Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>
> I am sympathetic to this position in the abstract; however, when we're
> trying to get things done in an educational organization, turning a
> blind eye to people who don't do their work causes all kinds of problems
> for students, faculty, and staff. One example: a faculty member at a
> vaguely unidentified college I've worked at refused to grade final
> papers for a number of terms, and the department chair and another
> faculty member did the grading so that the students would get their
> grades on time for the hard work they did. What are we supposed to do
> about that? Is it wrong for me to argue that this faculty member should
> not be allowed to impose additional workload on colleagues?
>
There a number of possibilities. Excuse him from teaching while still paying his full salary. Ask him to give semester grades without assigning a final paper. Do a quick and slopp job of grading his papers for him, dividing the work up among a dozen or so colleagues. Factory workers of the past would try to carry an ill or otherwise incapacitated fellow worker. Refusal to grade papers and letting someone else grade them is not incompetence but some psychological glitch. He's an injured fellow worker.
And this is an extreme case. Most incompetence doesn't explicitly 'overflow' like this. But at its worst incompetence does not really harm the 'total produce' of a school (the students) as much as a merit system does.
And the Religion of Competence is a rather more serious national problem than a few tens of thousands of misgraded studetns in a given year.
Carrol