John Gulick wrote:
> Martin McIntyre wrote:
>
> >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