<p>
</p>
<p>You actually didn’t answer my question: do you really think that nearly 500 MCB seniors - not even counting any nonseniors - have done research? </p>
<p>I believe that, at most, the number is half. After all, let’s face it, not all MCB students are doing that well. {Perhaps you just happen to know only high-performing MCB students and if so, good for you, but your experience is not representative.} Let’s face it, if you’re getting below a 3.0 in MCB, you’re probably not champing at the bit to be doing any MCB research. You probably just want to graduate and move on with your life. </p>
<p>But again, like I said, the overwhelming majority of faculty at Berkeley are not in the natural sciences. Yet they are still subject to the same research and publication pressures. For example, only a small percentage of Berkeley humanities undergraduates engage in academic research, or even know what it is, but all of Berkeley’s humanities professors do. Because they must. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Um, no, I didn’t say that all of the faculty would be given this deal. What I said is that only the specific top faculty who you want to raid would be given this deal. The rest of the faculty would not be given this deal. </p>
<p>Also, it should be noted that I never said that they necessarily would be exempt from teaching forever. A new assistant professor might be exempted from teaching until their tenure review. If they pass their review, then their tenure offer would come with teaching requirements. {They could then choose to turn down the tenure offer and go to some other university if they still don’t want to teach.} A senior tenured faculty member would be exempt for X number of years.</p>
<p>Is this really such a shocking idea? Then it should be said that that is what most research universities offer right now. Yale just recently offered one person a faculty position with a multi-year (I believe 3-year) teaching exemption. Heck, like I said, Berkeley too famously offered a long-standing teaching exemption to Yuan Lee. </p>
<p>Any teaching backlog could then be filled by adjuncts or lecturers who are not part of the standard tenure-track ladder faculty. Again, this is something that practically every research university does…including Berkeley. Carlo Alesandrini and Henrik Wallman co-teach the (required) chemical engineering senior design course, Shannon Ciston teaches the (required) chemical engineering technical communication course, and Henrik Wallman also teaches the required chemical process control course. All of them are lecturers, not professors. Yet nobody seems to have a problem with that, as Berkeley still runs a top-ranked chemical engineering program. Similarly, the Berkeley CS department has several lecturers and adjuncts (Trevor Darrell, Paul Hilfinger, Armando Fox, Dan Garcia, Brian Harvey, Mike Clancy), and nobody seems to have a problem with that.</p>
<p>And so I ask: can anybody come up with a counterargument as to exactly why this proposal wouldn’t work?</p>