Despair!

Brad DeLong delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU
Wed Mar 7 10:42:09 PST 2001



>From: "Michael McIntyre" <mmcintyr at wppost.depaul.edu>
>To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Subject: Re: farewell to academe
>Sender: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>Status:
>
>Let's think of it this way. If you were to design a university to
>discourage education, how would you do it?...
>
>
>(3) Make departmental budgets and faculty lines dependent on student
>enrollments.
>
>(4) In evaluating professors for tenure and promotion, measure
>quality of teaching by student evaluations.

I swear. Unless I quit this list soon, I'm going to wind up somewhere to the right of the Cato Institute.

For twenty-five years I have argued that everything the neoconservatives wrote about the arrogant elitism of the "new class" was false. But now here I am, confronted with Mr. McIntyre, who thinks that a good university is one in which (a) professors don't teach the subjects that students want to learn, and (b) whether a professor keeps teaching bears no relation to whether students actually like his or her classes. The claims that departmental budgets and staffing levels should be independent of student enrollments, and that student perceptions of professor quality should be irrelevant for promotion and retention decisions--these claims make sense only if students are a swinish multitude, incapable of any judgment at all about their own interests and intellectual development.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this thread is the number of teachers who seem, at some level, to hate their students. I think there is only one thing to be said to them: get anohter job.

Brad DeLong



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