Category Archives: Faculty

Inside Higher Ed: Validation for RateMyProfessors.com?

You’ve heard the reasons why professors don’t trust RateMyProfessors.com, the Web site to which students flock. Students who don’t do the work have equal say with those who do. The best way to get good ratings is to be relatively easy on grades, good looking or both, and so forth.

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Newsday: Guinness names Northport teen world’s youngest professor

Alia Sabur was appointed as a full-time faculty Professor at Konkuk University in Seoul, South Korea as research liaison with Stony Brook University.

Sabur was three days shy of her 19th birthday in February when she became a professor at Konkuk University, in Seoul. The previous record was held by a student of physicist Isaac Newton, Colin Maclaurin, who set the mark in 1717

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Los Angeles Times: Marxist professors or sensitive students?

Students complain about indoctrination by professors. Professors complain about vendettas, surreptitious taping and smear campaigns from students and ideologues. Who is right? All week, Michael Shermer and Greg Lukianoff debate academic freedom.

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The Age: Cuts take toll on ‘overworked’ Melbourne Uni staff

INCREASED workloads and stress among Melbourne University staff has raised questions about the university’s call for more voluntary redundancies in the embattled arts faculty.

According to a union survey of staff, obtained by The Age, more than 90% of staff said their workload had increased in the past two years. Of those, 60% reported a sustained increase in the past three months.

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abpnews.com: BTSR budget shortfall leads to faculty lay-offs

RICHMOND, Va. (ABP) � Faced with �worrisome� financial challenges, Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond will downsize its faculty and staff, the school�s president announced April 8.

Four full-time professors and at least three administrative staff members will be let go in an effort to reduce costs, according to BTSR President Ron Crawford, who was elected to his position about a year ago. Though he did not release the names of the professors to be dismissed, Crawford said he has communicated with each one and that the school is offering severance packages that exceed a full year�s salary and full personnel benefits.

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Inside Higher Ed: Professor for Hire

Readers of The Washington Post were treated on Thursday to the latest salacious details of the “D.C. Madam” trial, a federal racketeering case in which prosecutors are attempting to prove that Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s escort service was really an illegal, high-class prostitution ring. The proceedings, and the mythical list of clients she’s dangled in front of the press, have already ensnared politicians and others far outside Washington’s orbit. Now it’s higher education’s turn to get roped in.

In Wednesday’s testimony, a former academic and university department chair took the stand and admitted to earning some extra income on the side: $250 per sexual encounter as an employee of Pamela Martin & Associates.

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The Chronicle News Blog: Many Academics Use Drugs to Enhance Their Brain Power, Survey Suggests

College students have long resorted to popping Ritalin and other stimulants to give themselves a mental leg up, but an informal survey by Nature magazine reveals that many science professionals are also taking drugs for the express purpose of improving their cognitive capacities.

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The Chronicle News Blog: Cedarville U. Board Says Officials Followed Procedure in Professor’s Dismissal

The Board of Trustees at Cedarville University has sided with the administration in its dismissal of a tenured Bible professor. In a statement issued this afternoon following a board meeting, the trustees said that the Baptist university in Ohio had observed its own guidelines when it fired David Hoffeditz for conduct toward students and colleagues that violated the terms of his contract. The statement did not specify the nature of that conduct.

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The Age: Jobs under threat at Melbourne Uni

MELBOURNE University’s troubled arts faculty is bracing itself for more redundancies with some saying further cuts will threaten the university’s controversial US-style teaching model.

Under fire are academics who teach subjects with fewer than 40 students and those who have not met research targets over the past five years, a university draft proposal for voluntary redundancies states.

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The Chronicle: The Public View of Politics in the Classroom

The older Americans are, and the less time they have spent on a college campus, the more likely they are to believe that professors are politically biased.

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Inside Higher Ed: Late Grades? Pay Up, Professor

Many professors hate grading, and like most human beings, they often put off what they don’t like. So at many colleges, the end of a term results in some proportion of the faculty turning their grades in late, much to the dismay of the registrars whose job it is to process the grades and make them available to students. The outcome can be more than just annoying to the registrars; late grades can delay diplomas, disrupt the awarding of financial aid, or get students into academic trouble.

