Here at SodaPop College I recently took on two new t-t folks. My official role is as mentor, but my unofficial role seems to just be listener.The three of us meet occasionally over coffee at a little place across the thin highway from our beachfront campus. We were there yesterday when Jacob (from my own department) asked me about college standards.
"I get students in my 102 class who I know shouldn't have passed 101. They do lousy work, are rude in class, and always complain about how hard my class is compared to every other class in the department. I want to flunk about half of them. But some of them are sophomores and juniors. They've passed all these other classes before me. I even have one kid who is a real favorite of Dr. Venerated [a longtime colleague]. This kid should be sent directly back to the 5th grade, but Venerated gave him an A in 101."Rachel, the other new faculty member (but from a different department), added, "I know I haven't been here long enough yet, but I feel all kinds of pressure to keep students moving through the system. Dean BeenThere DoneThat said something at the new faculty orientation that put a chill in me. She said since our freshmen had been admitted that we had the responsibility to make sure they finished in time, by meeting them 'where they were,' and making their progress through our programs our number one priority. She said not to let our own standards derail the abilities of some students who 'learn different' than we did when we were in college.
"And," Rachel continued," in my own department I've actually been told by a veteran colleague that flunking students, even in the 100 level classes, will send up red flags about me to the administration."
"And that will ruin your student evaluations," Jacob added. "Evals count for 25% of my T&P package. Dr. JustGotTenure has a line that goes, 'Passing students are happy students.'"
My coffee was cold.
Jacob said, "I feel like I owe it to the students to tell them they're not making the grade, to flunk the ones who just refuse to come to class, or refuse to do the work, or who want 900 special considerations for everything they miss or do poorly on. But then I think, 'Maybe I'm too tough on them. After all, they passed all these other classes; nobody else is making them flunk.'"
"And I don't want the complaints," Rachel added. "I don't want to be the hard-ass grader who holds the line on student achievement and behavior. I won't get any students in my upper level classes if I get that reputation, and I don't want my name to come up to the chair as the only one not getting students passed."
I didn't have any wondrous answers for them. I blathered something about owing it to our students to be fair to them, but I wasn't even sure I believed that fully. I felt ashamed that I didn't jump all over them and encourage them to flunk the flunkers, departmental politics and pseudo-standards be damned, because I knew there real world career consequences waiting them if they did.
Q: Finally, who do we serve? Do we serve the needs of the department, the students, or ourselves? Do we protect our career paths by finding and maintaining the standards of the department - even if we find them lacking and porous? Do we hold the line against slipping standards, or do we slide along with the rest? Is there a cost to doing what we think is right?
There are no simple answers to systemic problems. The best I think your t-t's can hope for is enough support from your department to do what is right and still keep their jobs. In doing so, we serve our disciplines, students, departments, and ourselves in the long term.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, IMHO sometimes when the standards are upheld, the evals don't change much on balance. Sure, the ones who get flunked get pissed off, but there are also those who actually want to learn, to be differentiated from those who have been allowed to slide, and they get more positive. If that doesn't happen, though, it takes some Alphas in the dept to go to bat on behalf of the t-t's. Those Alphas can also help by rattling the cages of the softies teaching 101.
But yeah, with dept politics and useless admins, it's still a risk. But if those young people hold the line and make it through, then eventually those young people become the senior people, and are in a position to do even more good. They might even be senior people and not be dead inside - imagine! But they have to put up with the crap first. That is the cost. Trust me, I know. But it can be done. Cultural change takes a very long time.
If ever there were an argument for tenure, this is it. The cynic in me says: tell them to do what they need to do to get tenure, and then flunk the hell out of students when they get it.
ReplyDeleteMid-Career Mike, I want to think about your question as I go through the next few hours of class, but I couldn't walk away without saying: WELCOME BACK I MISSED YOU SO!!
ReplyDeleteWhen asked about who our "customer" was (another way of asking who we "serve"), a VP of Instruction at a previous institution said business was our "consumer" and students were the "product." He was a higher ed lifer, too, not a "education as corporation" transplant.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's a reduction. But on some level I can see his point.
You are lucky that evals only count for 25%. Evals here count for almost all. Student "impressions" count greatly. If a student thinks a professor is not doing enough, the professor isn't. If a student thinks a professors doesn't answer questions, that MUST be the case- even if said professor ALWAYS asks are there questions at the beginning of class and throughout.
