

A Response to “What's the Point of a Professor?” - slvv
http://www.thetattooedprof.com/archives/356#comment-1030

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navait
>These professors will knock on a dorm room door if one of their students has
missed several classes and is in jeopardy of being on academic probation (this
may or may not have been someone who looked remarkably like me). These
professors are on the hospital floor for 8-hour clinicals with a cohort of
19-year-old Nursing majors. They help find translators for a Bosnian student’s
parents (who don’t speak English) to open up a bank account in town. They sit
through interminable afternoon meetings and then teach a three-hour Social
Work seminar two nights a week. These professors go to their student’s
graduation parties, they get thank-you cards from grateful students (and
relieved parents*), they go to former students’ weddings, they are invited to
law school commencements for former advisees.

It's good that, you, the author do that. It sounds like you're the sort of
professor that the article wants to see. But let's not pretend the majority do
this, especially at R1/R2 universities, or the article was specifically saying
you were failing your students.

~~~
ruswick
Yep. I'm a current student and the thought of a professor doing some of the
things listed here is comical.

~~~
jseliger
_Yep. I 'm a current student and the thought of a professor doing some of the
things listed here is comical._

I'm an adjunct now and was a grad student, and doing some of these things is
actually dangerous: [http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Angel-Novel-Francine-
Prose/dp/006...](http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Angel-Novel-Francine-
Prose/dp/0060882034) or [http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-
Paranoia/190351/](http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia/190351/). Most
of the time of course they won't be dangerous, but it only takes one person to
really fuck up a career.

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letitgo12345
There are colleges that focus a lot on teaching -- Rose Hulman, Harvey Mudd,
Swarthmore, etc. I think the problem is that people want academic fame as well
as good teaching.

However a lot of fame comes from, I think, path breaking research (and
startups) coming out of universities -- that's why you see the universities'
names in newspapers. That's why US news ranks those universities as having
great departments (in their disciplines of speciality)

So if you want that you by necessity have to value research and
entrepreneurship in profs a lot higher than you value teaching.

What one can try and get is good teaching colleges which may not be
necessarily famous for research, etc. but are still popular with recruiters
for recruitment out of ugrad. The colleges mentioned above do do that. There
are other colleges too -- University of Warsaw is a very popular recruitment
ground for big tech companies like Google even though it's not on the same
level as a top US school for research. University of Waterloo and Brown are a
couple of others that come to mind that are popular with recruiters to a
bigger extent than their rankings would indicate. Perhaps we need more
advertisment of such options.

The other possibility is for prestigious schools to hire more teaching fac.
But that would mean taking resources away from research oriented fac. So the
market dynamics make it hard to do that.

Ideally universities would have the financial resources to hire both teaching
and research oriented fac but given the current political climate...

~~~
analog31
In my view, a huge issue is that no matter how you try to recruit and manage
separate research and teaching faculty, it will always quickly devolve into a
caste system.

At the university where I taught math as an adjunct, the teaching and research
faculty didn't even interact with one another.

~~~
letitgo12345
Teaching and research fac have very different goals though so I don't think
it's a bad thing if they don't interact much.

There's a lot of ego on part of some research fac though, I agree that that
one should try and address.

~~~
analog31
That's fair enough. In fact, I never even met my supervisor, which was just
fine.

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slvv
Oops, the correct link should be:
[http://www.thetattooedprof.com/archives/356](http://www.thetattooedprof.com/archives/356)

~~~
sciurus
Can a moderator please fix the link?

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jpace121
Link to the original Hacker News discussion
here:[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9518814](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9518814)

As a recent graduate, I much more agree with this author than the author of
the original.

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fierycatnet
I am pretty disappointed with my academic experience at University for the
same reasons that NYTimes highlighted, and I don't agree with this "tattooed
prof" but it's just my experience.

------
cafard
I don't know that any of my professors did the stuff he mentions. However,
he's quite right about the piece he was responding to.

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javert
> And I’m really hacked off when that scolding comes from obliviously
> pretentious Older White Male Professors

Stopped reading here, because the piece is obviously racist.

If the author is trying to evoke a stereotype, say that explicitly. To say it
this way, even if it's not _meant_ , provides cover for actual racists (which
are growing---see the "white privilege" movement).

"Racism" is properly defined as any view that implies that a person's _ideas_
are determined by their race. See also Marxist class-ism, which is the same
thing applied to economic class.

Rather, individuals are individuals, and they have free will. Nothing
_determines_ the content of a person's mind.

~~~
ajkjk
The author explicitly invoked a stereotype, as you requested. I'm not sure why
you didn't read it that way.

~~~
kaitai
It's even capitalized.

