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This is college-level pap for non-logical, emotion-driven critical thinking: Preposterous!
Medical patients aren’t customers either, at least when the Rats finally succeed in forcing the dumb-masses onto single payer (while the elites STILL find ways to pay for their own superior private care)...
” based solely on student evaluations would be automatically fired regardless of rank or tenure. L”
What’s the problem with that?
Rank and tenure doesn’t guarantee excellence.
Rather, it discourages it.
By their own statement they are admitting that rank and tenure doesn’t guarantee excellence in teaching.
Back in our day, college was much cheaper, and the cost of tuition, room and board was within reach of most families. For those for whom it wasn't, state colleges and universities were reasonably enough priced so students could work and pay their own way.
It would be so much better if a very large percentage of those now going into debt for college degrees they're not qualified for would be in a trade skill, developing a talent that would provide job opportunity and knowledge appropriate to their interests and aptitudes. The sad irony is that so many of those without real aptitude for college work go into so much debt that that technical training is no longer affordable for them.
An extremely simple fact is being overlooked here:
Public schools (grades 1 through 12) are not commercial enterprises. They are paid for by local property taxes from all citizens. In most cases tenure does not exist in non-unionized schools.
Colleges are not paid by local property taxes by all citizens and is a commercial enterprise. In Colleges tenure is the rule. As a matter of fact, they are huge commercial enterprises.
Now, to tenure: The idea of tenure was to protect professors from reprisals if they voiced opinions other than mainstream. The punishment would be firing.
Back in the early days a college education really meant something but now a piece of paper is simply a piece of paper unless it ACTUALLY TEACHES A SKILL whether technically or administratively. Today many college graduates come away with a degree that is equivalent to a high school graduate of 1965.
Why? Because political indoctrination and pressure overcame the actual need to learn a trade or profession...and due to the tenure rule, the colleges can’t do a thing about it...and don’t want to because (after all) they are a commercial enterprise and that’s what the CUSTOMER wants.
Students are indeed customers, given that they are are (over)paying for their ‘education’. Student evaluations should count, but to use them as the sole measurement is a stupid idea. No, more than stupid.
".......I don’t know about condemnation and ridicule…. We scholars are trained to be critical – to question claims, test them, validate or invalidate them. I am familiar with the ongoing scholarly critique of claims of American exceptionalism. I myself have made some small contribution to that critique. For many years I have been studying the ideology of space exploration, in hopes of finding some way to develop a 21st century rationale for space exploration that might be more meaningful to the majority of human beings who are not engaged in or otherwise enamored of the enterprise (and who, by the way, are not American or “Western”). See, for example, my chapter on “Ideology, advocacy, and spaceflight: evolution of a cultural narrative,” in Societal Impacts of Spaceflight (2007).........
[That link above and the sources that are cited - with snips of how academia works to diminish our national "can-do" mood, is very enlightening; below is the link to the excerpted article, written because of the author's problem with an article on American Exceptionalism. - Written in 2007, I have no doubt that what Obama has done to the military and to the U.S. program meets with the author's approval. That's what passes for scholarly work - how a national spirit that animates our military and our space program is a problem (that we need to make "peace" and "life on Earth" the driver of our national discourse). I'm sure the students are required to buy some of these anti-military, anti-space program books.]
From the chapter:
......“Everything now suggests,” Nisbet wrote 25 years ago, “that Western faith in the dogma of progress is waning rapidly.” This faith appears to have remained alive and well, however, in the ideology of spaceflight. Christopher Lasch wrote 5 years ago,“almost everyone now agrees that [the idea of] progress—in its utopian form at least,” no longer has the power “to explain events or inspire [people] to constructive action.” But in the current cultural environment, perhaps it does—at least among space advocates. Progress is, indeed, modern American dogma and a key element of pro-space dogma. But it does not resonate well—as Pyne and others have noted—in the current postmodern (or even post-postmodern) cultural environment, where public discourse is rife with critiques of science, technology, the aims of the military-industrial complex, and the corporate drive for profit.......
"This brief historical review has shown how the rhetoric of space advocacy has sustained an ideology of American Exceptionalism and reinforced long-standing beliefs in progress, growth, and capitalist democracy. This rhetoric conveys an ideology of spaceflight that could be described, at its worst, as a sort of space fundamentalism: an exclusive belief system that rejects as unenlightened those who do not advocate the colonization, exploitation, and development of space.
