[quote name='bmulligan']Don't sweat it Ace, neither Alonzo nor Myke believes in the right to private property, so of course, they cannot believe in capitalism by definition.[/quote]
I can't even make a tiny comment without them jumping on me asking why I would ever consider holding professors responsible for their work. I honestly don't know how you do it.
[quote name='mykevermin']Please restate those first two things, because I don't understand how you can set aside research. It's part of the job for most tenured faculty. That "tenure is being replaced with adjunct labor" pattern that I spoke of earlier is above and beyond the case at teaching (nonresearch) institutions more than research institutions
Now, as far as teaching is concerned, job evaluations do exist. Department evaluations (peer evaluations) are considered, letters of support from graduate students, course evaluations from undergraduate students, are all taken into consideration when granting tenure. I don't think you understand the gravity given to the decision of adding a faculty member, for
life, to your college's bankrolls.
You're just not giving enough agency to the students here. You want some person (looking at it in terms of a for-profit corporate hierarchy organization style) to continually decide the fate of another professor. Well, that did happen to us this year, as a matter of fact. We lost our department head (well, he's still he, but he cannot serve as dh despite being hired on tenure) this year because the school's provost is a
ing dipshit who thought he was the first person to discover what a potential conflict of interest the dh put himself into (which, shall we say, was not only not the
ing case, but the stituation had been remedied prior to the provost ruining
ing everything).
Tenure, as I said, applies to a lot more than teaching; knowing you and I, would you want me overseeing your work (especially if your research interests would clash politically with my own)?
Honestly, we're going to get to a point where all schools will have offices set up for teacher unfairness, where the stupid and the lazy will line up to petition for a grade at the expense of the teacher's reputation. I don't know what kind of college experiences you're having, but you seem like a bright enough person to be able to give the teacher a respectable piece of your mind if you desire. Why give such little agency to students?[/quote]
Professors, I would hope, are at universities first and foremost to pass on as much of their knowledge to the students that paid to take the classes they're supposed to teach. This is what this whole controversy is surrounded upon, that there is a bias in their teaching and treatment of the students that they teach. The controversy isn't that they research in such an offensive way, I could care less what they use to research for their works.
The research they do for whatever works they do publish is undoubtedly important in maintaining the creditability of whatever they have to say about whatever subject they've chosen, I'm not debating that. While I'm sure the system is much less cut and dry than it may appear, I cannot fail to acknowledge the problems of a professor who is unaccountable for his actions that may occur. While there have been individual cases of student frustration in a crucial time in their life where they have falsely accused a professor of unfair treatment, I'm sure that someone in such a position of power could take it upon his or herself to use that power to hurt a student. Many universities pay these same professors a great deal of money to keep them on their campus, and these large salaries are partly responsible for tuition hikes in recent years across the board. That's not to say the job is an easy one that deserves little financial credit, but to explain how the student is in a very submissive position in this type of classroom. Should there be an incident of an oppressive professor, which has and will continue to happen on some scale no matter what reforms are made (we're all human), the deck is stacked completely against the student in every conceivable way. I believe the best solution is to leave the professor vunerable to at the very least an evaluation from a superior that can critically and objectively analyze their performance. This isn't an unheard of proposition either, this happens with any person who works for another person. This is a good 90 something percent of the working population in America.
I appreciate your kind comments and I'm sure your stories are true ones. I just do not see why a professional would need such seemingly unobstructable defense from career repurcussions. How difficult or not it is to get such status is irrelevant if it exists on the large scale that it does. Granted the situation is entirely possible that the person above the professor might hit the same roadblock as what we're already trying to prevent with unfair perception of the person/work. That is something that can easily be fixed by the university itself as a self-managing entity.
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