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[cgfunmathguy]

While a lot of the proposals for "accountability" are pretty horrible policy e.g. students as customer, what a lot of academics seem to forget that real problems are driving this.  There are plenty of stories of deadwood academics, dodgy institutions, academics who sleep with their students and treat their graduate students and postdocs as their personal fiefdom  etc.

Yes, there are plenty of stories of these things. There are also lots of sightings of D. B. Cooper every so often. Not to say that the stories aren't true, but ... .

The fact of the matter is that these items are not common in academia. Yes, they may occur, but anecdotes--and don't forget that that is what these stories are--do not establish reality, no matter how much anyone on any part of the spectrum wants them to.

When the academic community starts openly challenging their colleagues on their bad teaching and acts like sleeping with students and turfing out deadline, essentially showing they can police themselves then they will have a ground to fight the administrators and politicians back on.  Otherwise as I said, it is inevitable the administrators will set the agenda because to parents and students it will look like they at least are doing something, anything (even if it is turns out to be foolish).

This part is done routinely already. Sleeping with students gets one fired. It may take awhile, but due process needs to be done, even if "everyone knows it's true."

True "deadwood" is pretty hard to come by. What most people see as "deadwood" are professors who were tenured long ago and who aren't writing any more articles. They advance the professions in other ways: editing journals, serving as officers in professional organization, organizing conferences, and mentoring others. Just because you don't look closely enough (or in some cases, know what to evaluate) does not mean the professor in question is "deadwood."

Academics do police themselves. The thing is that we don't send out articles to the NYT every time we do it. To assume that we don't do anything because we don't send out news releases about is the epitome of foolish. Does the government (another organization that operates on the public trust) send out news releases when a mid-level bureaucrat is let go? Let's  get realistic in some of our expectations before we do stupid sh!t just to please a few politicians who don't know what really happens in the tower.

[sjsmith]

While a lot of the proposals for "accountability" are pretty horrible policy e.g. students as customer, what a lot of academics seem to forget that real problems are driving this.  There are plenty of stories of deadwood academics, dodgy institutions, academics who sleep with their students and treat their graduate students and postdocs as their personal fiefdom  etc.

Yes, there are plenty of stories of these things. There are also lots of sightings of D. B. Cooper every so often. Not to say that the stories aren't true, but ... .

The fact of the matter is that these items are not common in academia. Yes, they may occur, but anecdotes--and don't forget that that is what these stories are--do not establish reality, no matter how much anyone on any part of the spectrum wants them to.

Yes, it is so rare.  That is why so many places have untrained and/or overworked graduate students or adjuncts to teach undergraduates.  Why there is often little formal training given for teaching on university level. Why graduate supervisors and postdoc supervisors have so much power over their PhD students/postdocs, so that whether or not you are abused is more to do with the good will of your supervisor rather than say formal processes in place.  

To tell the truth though things like sleeping with your students is not the biggest problem.  The biggest problem is more to do with just plain and simple neglect.  Which is not to say that there are not a lot of great dedicated teachers in academia. However, often I think that is despite the system rather than because.

Academia is basically one of the last remaining relics of the master knows best system outside of the realm of accountability or formal control processes.  What people are trying to do is bring it into the realm of accountability, admittedly in a pretty bad way.  For example student evaluations are an obvious attempt to bring some sort of quality control. It's used badly but you tell what people are *trying* to do.  

When the academic community starts openly challenging their colleagues on their bad teaching and acts like sleeping with students and turfing out deadline, essentially showing they can police themselves then they will have a ground to fight the administrators and politicians back on.  Otherwise as I said, it is inevitable the administrators will set the agenda because to parents and students it will look like they at least are doing something, anything (even if it is turns out to be foolish).

This part is done routinely already. Sleeping with students gets one fired. It may take awhile, but due process needs to be done, even if "everyone knows it's true."

True "deadwood" is pretty hard to come by. What most people see as "deadwood" are professors who were tenured long ago and who aren't writing any more articles. They advance the professions in other ways: editing journals, serving as officers in professional organization, organizing conferences, and mentoring others. Just because you don't look closely enough (or in some cases, know what to evaluate) does not mean the professor in question is "deadwood."