The rhetorical strategy of space advocates has tended to rest on the assumption that the values of “believers” are (or should be) shared by others as well. Although the social, political, economic, and cultural context for space exploration has changed radically since the 1960s, the rhetoric of space advocacy has not. In the twenty-first century, advocates continue to promote spaceflight as a biological imperative and a means of extending U.S. free enterprise, with its private property claims, resource exploitation, and commercial development, into the solar system and beyond. Pyne, among others, has addressed the problematic nature of these arguments: “the theses advanced to promote [solar system] settlement,” he noted, “are historical, culturally bound, and selectively anecdotal: that we need to pioneer to be what we are, that new colonies are a means of renewing civilization.”
Spaceflight advocacy can be examined as a cultural ritual, performed by means of communication (rhetoric), for the purpose of maintaining the current social order, with its lopsided distribution of power and resources, and perpetuating the values of those in control of that order (materialism, consumerism, technological progress, private property rights, capitalist democracy). Communication research has shown how public discourses—those cultural narratives or national myths—“often function covertly to legitimate the power of elite social classes.” And this review has shown how the rhetoric of space advocacy reflects an assumption that these values are worth extending into the solar system.
......although she has noted that “the WASP space cowboy version of spaceflight” has persisted from the apollo era into the present, Constance Penley also has observed that NASA “is still the most popular point of reference for utopian ideas of collective progress.” In the popular imagination,“NASA continues to represent . . . perseverance, cooperation, creativity and vision,” and these meanings embedded in the narrative of spaceflight “can still be mobilized to rejuvenate the near-moribund idea of a future toward which dedicated people . . . could work together for the common good.”
This historical review of the rhetoric of space advocacy reveals competing American cultural narratives, then. The dominant narrative—advancing the values of the dominant culture—upon which the narrative of U.S. spaceflight piggybacks, is a story of American exceptionalism that justifies unilateral action and the globalization of American capitalist democracy and material progress. The story of spaceflight is embedded in this broader narrative. That story is also woven into a competing narrative, a vision of “utopian ideas of collective progress” and “a spiritual humbling of self.” This competing narrative may be a site within which the ideology of spaceflight might rejuvenate itself—where the vision of a human future in space becomes a vision of humanity’s collective peaceful existence on Spaceship Earth and the need to work together to preserve life here and look for life out there........."
I made a suggestion on a thread earlier in the year that a fix for the present system could be that students, instead of paying for college directly, could be assessed a percentage of their post college gross earnings that went to fund the institute of higher education they attended.
Seems to me that this would solve most of the problems we are confronted with today...
No more student debt that is impossible to pay.
No more accepting kids into college that had had a low likelihood of success.
Effectively eliminating tenure.
Forcing the college to be responsible for the quality of the education they provide.
Etc...
I will stand by that suggestion for now.
Paying for a service certainly makes you a customer, it’s like tipping the wait-staff after a meal. Oh wait, the elite like Clintons and professors don’t tip, that’s only for the untermench.
And why shouldn't we have our turn? It is the left that has turned the Academy into an ideological whorehouse.
SENATE FILE 64
BY CHELGREN
A BILL FOR An Act relating to the teaching effectiveness and employment of professors employed by institutions of higher learning under the control of the state board of regents.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF IOWA:
Section 1. Section 262.9, subsection 25, Code 2015, is amended to read as follows:
a. Require that any professor employed by an institution of higher learning under the control of the board teach at least one course offered for academic credit per semester.
(1) Collaborate with the institutions of higher learning under the board’s control to develop and adopt the criteria and a rating system the institutions shall use to establish specific performance goals for professors and to evaluate the performance of each professor employed by each institution based on the evaluations completed by students pursuant to this paragraph.
Each institution of higher learning under the board’s control shall develop, and administer at the end of each semester, an evaluation mechanism by which each student enrolled in the institution shall assess the teaching effectiveness of each professor who is providing instruction to the student each semester.
For a professor teaching multiple classes in a semester, the institution shall compile an average evaluation score. Scores are not cumulative. If a professor fails to attain a minimum threshold of performance based on the student evaluations used to assess the professor’s teaching effectiveness, in accordance with the criteria and rating system adopted by the board, the institution shall terminate the professor’s employment regardless of tenure status or contract.
(2) The names of the five professors who rank lowest on their institution’s evaluation for the semester, but who scored above the minimum threshold of performance, shall be published on the institution’s internet site and the student body shall be offered an opportunity to vote on the question of whether any of the five professors will be retained as employees of the institution. The employment of the professor receiving the fewest votes approving retention shall be terminated by the institution regardless of tenure status or contract.
