Posted on 01/30/2015 6:01:10 AM PST by rellimpank
Walker has it right. My wife is an adjunct instructor at our local State University. She gets paid by the “contact” hour and fills out an hourly timesheet - like many in the real world. She works very hard. There is no extra pay for preparation or grading students’ written work. Nor is she paid based on the revenue she generates: She is a popular and effective teacher and easily has the largest student load. All her colleagues dream about becoming full time faculty so they can earn more, work less and receive all kinds of benefits. Walker has it right. Prof. Elizabeth Warren is a perfect example of the exploitation that masquerades as higher education: Harvard paid her $350K for teaching one course!!
Thats simpley no fare.
I hapen to have a jurnalism deegre.
And I take graeve offents at suck coments!!
A great many tenured college profs are under-worked, overpaid blowhards that compliment each other on being brilliant while pumping liberal bs into the skulls full of mush entrusted to them. I grew up with a dear friend who became a liberal arts phd and is now nearly unrecognizable and intolerable.
Academia is a partially closed system that survives only because the needed resources are provided from the outside. The institutions and structures exist solely to compete for those resources. Virtually all of the people involved are leftwing fruitloops, so the result is predictable: pre-1990 Eastern Europe, Cuba, North Korea. It will fail. Even the schools and disciplines that teach useful things will fail because the students don’t know how to think. I am horrified by the attempts at logic that I see from younger people; people with degrees in things that aren’t Gender Studies. In the odd case where their thinking might possibly be clear, their writing is so poor that it’s hard to tell. They could be right, but nobody (including them) would know why. The Left won it’s long march through the institutions, and now it’s just a matter of waiting for it to all fall down.
Scott Walker is trying to make me love him. It’s working.
I did my undergrad work in Chemical Engineering at Cornell in the early 80s.
We had one professor that was very popular, Dr. Cocomo. He was available for help at most hours. Other professors in ChemE had few or very limited hours for help; that role was farmed out to teaching assistants (mostly graduate students with heavy Indian accents).
Dr. Cocomo was fired because he didn’t bring in enough grant money and didn’t conduct enough research.
A great teacher. But he didn’t fit the model of a researcher. This matches the description in the article.
I have 15 years of experience as a university professor. The work load varies considerably between schools and departments. For example, I teach computer information systems. This field is constantly changing and requires a constant effort to stay current. Textbooks are often obsolete by the time they are published. Almost nothing I learned in school is still used today. A person teaching Shakespeare would not need to update all of their classes each year.
At most schools, a tenure track professor needs to devote only 1/3 of his time to teaching. The remainder is spent doing research and serving on various committees. I was once named “teacher of the year” for my college at a major university. My boss said congratulations and don’t do it again! He knew my tenure depended on publications, not teaching.
There is enormous waste in higher Ed. Most of the research is worthless and takes up an enormous amount of time. There are too many people in college that are not good scholars and are just wasting their time and money. Many of the degrees do not teach any marketable job skills and the students end up in jobs that do not require a degree.
Here are my recommendations to save money in higher Ed .
1. Close departments and consolidate them at a few state schools. Not every university has a law school. Why should they all have a sociology (or journalism,or women’s studies etc.) department?
2. Raise standards. For the schools, more students equals more money. This is not a good deal for the taxpayer who is on the hook trying to educate students who have little chance of graduating.
3. Remove the research requirements from most teaching positions and increase the course load.
4. Evaluate teaching performance and use it to determine pay, promotion and retention.(This is hard.)
5. Get rid of tenure.
and their penchant to hire foreign graduate assistants rather than American who speak a language their students understand. My daughter who graduated for a state university 30 years ago said that almost all graduate assistants teaching the lab courses were foreign with poor English skills. She got through those lab courses, not with the paid lab instructors teachings, but with the help of other students and text book.
I like your recommendations
Charlie Sykes locally here did a search of UW Systems salaries and 25 pages into it each person was still making 6 figure salaries. So many people jumped onto the document that the host site crashed yesterday.
The real reason for the squealing from the UW Admins and their teaches is that a light is finally being shone on this. You thought the backlash was big against State workers and teachers unions during Act 10? Wait until people start connecting the salary to the amount of teaching time they’re putting in!
Most of Academia has morphed into one of the biggest scams in human history.
Trillions of dollars, flushed down the toilet and into pseudo"studies" and into the purses of corrupt know nothings.
They have extorted this money, and the day of reckoning that is coming with our economic collapse is partially their fault.
Thanks for your perspective.
There’s a place for research, and universities that are heavily involved in research. But, I agree that some of it is make work grant chasing (my reference is one of my sons who left a Ph.D. program after becoming ABD).
There ought to be a place for good quality colleges that are more oriented towards teaching. And, tenure should, at the very least, be revocable so slackers can’t take advantage of it as a sinecure.
Completely take tax payer money out of education and they can run the programs anyway they want. I can’t believe that our tax money goes to colleges. Absolutely no reason for this. Most Universities have extremely large endowments. I never understood the need for taxes to be given to colleges and universities.
If you are referencing gender and ethnic studies and most of what goes on in education schools and radicalized comp lit departments, I agree with you completely. But at the local land-grant university, there is a tremendous amount of exciting work being done in biochemistry, pharmacy, computational chemistry, and complex carbohydrates, to name just a few such areas.
Even in these fields, most research projects are failures, if you apply a strict cost-benefit analysis. The same can be said of drilling oil wells. The vast majority of them are dry holes, but a few produce tremendous wealth. The problem is that nobody, least of all a politician, can determine in advance what research will prove valuable and what will be a dead end.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.