Shirking the Real Work -- Full Professors and Freshman Comp — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
The problem for the university is the low quality of the feeder K-12 systems. Low quality K-12 education is a problem looking for a solution, but our political class does not want to solve problems it wants eternal issues in need of a little more money. K-12 education fits this bill perfectly. A key problem at university is the fact that the money and prestige go to the researchers, not teachers. The result is baccalaureate students are a demanding afterthought for many professors. As the article notes, this leads to professors shifting the critically important lower level workload to graduate students or assistant professors. Further, the chance that an excellent researcher will make a highly motivated and outstanding teacher of baccalaureate students is low. A separate but related issue is that many minority students are mismatched with their university rigor level due to affirmative action. A minority student who would do well at a second-tier university may be incapable of handling the work at a first tier or Ivy. The result is incredible stress and a tendency to pass these students along before they are competent in the material. "We are caught in a treacherous situation. The hardest classes to teach are often taught by the least competent teachers. The class most unpopular with undergraduates is taught by the most vulnerable teachers. The most delicate subjects are thrust upon twenty-somethings ill-equipped to manage them. This is not the fault of people running writing programs, or of deans of humanities, or of lecturers with renewable appointments. It is the fault of safe and secure tenured professors in English, Comparative Literature, American Studies, etc. All too often they conduct rarefied research and minimize contact with students. They regard themselves as specialists, busy and professional, and while they agree on the importance of freshman writing, in their actions they express the opposite. General education and basic skills, they indicate, are the responsibility of lesser colleagues." This sounds to me like it is time for a revolution, a riot, or both. What was it the Bard said? "The first thing we do, let's kill all the tenured English professors." Or something like that. "This is not a healthy subdivision of the humanities, and the disciplines will recover only if the upper-faculty regularly turns its attention away from its research and toward the foundations of reading and writing. If those foundations are not reinforced and respected by distinguished humanities professors, and if students don’t acquire sound English skills during the first year, the most cutting-edge sophisticated scholarship collapses upon itself. Full professors must reconnect with the freshman classroom and with the teachers—graduate students, temporary hires, and lecturers—who are doing the hardest job on the campus." But do the tenured English professors want students with solid analytical, research, and writing skills? The political wackadoo which stands in as an education in the humanities and social sciences today would be untenable if the students were skeptical, critical thinkers. Better to not rock the boat, but indoctrinate the students while providing them with an incompetent education in writing, analysis, research and critical thinking skills. In the video below, law students from Lewis and Clark law school show the quality of analysis, critical thinking, and skepticism to be found in law students. As a lawyer, I would not hire these zombies to fetch water or coffee.
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