Develop a policy requiring oral communication competence of persons who provide instruction to students attending institutions under the control of the board. The policy shall include a student evaluation mechanism which requires student evaluation of persons providing instruction on at least an annual basis.
However, the board shall establish criteria by which an institution may discontinue annual evaluations of a specific person providing instruction. The criteria shall include receipt by the institution of two consecutive positive annual evaluations from the majority of students evaluating the person.
EXPLANATION
The inclusion of this explanation does not constitute agreement with the explanation’s substance by the members of the general assembly.
This bill directs the state board of regents to require that any professor employed by an institution of higher learning under the control of the board teach at least one course offered for academic credit per semester.
The board must also collaborate with the institutions to develop and adopt the criteria and rating system the institutions shall use to establish specific performance goals for professors and to evaluate the performance of each professor employed by each institution based on the evaluations completed by students.
Each of the regents universities must develop, and administer at the end of each semester, an evaluation mechanism each student enrolled in the university must use to assess the teaching effectiveness of each professor providing instruction to the student each semester. For a professor teaching multiple classes in a semester, the institution shall compile an average evaluation score. Scores are not cumulative.
The names of the five professors who rank lowest on their institution’s evaluation for the semester, but who scored above the minimum threshold of performance, shall be published on the institution’s internet site and the student body shall be offered an opportunity to vote on the question of whether any of the five professors will be retained as employees of the institution.
If a professor fails to attain a minimum threshold of performance based on the evaluations or receives the fewest votes approving retention, the institution shall terminate the professor’s employment regardless of tenure status or contract.
Also, the Universities in Europe make it a point that the chief executive officers teach. Some even do both of teaching and research. This keeps the hands of their Presidents, Vice Presidents, Deans, Vice Chancellors, etc., in the business. If the elite administrators in Iowa refuse to perform their duty of teaching, will a similar evaluation by the teaching professors of the non-teaching administrators be included in subsequent versions of the bill?
I had one professor who refused to award an A to any American student since none of us had to walk twenty miles a day through lion infested territory. I had another one who refused to award an A to any student who had not declared a major in his department. That sort of nonsense should not fly, but I wouldn’t want to turn this into a popularity contest. There needs to be an objective way to evaluate these profs.
Everyone else is rated by the customers but the "important" work of the academics must be placed beyond the plebeians reach.
The article is correct in that the students are not the customers. The loan makers are. Now it is the Fedgov. Also, the companies that are asking for the new grads to know X used to be, but they are being told to go shut up now.
The student isn’t a customer, they are a product. They don’t pay the cash, the loan department does.
I had one prof who made the class a good deal harder than the others who taught the same class. Students fled in droves but a few of us stuck around and learned something (and no, I didn’t earn an A). Profs like that who raise the bar should be encouraged, other profs who use their position to exercise their prejudices, like the various anti-American biases I’ve run into in an American college, should hit the bricks with no delay.
Instead of attacking author Schumann’s arguments, perhaps we ought to cast a fishy eye on the self-satisfied, self-righteous dogma “the customer is always right”.
The latter has been enshrined in American commerce. Combining with the modern tendency toward self-regard and instant gratification, it leads daily to demands (from customers) that service providers violate every law of physics (not to mention legal codes); and it is demanded that they do so in a hurry, for not very much money.
College Students Are Not Customers
Well lets see.
The student pays for a product (an particular education)
He either gets it or he does not. That is a customer.
This is completely nutty! Very bad idea!
My experience:
Most of the students in any class are there **only** for the credential and would really rather be someplace other than in the classroom. This attitude shows in their assignments, classroom participation, and attendance.
Gee! Who are these laggards? Only a complete idiot even think of trusting them to evaluate a teacher's performance?
How about choosing only those students with a GPA of 3.8 or better to be evaluators as a **small** part of a evaluation by an outside agency?
I have lots of experience being a student. I have a diploma from a 3 year training program in a health career, a B.S. a doctorate, and now in retirement I am earning an A.A. in art. Many times during those years in the various schools professors have said at the end of the course, “I wish I had a whole class of Wintertimes.” Just this past fall a professor said, “The other members of the class should thank you because I prepare my class knowing that you'll be there.”
I worry about agreeing with anything published in Slate, but WTF?