Despair!

Michael Yates mikey+ at pitt.edu
Wed Mar 7 18:18:54 PST 2001


Funny, I don't recall a single mesage that indicates that the teachers hate their students.

Michael Yates

Brad DeLong wrote:
>
> >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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