And what does this have to do with teaching?  The main reason parents pay money to send their students to a university.  They are not paying you to edit journals, they are paying you to teach their kids.  

And taxpayers and politicians are expecting you to do research too, as in actually publish articles, not pay very senior, expensive staff as a retirement home.

Now personally I think that there is a potentially good argument for having staff not necessarily publish if they still contribute in other ways, but I'm trying to show you how other people outside of academia see the situation.  Basically if you want them to pay for very expensive senior staff to not do research or teach but edit journals and organize get togethers, it is up to you to explain to politicians and the public why they should fund it.  Because it is not what they are expecting when they fork out the $$.

It's true that in the old days people didn't have a problem with it.  But you know what, those days are long go.  

Academics may whinge about the philistines who don't understand, but those philistines pay your salaries.    

Academics do police themselves. The thing is that we don't send out articles to the NYT every time we do it. To assume that we don't do anything because we don't send out news releases about is the epitome of foolish. Does the government (another organization that operates on the public trust) send out news releases when a mid-level bureaucrat is let go? Let's  get realistic in some of our expectations before we do stupid sh!t just to please a few politicians who don't know what really happens in the tower.

[/quote]

Well, actually yes you do need to send out articles to the NYT publicizing any efforts.  The public doesn't have much respect for government bureaucracy either mine you.  They are a bit safer though because they are closer to the purse strings than academics.  You can't stay in an ivory tower whinging and moaning about how no-one understands you.  If you can't get out there and say to people we have being doing X and Y while politicians and administrators are going out there saying we have being Z because nothing is being done, well you only have one guess as to what the public is going to think.

The general attitude I see amongst academics is there is a lot of complaining about how noone understands them, they are the victims of philistines and the right thing to do is those same philistines just gave them $$ and left them alone.  Well, that's not going to happen.  And also, you *are* accepting $$ from them.  That does imply some level of accountability.

The main reason why I wrote this is because in these sort of threads I note a lot of (justified) complaining about things like student evaluations and "customer focus" but very little suggestions about alternatives except the "leave us alone and let us do our own thing".  The public (and hence politicians) think it is a big problem so regardless of whether you think of it is a problem or not it IS a problem because they control the pursestrings. So if the current system of accountability sucks (and it does in many ways) what are your proposals (besides leave us alone)?

Hey look, I think a bureaucracy in place monitoring everything by very narrow metrics and customer focused thing is a pretty horrible thought.  It's not like I welcome it, but seriously as I said, either academics (very publicly) take control of the situation or someone else will take control of the situation for them.  That is the simple reality.  

[mad_doctor]

Some of us know and understand why the best teaching doesn't come from schools where professors are wholly dedicated to teaching and service, and research just "gets in the way", so to speak.  Others are perplexed by it, they know it, and think it's strange that things should be that way, but they don't understand why.  The rest don't know, don't care, and will never understand.  The latter are the ones pushing for accountability, and they're the ones the system is catering to every time faculty get lectured on the importance of accountability in higher ed.

Correspondingly, there are three kinds of attitudes about research: 1) Research is important, it defines a university and its faculty, it establishes the uniqueness of each university and each department within the university, and contributes greatly to teaching effectiveness.  Universities like this will require faculty to publish at least one or a few "quality" publications to be tenured.  2) Research is necessary, but it is somewhat at odds with the goals of teaching excellence.  These universities can be identified by minimal publication requirements with little or no expectations of quality, maybe three or four peer-reviewed publications in regional journals as a minimum, or something along those lines.  There is at least a bit of suspicion in these universities over whether quality research and quality teaching are related. 3) Research is unnecessary, it gets in the way of our "true" mission, and we wish we didn't have to deal with it at all.  These universities are characterized by "anything goes" publication requirements, if there are any at all.  There is a very strong sense that research has little or nothing to do with quality teaching, and professors can be effective teachers without it.

This is partly why I was saying elsewhere that we really need to distinguish between more than just "research" and "teaching" universities.  The research/teaching classification just doesn't say enough.

