>Let's think of it this way. If you were to design a university to
discourage >education, how would you do it? Here's one plan ...
>(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 ...
>Sounds like my school. Sounds like Yates's school. Sound like anyone else's
>school?
I sez:
Here at UCSC, which allegedly combines the virtues of a small liberal arts school (relatively high teacher/student ratios) and a large research university (cheap tuition and world-class facilities), I was once upbraided by the department chair b/c undergrad evaluations indicated that students didn't like me as a TA. The reason they didn't like me as a TA was b/c I actually expected them to come to section prepared to intelligently discuss the assigned reading. The problem w/having such lofty expectations of the undergrads, noted the department chair in his vaguely menacing letter to me, was that department budgets were dependent on student enrollments, and best not to upset the little racket the department had going on. It may or may not be pertinent that the said department chair was a card-carrying member of watered-down cultural studies "market populism." Spoon-feed the students unchallenging pseudo-radical claptrap about how "transgressive" watching TV can be, thus lightening your workload so you can compose some bullshit article for a po-mo journal that only your colleagues can or will read. One thing that hasn't been explicitly pointed out in this whole discussion is how the various trends that have been mentioned are the most difficult to bear for conscientious and committed leftist academics.
John Gulick