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New Zealand Herald: Wrongly sacked lecturer’s career ‘ruined’ – friend

A university lecturer’s career was ruined when he was wrongly sacked over an offensive email to a student, a former student and friend said today.

The Employment Relations Authority (ERA) yesterday ruled Dr Paul Buchanan was unjustifiably dismissed from Auckland University last July.

It awarded him $51,000 in lost wages and $15,000 for hurt and humiliation.

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Inside Higher Ed: Faculty Are Liberal — Who Cares?

One of the key arguments made by David Horowitz and his supporters in recent years is that a left-wing orientation among faculty members results in a lack of curricular balance, which in turn leads to students being indoctrinated rather than educated. The argument is probably made most directly in a film much plugged by Horowitz: “Indoctrinate U.”

A study that will appear soon in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics accepts the first part of the critique of academe and says that it’s true that the professoriate leans left. But the study — notably by one Republican professor and one Democratic professor — finds no evidence of indoctrination. Despite students being educated by liberal professors, their politics change only marginally in their undergraduate years, and that deflates the idea that cadres of tenured radicals are somehow corrupting America’s youth — or scaring them into adopting new political views.

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CBC News: St. John’s prof maltreated, external review finds

A Memorial University of Newfoundland medical professor was bullied and harassed by employers and colleagues at a St. John’s teaching hospital, according to a report released Wednesday.

Dr. Cathy Popadiuk, a professor of medicine at Memorial as well as an oncologist with the Eastern Health regional authority, complained five years ago that her professional reputation was unfairly damaged by allegations that she was incompetent.

A report released by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which struck a three-member committee to investigate the case, found that Popadiuk was poorly treated by supervisors at both her university and hospital.

“We concluded that there were incidents of harassment and threats to academic freedom,” said Albert Katz, a University of Western Ontario psychology professor who headed the investigation.

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Chronicle News Blog: Canadian University Treated Professor Unfairly, Review Team Finds

An external review says a medical professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland was subjected to years of harassment and bullying. According to a report released today, the review committee concluded that Cathy Popadiuk, a gynecological oncologist, “experienced a pattern of harassment that extended over a period of years.” The report says that Dr. Popadiuk “was placed in an intimidating, hostile environment, has been discouraged by her superiors in carrying out acceptable treatment options she deemed best for her patients,” and “has had her clinical work assessed in a manner that denied her natural justice.”

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The New York Times: The Professor as Open Book

IT is not necessary for a student studying multivariable calculus, medieval literature or Roman archaeology to know that the professor on the podium shoots pool, has donned a bunny costume or can’t get enough of Chaka Khan.
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THE BIG PAYBACK The mtvU series “Professors Strike Back” gives instructors a chance to refute criticism by students who gripe about them on RateMyProfessors.com.

Yet professors of all ranks and disciplines are revealing such information on public, national platforms: blogs, Web pages, social networking sites, even campus television.

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Reno Gazette-Journal: UNR professor’s conduct faulted

A special hearing officer said Friday that University of Nevada, Reno professor Hussein S. Hussein did not plagiarize his students’ work, but that his conduct in dealing with research funds was negligent, unprofessional and dishonest.

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Tallahassee Democrat: FAMU faculty must pay university $67,558

A payroll glitch from Jan. 18 continues to haunt Florida A&M University administrators and faculty, according to chief financial officer Teresa Hardee.
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Hardee said 66 certified letters were mailed to FAMU employees who were told they needed to pay the university as little as $3.25 or as much as $4,543 in paycheck overpayments.

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Inside Higher Ed: The Shrinking Professoriate

Every other year, data released by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics provide a snapshot of the growth of part-time positions in the professoriate. This year — an off-year for that data — the federal statistics provide evidence for another shift, in which the majority of full-time professional employees in higher education are in administrative rather than faculty jobs.

In the fall of 2004, 50.6 of professional full-time employees in higher education (excluding medical schools) were faculty members. In the fall of 2006, for which data were released Tuesday, 48.6 percent of professional, full-time jobs in higher education were held by faculty members.

Faculty jobs remain the majority among full-time positions at two-year colleges and in public higher education, but because there are far more full-time jobs at four-year institutions than at two-year institutions, the balance has tilted away from professorial positions. (Adding part-time positions would of course also swell the faculty ranks across sectors, but this data set focuses on full-time positions.)

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