[concordancia]

Why do people have such a problem with graduate students teaching classes? They have mastered the skills from the basic level courses, they often have more enthusiasm for that level than professors, they can be supervised. Most students don't actually know the difference - when you start explaining the difference they often realize that they have had some great instructors who were graduate students.

Academia does have accountability and formal control processes. Several of them - the T&P process, accreditation, well recognized rating systems, alumni contributions, distribution of state funds. Ironically, the most formal one - accreditation - is probably the most laughable. It works to weed out absolute failures, but program assessment and future plans are manipulated: we are pretty sure that at least 75% of our students can do this, so we will write an assessment category as such.

We are held accountable via student evaluations - from students who just might resent having to do any work outside of class; we are held accountable by what they can do when they get out into the workplace - even though they never came to class, but some professors still pass them anyway because we are also held accountable via retention...

The ways in which academia is broken are only made worse by customer service model methods of evaluation. It is virtually impossible to have open enrollment (so that we can attract as many customers as humanly possible) and high standards. As I have stated before, the information that this report is requesting IS available - it is not what many students are using to decide which school to go to. I bet there were rational choice economists involved in writing this.

Research and participation in the real world make me a better teacher at the upper levels, at least. You don't think someone needs to stay active to teach the intro classes? For those fields in which this is true, fund more full time, full benefits lectures. Conference funding seem like a waste? Consider that while many academics may be a bit introverted, they thrive when talking about their geeky stuff. Even if you can't get your head around the implications, consider it an investment in mental health so that your professors don't become grumpy, brain dead lumps.

In short, many of the problems stem from the fact that we are not allowed to police ourselves in many aspects. As sjsmith's posts show, everybody has an interest and everybody has an opinion, largely based on assumptions that are false or expectations that are unrealistic.

[educator1]

Correspondingly, there are three kinds of attitudes about research:

Let me suggest a more realistic view of research and teaching, that they are essentially independent skills. Some faculty excel in both, some excel in only one and some excel in neither.
Sadly, from my point of view, while graduate education provides a tremendous amount of training in research, it provides little or none in teaching. Primarily, we teach as we have been taught and growth in teaching is practically ignored.
At an R1 uni such as mine, research brings much of the reputation and funding and does contribute mightily to society in terms of new and useful knowledge. Teaching, on the other hand, is something that we assume that anyone can do if they will just stand in front of a class and start talking, perhaps supported by a couple of Powerpoint slides. We recruit the best and brightest of trained researchers and assume that they can pick up the skill of teaching by osmosis. No wonder they feel threatened by any attempts to measure "quality of teaching" and refuse to follow the realistic recommendations of sjsmith and develop accountability standards and reports on their own. They don't know how to, although they can develop great standards for research excellence.

[concordancia]

Correspondingly, there are three kinds of attitudes about research:

Let me suggest a more realistic view of research and teaching, that they are essentially independent skills. Some faculty excel in both, some excel in only one and some excel in neither.
Sadly, from my point of view, while graduate education provides a tremendous amount of training in research, it provides little or none in teaching. Primarily, we teach as we have been taught and growth in teaching is practically ignored.
At an R1 uni such as mine, research brings much of the reputation and funding and does contribute mightily to society in terms of new and useful knowledge. Teaching, on the other hand, is something that we assume that anyone can do if they will just stand in front of a class and start talking, perhaps supported by a couple of Powerpoint slides. We recruit the best and brightest of trained researchers and assume that they can pick up the skill of teaching by osmosis. No wonder they feel threatened by any attempts to measure "quality of teaching" and refuse to follow the realistic recommendations of sjsmith and develop accountability standards and reports on their own. They don't know how to, although they can develop great standards for research excellence.

This is being addressed at many schools. My own provided several days of intro to teaching and a departmental pedagogy class as graduation requirements. Unfortunately, we were all lumped together for the intro and the quality of the pedagogy classes varied greatly from department to department. Also, many graduate students start out as TA's, so they are seeing it being done. Unfortunately, TA's are assigned to all profs in given department, regardless of their own skills in the classroom.

