<p>The guy is a brilliant engineer with great credentials that taught at a third or fourth tier state university. His students believed that the piece of paper known as a diploma would get them a good job. That means that they only needed to get the diploma - it didn’t matter how they got it. So of course cheating was a big issue. He tried to expand the horizons of his students but most didn’t have the academic background to get it. They didn’t have the reasoning ability. Papers were cut and paste jobs from Wikipedia. When you have a large population of students that aren’t really college material, getting them to independence is near impossible. Our armed forces would probably do a much better job at this.</p>
<p>I wasn’t questioning his brilliance, or even his teaching, if it is in fact great. I was questioning, and do question, the belief that great teaching is irrelevant in higher education. If so, let’s save ourselves the money, all of us: close down the colleges and self-educate. </p>
<p>Those cynical and dishonest students which you mention and he references: They may “get the job,” but performance may or may not pan out, and eventually people more capable may overtake them on such jobs. I’ve seen that happen in many a work environment. What people (students & parents) sometimes forget is that an education well-used is also job training: it trains for certain skills which are also essential in the job market: enterprise, creativity, self-management, personal organization, risk-taking, and more. They may not be as apparent as the intellectual aspects, but they often determine the quality of that intellectual product.</p>
<p>I think that’s a strawman. I can see leadership in small classroom settings but let’s be realistic about the state of public education today. It’s under severe financial stress so you’re going to have lecture halls, larger classroom sizes and research is needed to bring in money to fund departments.</p>
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<p>Self-education only works for some but you’d better know how to do it in graduate school. There are a lot of people in college that shouldn’t be there. They spend a great
deal of money (from their parents or the state or loans) for four years and don’t really come out with that much in terms of marketable skills. If you want a healthy dose of skepticism about the academy, spend some time on ratemystudents.</p>
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<p>In his school, students like this were the majority.</p>
<p>He taught computer science and once started talking about logarithms. He was
surprised that even the math majors weren’t fluent with logarithms. He has often
said that Americans are the most optimistic people in the world. Where else would
people borrow massive amounts of money thinking that riches await them at the
end of four years?</p>
<p>This thread is at risk for going “out of control” and that would be a shame, because higher education faces a catharsis in coming years … pinned between higher costs and shrinking salaries of baccalaureate graduates.</p>
<p>What one wants from a flagship university largely depends on where one sits in life. Graduate student want large research budgets and professors with light (or non-existent) graduate teaching loads. Sports budgets are not a waste of money for athletes, fans and boosters. Remedial services are not a wasted for those wishing to “level the field” for non-elite students. Online teaching makes sense for some courses but not others. Even there, no one really knows what a quality online experience constitutes.</p>
<p>As I was taught many years ago “Where you stand often depends on where you sit.”</p>
<p>[signed] Spouse of one of those lazy Profs who works >80 hours a week trying to serve too many constituencies.</p>
<p>I don’t believe that great teaching is irrelevant in higher education, whether at LACs or at research universities.
I also think that students learn from peers, and that the classroom experience is very important. It’s a bit like listening to a live concert or watching a movie in a cinema vs. listening to a CD on one’s iphone or watching a DVD from one’s sofa. It’s a different experience. More importantly, being able to discuss readings, lectures, problem sets, with others is a key ingredient to processing the materials. Yesterday, I talked to a young woman who told me that several of her college roommates are taking the same humanities course as her; they regularly discuss the lectures and the materials without being formally part of a study group. In the evening I talked to my S on the phone. He is in grad school. Every day, he spends time with fellow students, doing homework together. Some of the study groups are informal (whoever happens to be in the office at the time) one was formally created by the prof. </p>
<p>Profs also learn from their students. They may think that they know what happened in a certain society at a certain time. But having to explain it to their students or trying to answer their questions often makes it clear that there are areas of their knowledge that remain vague, that there are plenty of research questions that have not yet been tackled let alone resolved, or that their exposition of the information is not clear enough. This is why so many academic authors thank their students, not for doing some of the research but for forcing them to think through and even re-think their ideas.
Even profs who do not go on doing independent research and publish once they have received tenure try to keep up to date with what has been published in their particular field, create new courses which requires reading in different disciplines, etc… I would consider this, too, to be research of a sort. Profs are themselves lifelong learners.</p>
<p>I think mass education needs new delivery models. The means and opportunities for learning are about unlimited. Yet there is a “credentialing” system that creates a funnel, and gives the impression that the opportunities for education are (artificially) scarce. As a graduate of a state flagship, I have to say that the credential (a 4 year degree) has the same relationship to being educated as getting a state driver’s license has to being a good driver.</p>