The Chronicle: Charging That His College Undervalues Teaching, a Professor Strikes Back
Last October, Madhukar Vable said farewell to two teaching prizes that he had won a decade earlier. He packed the plaques in envelopes and shipped them back to the university and state offices that had awarded them.
Comments Off on Charging That His College Undervalues Teaching, a Professor Strikes Back
Posted in Faculty
Tagged Faculty, Michigan Tech U, Teaching
Times Higher Education: Pedagogy a poor second in promotions
Study finds ‘hypocritical’ sector fails to practise what it preaches. Rebecca Attwood reports
Universities stand accused of hypocrisy this week over their claims to value teaching, after a major study of promotions policy and practice found that many are still failing to reward academics for leadership in pedagogy.
Research by the Higher Education Academy and the University of Leicester’s “Genie” Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning examines the promotion policies of 104 UK universities.
Comments Off on Pedagogy a poor second in promotions
Posted in Tenure & Promotion
Tagged Research, Teaching, Tenure & Promotion
The Chronicle: Doctoral Students Think Teaching Assistantships Hold Them Back
A new survey of recent Ph.D. recipients has found that more than four out of five of those who received paid teaching assistantships believe that having them prolonged their doctoral education, though not enough to keep them from completing the programs in a timely manner.
Comments Off on Doctoral Students Think Teaching Assistantships Hold Them Back
Posted in Students
Tagged graduate students, Teaching, teaching assistantships, Working conditions
Inside Higher Ed: What Counts for Tenure
For all the talk about how research universities place an increasing value on teaching, a survey on tenure standards in political science departments finds not only that research remains dominant, but that poor teaching may be tolerated at doctoral-granting universities.
Comments Off on What Counts for Tenure
Posted in Tenure & Promotion
Tagged Research, Teaching, Tenure & Promotion
The Chronicle: When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom
College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled “smart” classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked” — by which he means, sans machines.
The Chronicle: Who’s Teaching at American Colleges? Increasingly, Instructors Off the Tenure Track
At community colleges, four out of five instructors worked outside the tenure track in 2007. At public research institutions, graduate students made up 41 percent of the instructional staff that year. And at all institutions, the proportion of instructors working part time continued to grow.
Comments Off on Who’s Teaching at American Colleges? Increasingly, Instructors Off the Tenure Track
Posted in Contingent labor
Tagged community colleges, Contingent labor, Teaching, tenure
Inside Higher Ed: Composition, Overcrowded
March 16, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO — Class sizes and teaching loads for composition courses at community colleges — courses typically required of most students and seen as crucial for college success — appear to be growing well beyond levels that are considered educationally sound.
Comments Off on Composition, Overcrowded
Posted in Working conditions
Tagged class size, rhetoric and composition, Teaching, teaching load
Follow
Reject student evaluation of faculty
Houston Chronicle: Reject student evaluation of faculty
By ROBERT ZARETSKY
“Now what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life… Stick to Facts, sir!”
Thomas Gradgrind,
Hard Times
My thoughts drifted the other day to the opening passage from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. The occasion was a meeting of fellow professors at the University of Houston, gathered to discuss a modest proposal from the board of regents. In the interest of greater efficiency, the regents wanted professors to post on the Web a variety of statistics: how much they earn, how many A’s and B’s they give, how many students they teach, and how much these same students earn once they graduate.
It is endearing that Texas — home to the Bush Administration, which cooked the books on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Sir Allen Stanford, who is alleged to have cooked the books of his financial empire — is saddling up to catch allegedly AWOL academics guilty of earning in the high two figures. Yet this is the goal of Jeff Sandefer, a board member of the Texas Public Policy Center, a private think tank in Austin devoted to free market principles. (Among the Center’s senior policy fellows are Arthur Laffer, whose theories have justified cutting marginal tax rates of the nation’s wealthiest citizens, and Grover Norquist, director of Americans for Tax Reform, who recently compared the estate tax to the Holocaust.)
Comments Off on Reject student evaluation of faculty
Posted in Commentary
Tagged Commentary, Evaluation, Government, Students, Taylorism, Teaching