[educator1]

This is being addressed at many schools. My own provided several days of intro to teaching and a departmental pedagogy class as graduation requirements. Unfortunately, we were all lumped together for the intro and the quality of the pedagogy classes varied greatly from department to department. Also, many graduate students start out as TA's, so they are seeing it being done. Unfortunately, TA's are assigned to all profs in given department, regardless of their own skills in the classroom.

My point exactly. And how much training are they given in research?

[sjsmith]

Why do people have such a problem with graduate students teaching classes? They have mastered the skills from the basic level courses, they often have more enthusiasm for that level than professors, they can be supervised. Most students don't actually know the difference - when you start explaining the difference they often realize that they have had some great instructors who were graduate students.

The problem is not necessarily with graduate students teaching classes as it is in the many cases of graduate students being thrown into classes and told "go teach".  In fact that is the general attitude that academia takes. Throw them in and sink or swim.

You know this could also explain why later on some supervisors are so crap too. They are not taught how to be supervisors of a graduate student or a postdoc.  They are just expected to somehow pick it up by osmosis.

Sink or swim is the academic way.  

Academia does have accountability and formal control processes. Several of them - the T&P process, accreditation, well recognized rating systems, alumni contributions, distribution of state funds. Ironically, the most formal one - accreditation - is probably the most laughable. It works to weed out absolute failures, but program assessment and future plans are manipulated: we are pretty sure that at least 75% of our students can do this, so we will write an assessment category as such.

We are held accountable via student evaluations - from students who just might resent having to do any work outside of class; we are held accountable by what they can do when they get out into the workplace - even though they never came to class, but some professors still pass them anyway because we are also held accountable via retention...

And yet all this isn't making people happy.  Strange that.  

Actually the fact that so much of the public is unhappy and thinks there is no accountability proves that it doesn't work.  Accountability is not there for fun and games and because people have nothing better to do than fill in forms.  It is about building trust in the people who fund you and who you are supposed to be serving.  Since they don't trust you you failed.

The main reason why so many people are pushing for micromanagement accountability measures is because the public does not trust the higher education system and they don't trust academics to actually do their job.  

The ways in which academia is broken are only made worse by customer service model methods of evaluation. It is virtually impossible to have open enrollment (so that we can attract as many customers as humanly possible) and high standards. As I have stated before, the information that this report is requesting IS available - it is not what many students are using to decide which school to go to. I bet there were rational choice economists involved in writing this.

I agree that the customer service model is broken.

Research and participation in the real world make me a better teacher at the upper levels, at least. You don't think someone needs to stay active to teach the intro classes? For those fields in which this is true, fund more full time, full benefits lectures. Conference funding seem like a waste? Consider that while many academics may be a bit introverted, they thrive when talking about their geeky stuff. Even if you can't get your head around the implications, consider it an investment in mental health so that your professors don't become grumpy, brain dead lumps.

In short, many of the problems stem from the fact that we are not allowed to police ourselves in many aspects. As sjsmith's posts show, everybody has an interest and everybody has an opinion, largely based on assumptions that are false or expectations that are unrealistic.

Hey, I *worked* in academia until a couple of years ago.  Mostly in research ironically enough i.e. you don't have to explain to me the importance of research.  Even more ironically probably the most theoretical, chances of it ever having any practical use in the next couple of decades probably zero research.

However, unlike a lot of academics I don't live in an ivory tower.  I can see the politics of the situation and see how the tide is moving.  The future is going to be very resource constrained and everyone is going to have to fight for what is available.   You want $$, show me what I get for it.  OK, I can understand that.  It's reasonable.

As for academics policing themselves. That is what lead to the bad old days with the problems which directly led to now the (over)drive for accountability.  When you give that suggestion to politicians and the public the first thought will be those bad old days.  

But this leads back to my original point.  In all of these sort of threads, people like to complain about student evaluations, bureaucracy, customer focused etc.  And rightly so mind you.  But the only alternative I've ever seen suggested is that the public just lets them go off and do their own stuff without interference i.e. no system.  But the reason why the public insist on all this ridiculousness in the first place is because of the problems caused in the past when that "no interference" system was in place!  They *don't* want that old system back.  

