
Who Defines Expertise? - sndean
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/02/accreditors-rules-about-faculty-members-spark-debate-wayne-state-college-and-among
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dahart
I'm kind-of mystified what the objections to these new requirements are. 18
hours of coursework, or alternatively, at least have to explain your
experience. That's a pretty low bar for being able to profess on a subject. If
I were taking a course, I would certainly hope the professor had at least 18
hours of graduate coursework on a subject.

The rules these people are objecting to literally make an exception for them
to explain that 50 years of teaching a subject counts as credit. If they can't
do that, is it possible they shouldn't be teaching the subject?

Why shouldn't professors have a minimum requirement? It sounds like before
these bare minimum rules it was a free-for-all.

> I have learned that English and philosophy have much in common. Both
> disciplines emphasize effective and clear communication, critical thinking,
> and the analysis and interpretation of texts,”

This quote is laughable. Those things are common across _all_ academic
disciplines. This justifies a music teacher professing about medicine with no
experience at all.

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Top19
I remember reading something once along the lines of "knowledge is just the
opinions of those in power".

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trevyn
Interesting approach, and may be valid for some fields. I feel that most of
science is about discovering falsifiable objective truths, though the specific
set of potential truths that are chosen for research activity is definitely
influenced by those in power.

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pcrh
In the long run that is correct. However, in decision making, when work is
"cutting edge" the opinions of experts/"key opinion leaders" weighs more
heavily, or equal to, data.

For example, it is now >50 years since anthropogenic global warming was first
proposed. The first intergovernmental action I can find with a brief search
that tackles climate change is the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate
Change. Legislation surrounding CO2 emissions was not introduced until the
2000's. The matter is still "controversial".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Conve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Convention_on_Climate_Change)

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trevyn
To be fair, while we can run controlled experiments on components of this
problem, I don't think we can run a global controlled experiment of the entire
system, or fully understand the long-term impact of climate change on humans
in the face of advancing technology.

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pcrh
That problem exists for almost all innovative work. Generally, a paradigm
becomes accepted when the predictions that follow from it are found to hold
true. For people to make the effort to test such predictions requires (from a
human standpoint) a "leap of faith", regardless of the integrity of the data
that lead to said paradigm being proposed.

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gumby
This is more of a problem at smaller schools. At the "majors"
(MIT/Harvard/Columbia) such cross-discipline work is unremarkable, if not
necessarily common. Stanford, to my surprise, appears to me to be more
bureaucratic in this regard.

And very small institutions don't care: they make their own way (and may not
be able to afford a huge faculty).

If you're above tiny but not a marquee name then accreditation is vital to
your survival. You don't do anything to mess that up!

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pcrh
A similar conundrum exists in UK universities. It was decided that all
university lecturers (professors in US parlance) should have a teaching
qualification regardless of experience in actual teaching. The solution was to
create a series of new post-graduate certificates in teaching, the
requirements of some of which are fairly easy to fulfill if one does actually
have academic teaching experience, e.g. 10,000 words one's teaching philosophy
plus a few classes.

