

Adrift in the Slow Lane of Learning - mjfern
http://www.popecenter.org/clarion_call/article.html?id=2165

======
ShabbyDoo
I recall a mini-scandal in the math department of my alma mater. A department
member (but not a tenure-track professor) with a PhD who primarily taught
calculus courses was fired. By all accounts, he was a good teacher and
required much of his students. However, I recall that the professors' union
was opposed to allowing non-faculty to teach because it was a slippery slope
toward faculty elimination. Nevermind that few math faculty members wanted to
teach large calculus classes and that those professors probably weren't very
good at it.

I understand the value of taking a higher-level course with a world-class
expert in the subject, but calculus for poets barely requires a math undergrad
to teach adequately.

Another sign that disruption in education is coming...

~~~
gabriel
_I understand the value of taking a higher-level course with a world-class
expert in the subject, but calculus for poets barely requires a math undergrad
to teach adequately._

Imagine being 19 years old and already identifying yourself as a poet. Maybe
you spend your time writing love poems (ha ha, cliché right?), after all you'd
be surprised how much something like this can be attractive. Imagine being
this poet and going to a school that allows you to be taught by a world-class
mathematician without any requirements other than sheer tenacity and zeal. I
admit the first thing that popped in my head is that a poet might be one of
the most enthused in such a situation.

After all, who is anyone to trivialize the pursuit of knowledge from motivated
students who are by their very nature yet to be categorized or to have created
a deep identity. It's like so many universities are swaying towards vocational
training. No, I'm not making fun here, vocational schools have their uses, but
one of the great things of a higher-education is the continuance of
encountering things that you wouldn't otherwise find without the help of
someone who knows the terrain.

Just imagine.

~~~
stan_rogers
Imagine being 19 years old and entering ANY unfamiliar course of study. Who's
going to rock your world -- somebody who is engaged in esoteric research and
finds lecturing a distraction, or someone who views himself less like a
guardian of arcana and more like a streetcorner pusher who has recently run
across the most AWESOME brain-twisting drug in the ENTIRE FREAKIN' UNIVERSE
and YOU GOTTA TRY THIS SHIT!

That's not to say that somebody at the forefront of research (or, for that
matter, somebody of "a certain age") can't generate that kind of enthusiasm
for his/her subject -- one of the most entertaining and informative lectures I
ever saw was one given by Bill Phillips of NIST at the Perimeter Institute on
time measurement, cooling and the Bose-Einstein condensate. Nobel Laureate,
unapologetic geek, energy and sense of wonder not often seen in the average
six-year-old. Gimme a grad student with that kind of unbounded love for the
subject over an expert any time.

I like to think that's what I brought to the classroom when I taught, but then
I like to think a lot of good things about myself that ain't necessarily so.

------
kylec
Where I went to school there was another reason why students had virtually no
in-person contact with their professors: pride. Seeing a professor during
their office hours was considered a sign of weakness.

~~~
ncarlson
Wow, that sounds horrible.

------
tokenadult
There are several mentions of math courses in this thread, so I'll bring up
some examples of academic politics found in the book A Mathematician's
Survival Guide: Graduate School and Early Career Development.

[http://www.amazon.com/Mathematicians-Survival-Guide-
Graduate...](http://www.amazon.com/Mathematicians-Survival-Guide-Graduate-
Development/dp/082183455X)

The author, a math professor, points out that a department has to keep up its
enrollments to maintain departmental resources, and those resources include
funding for more professors. He tells the story of one state university system
that had a main math department in university's main college of arts and
sciences (whatever the exact name was) and a set of first-year calculus
courses for forestry majors taught by the School of Forestry. By university
rules, all first-year calculus courses were deemed equivalent, and by
reputation of the courses reported by students, the calculus courses in the
Forestry School were the easiest calculus courses to pass. So of course over
time the enrollments in the calculus courses for forestry students increased
quite a lot, including many students who were not majoring in forestry. That
kept the main math department from having the enrollments necessary to justify
hiring more junior professors, more secretaries and graduate students, and so
forth.

Another example he gives is of a different university where a department's
offerings to non-major students were so irrelevant to their needs that a
different department took over teaching those courses. In some state
university, the engineering school wanted engineering majors to be able to
take courses in Japanese to learn to read technical documents, but the
Department of Asian Languages insisted on teaching courses in reading medieval
poetry and the like. So the engineering school hired its own instructors of
Japanese, with no tenure track, and taught its desired Japanese courses in-
house, again denying the Department of East Asian Languages a chance to grow
and to gain more resources.

University departments, unless they are very well endowed by a specific
endowment, have to compete for resources by appearing to meet student needs.
Students may not always take a long term view of what their own needs are for
a good education, but enrollments matter in allocating resources.

------
keith_erskine
Here's a simple solution - get rid of tenure. Tenure was originally a
protection for professors to speak freely without the fear of getting fired.
The result however is an ossification of faculty that doesn't care because
they've attained a level of job security not found in the rest of the economy.

~~~
aswanson
Seconded. I had one to many classes with pricks who think the purpose of a
class is to complexify basic concepts and espouse their greatness rather than
convey useful information.

------
timdellinger
The college/department each take a percentage of every dollar that a professor
raises to fund his/her research through grants. It ends up being a sizable
amount of money, so there's incentive to hire and keep professors that bring
in the most research money. There's no direct monetary incentive to hire and
keep good teachers who care about undergraduates.

~~~
iends
Wait...

So you're saying the college/department doesn't get a percentage of the
student tuition for each student taking a class in the department?

~~~
Raphael
Apparently having "good teachers who care about undergraduates" does not
affect enrollment levels.

------
edw519
So what's the problem?

This just makes college a little bit more like real life. You get out of it
what you choose. "Beer and circus" or books and computers? Your choice. Less
competition for those of us who choose, in college or in business, to turn
lemons into lemonade.

~~~
joetrumpet
The problem is this makes degrees more and more worthless and causes "degree
inflation" where positions that previously required a bachellor's degree (and
still require bachelor's knowledge) now require a master's degree. This is
time consuming and a waste of money for those of us who take it seriously.

Plus, much of education is funded by the government (public to a large extent,
but also the research grants and whatnot to the privates can't be dismissed),
and I simply don't want to pay for people to waste away 4 years in a
glamorized high school. I'm all for scholarships and funding for students and
schools that take it seriously, but not this junk.