The public rightly wants some assurance that if the bureaucracy and customer focus is removed that academics will be judged on their teaching and research and ability for their students to get jobs.   And not by some opaque tenure system where it is tremendously difficult to fire people afterwards.  Basically if academics don't want the bureaucracy they are going to have to propose some alternative system which enforces standards, gives information, somewhere students can complain to and have it investigated and the perps fired or punished.  A system they can trust.  In the absence of any leadership on the part of academics themselves to put a transparent standards focused system in place without the customer focus thing (and widely advertise it by enforcing it) means that they are just going to have to live with the administrators' and politicians' system.  

I guess I wonder, are people complaining because they really care about accountability and have better ideas for a system besides the stupid customer focus thing. Or is it just "accountability, I only suffer it because I have to" and people just want to go back to the old days when they didn't have to answer to anyone at all.  In my experience when I worked in academia and judging by this forum, I'm leaning towards option 2. Mainly because I hear a lot of complaining about the accountability system but rarely any alternative besides "They should just trust us."

[mad_doctor]

Well, you make some good points, sjsmith.

On the accountability issue I foresee that the trends will continue.  Professors believe, rightly so, that only experts like themselves are qualified to evalute their work.  This is how the "old" system works - peer review - and the public doesn't trust it partly because the average John Q. Public believes nobody should be exempt from the same kind of performance evaluations and accountability that John Q. Public has to put up with.  Partly they don't trust it because they dislike the idea that it's possible for a poor-quality professor to slip through the tenure system into a lifetime position.  They would rather have a system where professors have the same job security as everyone else, where their workplaces are packed with incompetent people who may be hired and fired at will, rather than allow professors to earn tenure and tolerate the occasional poor professor who manages to slip through the tenure-track system for five years undetected.  They understand such a system, so they like it, and see no reason why academics shouldn't have the same system as everyone else.

Yet, with all the focus on accountability, the quality of our graduates as a group has been declining for forty years.  The most apparent interpretation of this is that whatever accountability has been implemented over those 40 years has made things worse, not better.  Unfortunately for faculty, the administrators and politicians have been very adroit in their PR efforts to paint it as a problem with uncooperative faculty, clinging to a medieval model of governance, unable and unwilling to get up to speed with all the new modern wisdom about how much better the "new" system is than the "old", rather than the truth that the kind of "accountability" the public, politicians, and university administrators favor actually makes things worse. 

We're about to see a similar thing happen to the medical profession.  The "old" system is that doctors policed themselves.  But now everybody thinks they know more about medicine than the doctors, so we try to make doctors accountable.  When doctors push back, the public makes the politicians put pressure on the HMOs, who put pressure on the doctors to find ways to quantify their performance and report it so the average John Q. Public can understand it, and the HMO managers can manage it.  The costs increase and the quality of medicine declines because doctors have to change their practices to suit the measures of accountability.  The next step will be a government takeover, a shortage of qualified doctors, restrictions on resources, and a mediocre but publicly-acceptable system of medicine and health care.  The doctors will be blamed for obstructing progress and accountability to preserve their "old" system (it's already starting - you heard the President trash-mouthing doctors, accusing them of doing unnecessary procedures, removing limbs, organs, and tonsils because they make more money, blah, blah, blah...).  A few years down the road we will see that our best and brightest people will no longer believe the medical profession to be a worthwhile pursuit for their talents.

Regarding alternatives...  If we're going to be so beholden to a business model of higher ed., the only way to turn things around is to put incentives and accountability in place to reward all participants for quality education outcomes (and penalize them for poor outcomes).  Currently the faculty hold each other accountable for quality in both teaching and research through the peer review process.  The administrators and higher ed professionals, on the other hand, neither get rewarded for quality education nor get penalized for lack of it - their incentives and rewards are centered around the business outcomes of the university, and they're held accountable by other administrators.  Imagine if we had measures of educational quality, say pre- and post- percentile rankings, test scores, job placements, employer evaluations, etc., that were used as a basis for administrators, like their industry counterparts, to receive the bulk of their pay based on real educational performance metrics?  Sadly, this, or anything like it, will never happen.

