I think this goes far beyond complaining about getting fired, and delves into the pernicious attitudes of the department's faculty. For example:
"Given the success I am having with students, one might think that the Mathematics Department leadership would be expressing curiosity about how I am achieving that success. Instead, Craig Evans [the interim chair of the department] in early 2014 asked me 'If you had a job at McDonalds and came along with all these new ideas, how long do you think you'd carry on working there?' The fact that the now Interim Chair of the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department should compare undergraduate education to fast food reveals everything you need to know about how students are regarded by the leading clique of men at the helm of the Mathematics Department of the number one public university in the world."
Should faculty be punished for having new ideas about teaching (which happen to be successful[1], and well-liked by students)?
[1] "My Fall 2013 Math 1A students were tracked into the next course in the sequence, Math 1B, and it was found that their average grade in Math 1B was 0.17 grade points higher than that of those students who took Math 1A with another instructor."
Should departments have standards they expect their lecturers to enforce?
People would actively welcome new approaches to teaching math. It's fucking frustrating not getting through to your students or having them dislike the course. Most of the faculty has tenure and the focus is largely (but not entirely) on research. THE IDEA THAT PEOPLE ARE THREATENED BY HIS SUCCESS IS ABSURD.
He is succeeding in the truly obvious way. Lowering standards and making it easy for students to ace his class without the skills the university has deemed necessary.
If he was really so deeply gifted at teaching he could have just used the same final exam as another faculty member and taught his students that material. Why doesn't he?
I'm not sure you read the article correctly. He was asked to make his tests easier, and his students performed better in subsequent classes taught by different professors.
Indeed. It actually puts UC Berkeley in a pretty horrible position by going public like this. It does not look good for employers to have the same kind of public litany of complaints against an employee.
Some things stand out from a quick skim of the personnel file/included complaint. Among these: he did not practically assign homework or have regular quizzes. This was noted as not being consistent with department norms. It actually _is_ of value to have consistency between multiple sections of introductory classes and as preparation for follow on classes in the same sequences (e.g Calc 1, 2 3 having similar structures in class organization) he seems to have disagreed philosophically with his boss (department chair) on this front. There are some other parts of the files posted that suggest he apparently did not work well with his graduate student instructors (teaching assistants). In my mind those are big enough reasons to let someone go.
He might be a great instructor. It might be a huge mistake for them to let him go, but it certainly doesn't seem like the only available explanations are completely specious or wrongly-motivated reasons. Also missing from submitted link is some info in the complaint that this was attempted to be worked out with a new incoming department chair, as evidenced by this being posted it seems like that didn't work out.
"It actually _is_ of value to have consistency between multiple sections of introductory classes and as preparation for follow on classes in the same sequences (e.g Calc 1, 2 3 having similar structures in class organization)"
Apparently, learning the material better is more important to future success than consistency: the students in his classes did better in the following classes by .17 grade points than students from other (presumably more consistent) classes.
I would like to see the Department's response too. Hopefully, they reply with their reasons rather than attack the argument that Coward has written here.
As a former CAL student, I am saddened to read about this.
I didn't have to take Math 1A or any math course for that matter, but I did have to take an AC course per University requirements. I wasn't looking forward to it.
I ended up taking the Southern Border with Professor Shaiken. That was by far one of the most educational and interesting courses I had taken at CAL.
I too would like to see the University's side, but I am inclined to believe they can't respond for legal reasons, and if they could their response would be far more vanilla then Prof. Coward's side.
I'm not necessarily inclined to take this guy's side of the dispute just because I read it first.