As I first said, I don't think there's a way out at this point.  The trends will continue.  In 30 years our system of higher ed will be acceptable and accountable to the public, and mediocre.  The best and brightest people will no longer see it as a worthwhile investment to earn a Ph.D. and seek a career in academia.  I have already begun turning young people away from academic careers and encouraging them to find a more promising avenue for their talents.  I myself have been looking at alternatives (although I am presently enjoying my situation here at QBSU for the last four months).  If I knew 17 years ago what I know now, I might have taken that executive job instead of investing four years of my life to earn a Ph.D. just so I could have a front-row seat to witness to the dysfunction and decline of American higher ed.

[sjsmith]

mad_doctor, I agree with you that the current system of accountability has been a failure and going further along that route (the whole customer service thing) is just going to make things worse.

If the current system continues (like the article that began this thread) it is likely to lead to the future you envision where the best and brightest don't want to work there and bad outcomes all around for academics, their students and the country.

However, I disagree with you that it is necessarily a bad thing that people are questioning academics or doctors.  First of all, isn't one of the ideas of education is to get people to question things from their leaders, the media and even "experts"?  That is to encourage a healthy sense of skepticism.  If you are going to teach people that, it is fair enough that you meet the same standards. Getting all uptight and defensive on "non-experts" questioning you is silly and even anti-thetical to what you are teaching your students about questioning things and making your own conclusions.  You are not some priest who is holding the mysteries of the holies of holies.   Also, if you are teaching them to question Fox news it is natural they will question you, left-wing professors back.  Unless all you want is someone who questions Fox news and accepts everything you say without question.  In which case what you are teaching is not healthy skepticism but partisanship. 

The danger is that the skepticism gets to such a degree that the entire system breaks down.  That is a complete breakdown in trust.  Getting uptight and defensive and mocking the public (who pays your salaries) and saying "I don't have to explain to you.  You should just trust me and if you don't you are obviously an idiot" helps that along the way a lot.

The root cause of this distrust is that people want to make sure they are getting academics actually doing their job of teaching and research and not slacking off.  Not being too ideological (either right or left) is part of it too.  Not that they don't want them to have opinions and think but they want some sense of professionalism.  There is a serious danger of an over-reaction in which academics are overwhelmed by micromanagement and bureaucracy and "customer service" which doesn't really do anything and they try not to think anything controversial at all and lowers education standards.  The current system and the system proposed in the original article is definitely going along the overreaction route.

However as I continue to say, the reason why they are going along the route is that the academic community, insteading of recognizing that they need to fix the breakdown in trust just continually whinge "Well they should just trust us because.  So there."  That's all the academic community has to say.  Besides mocking any of the little people's concerns.  That and mutterings about conspiracy theories (which to most people looks like a lame excuse).  If I was to write a guide on how to alienate the public, the way the academic community is behaving would be one of the prime examples.

 

[mad_doctor]

mad_doctor, I agree with you that the current system of accountability has been a failure and going further along that route (the whole customer service thing) is just going to make things worse.

If the current system continues (like the article that began this thread) it is likely to lead to the future you envision where the best and brightest don't want to work there and bad outcomes all around for academics, their students and the country.

However, I disagree with you that it is necessarily a bad thing that people are questioning academics or doctors.  First of all, isn't one of the ideas of education is to get people to question things from their leaders, the media and even "experts"?  That is to encourage a healthy sense of skepticism.  If you are going to teach people that, it is fair enough that you meet the same standards. Getting all uptight and defensive on "non-experts" questioning you is silly and even anti-thetical to what you are teaching your students about questioning things and making your own conclusions.  You are not some priest who is holding the mysteries of the holies of holies.   Also, if you are teaching them to question Fox news it is natural they will question you, left-wing professors back.  Unless all you want is someone who questions Fox news and accepts everything you say without question.  In which case what you are teaching is not healthy skepticism but partisanship. 

You and I will probably disagree on this, sjsmith.  I believe humility is a mark of an educated person, and especially so when questioning experts in other fields.  I teach my own students this, that it is ok to be critical, and ok to question authority, but to remember that it is an authority you are questioning, and to remember your place as a humble inquirer.  I believe I practice what I preach, especially every time I send another paper out into review, every time I attend a conference, every time I speak with another expert in my field, and every time I speak as an authority on my own subject areas.  So no, I don't believe this kind of accountability is good for the profession, and I don't believe people who demand this kind of accountability are educated - if they were educated they would know that they know nothing of what they demand.  I don't mind answering their questions, and I don't mind being held accountable for the right things, but a little respect and humility are necessary first or we will continue on down the road you and I both agree will eventually lead to the decline and fall of higher ed as we know it.  Sadly, we both know that won't happen, and there are way more of them than there are of us, which is why I believe things will unfold as I have said.

[magistra]

Oi.  Enough with the sweeping generalizations.  Not only are different schools very different, but different departments and fields will treat teacher-training, for example, very differently.  Lord knows it's been very important at the R1s I've seen in action.  I don't doubt that experience varies, but that doesn't mean anyone under the level of tenured professor can't teach (or that they become deadwood the second they are tenured professors, and can't teach).

And I'm tired of the "ivory tower" bit.  Anyone in business will tell you that that is an unreal world, too.  We all view the world through the lens we know, but many of us in academia have had varied jobs, lived different places, etc.  Certainly the majority of us have had a brush with poverty during grad school, and we all know about hard work.  Pundits and politicians live the surreal.  We pay our taxes, we live in this society, we send our kids to the local schools, we go to church and ballgames and the grocery store.  I know the exact price of a gallon of milk, and I can tell you that it was raised twice in the past few months, because that sort of thing still makes a difference to me.

No-one's mentioned adjuncts yet, but I think they're central to the conversation.  If there's anyone who's phoning it in, it's likely to be the adjuncts, and for good reason.  Not to malign adjuncts, who seem remarkably dedicated on the whole, but if we're using the business model: you get what you pay for.  Unless and until schools and governments are willing to pay for all that teacher training, and maybe raise and extend grad student stipends so they're not rushing to finish no matter what the cost to themselves or their classes, and of course are willing to pay adjuncts more and even give them health care, until we get decent classrooms with the tech we need, we get a bit cranky when people start talking about outcomes. 

And by the way, if goods come damaged from your supplier (i.e. the high schools), what do you do with them in the business world?  If they break the warranty (don't show up, don't do the work, don't participate), what happens in the business world?  If they produce unintelligible pieces of writing and rude e-mails, what will happen to them when they're employees in the business world?

OK, now I'm really cranky.  Rant off.

[concordancia]

And by the way, if goods come damaged from your supplier (i.e. the high schools), what do you do with them in the business world? 

Oh, you mean we can send them back? I wish someone had told me sooner!

[educator1]

No-one's mentioned adjuncts yet, but I think they're central to the conversation.  If there's anyone who's phoning it in, it's likely to be the adjuncts, and for good reason.  Not to malign adjuncts, who seem remarkably dedicated on the whole, but if we're using the business model: you get what you pay for. 

Rant on

As an adjunct specifically hired for my expertise and experience in the practical applications of my field and my expertise in teaching, I resent this remark.  My TT colleagues respect me for my practical experience and my teaching ability and I learn the newest developments in my field from them. I have established most of the innovative teaching methods in the required courses in my department. You start off with a slap at generalizations and then include one of the worst in your post!

The issue on teaching is that we spend an incredible amount of time and resources training our graduate students to be outstanding researchers and little or nothing training them to be outstanding teachers. Unless and until we both understand and value teaching, we will be suspect and held to the kind of accountability standards that currently plague the K-12 sector.

Rant off

[magistra]

Um, which was what I said.  And if you'd read my post, I was not slamming adjuncts.  I was pointing out that the adjunctification of higher ed is a related problem which is not being addressed, but certainly has the potential to hugely increase the amount of bad teaching.  You think paying people like crap, treating them like crap, and making them fear for their jobs every freakin' semester is going to motivate them to uphold standards in the classroom? 

It's great that you're well treated, but that is not the experience many adjuncts have.  The plural of anecdote...