ReplyDeleteThe only other thing that really counts is "collegiality" which means do the faculty like you. If you piss off another fac member, perhaps by failing (i.e. not giving a A to) a favorite student, that is enough. Never mind that mathematics is different from history and a good history student can just not be good at math. An enthusiastic student in one area can not like another and slack off in it.
Research, service etc are hardly looked at.
Where I work, collegiality has been ruled out as a criterion for tenure and promotion. Research, teaching, and service are all that's evaluated. Thank god.
ReplyDeleteIn answer to the original question, I'd say that we have responsibilities both to our students and to the larger society, and that those responsibilities intersect in the duty to help students become functioning, thoughtful, useful, and, when necessary, skeptical, participants in society. We also need to take care of ourselves, and the institutions we serve, so that we (both people and institutions) can continue over long periods (a career, the life of an institution) to serve students with their own longterm good, and the longterm good of society, in mind. That's not easy to do in today's consumerist, quick-results-oriented atmosphere.
ReplyDeleteSince I am, by job description, not a permanent part of my institution, I will, when overwhelmed by competing priorities, think less about the welfare my institution, and more about balancing my own welfare and that of my students. It's when those two come into conflict -- and when my students' ideas of what will contribute to their longterm welfare conflict with mine, and the customer-service model threatens to allow their ideas to prevail -- that things get really hard. That happens on a pretty regular basis, and I've found no solution except to keep slogging ahead, making the best decisions I can based on the information I have at the time, and more than occasionally praying "Lord, help me to be fair to both my students and myself" (despite the fact that, although I'm both a regular churchgoer and a regular pray-er, I'm not entirely sure what I think prayer does).
I tend to use the "Headstone Test" - of the courses of action available to me, which one would I want (or be least embarrassed by) written on my headstone. Since I'm fortunate enough to have tenure, I can shoot for "He was rigorous fair and scholarly, and it pissed off the adminflakes"
ReplyDeleteIf I were in a different situation though, with no tenure and dependents to look after, such lofty ambitions might well turn out as "He got fired and couldn't feed his family because he was too damn proud and stubborn".
And the one I fear most: "He sold his soul and they still screwed him over." It'd suck to lower your standards and still be denied tenure.
But to answer the question, I think Universities serve society at large (slightly weighted to the students in our actual classes). I think we do this by holding up some standard of knowledge and reason, in our teaching and grading - and in our research and writing.
I could live with that on my headstone (wait.. that didn't come out right)
Those sorts of decisions are heady stuff, and quite lovely when one has tenure. It's possible to view them as abstract items to be turned over and mulled.
ReplyDeleteBut when one feels beholden to customer satisfaction, then those decisions are painful and heavy.
Here's my confession. I want you to fail me--or at least give me the B we both know I deserve. Grade inflation may help me get through my program, but it's not helping me or any of my peers in the long term.
ReplyDeleteFor example, if I can pull a paper out my ass in a night or two of intense work and still get an "A" on it, where's my incentive to start earlier?
If "good enough" is A-work (!?), why should I bust my ass?
If meeting the minimum requirements--proper heading/format/citations, thesis, supporting evidence, coherent sentences--passes for A-work, why should I ever try to go above and beyond expectations?
Granted, some students are intrinsically motivated. Most are not. Grades are not just a carrot; they are also a stick. Use it; I've been naughty.
I know it's not a professor's responsibility to encourage a good work ethic. I just want there to be consequences for my bad decisions; how else am I going to learn?
I understand that tenure-track positions are rarer than a hen's teeth and that evaluations can, I imagine, make or break you when you come up for review. Adjuncts, of course, are in an even more tenuous position. I get it. You're off the hook.
But those of you with tenure, I want to encourage you to grade even just a little bit harder. My favorite professor of all time never gave me an A. I worked my ass off in his/her class after the first (mediocre) paper, and the best I ever received (earned!) from him/her was an A-. It's one of the few papers of which I'm actually proud.
Grade inflation is not helping your students and you seem to feel lousy about it too. So why keep the status quo?
If you do have tenure, do your job. Keep your standards high. Please.
Mid-Career Mike is my favorite.
ReplyDeleteI would agree with F&T and many others who have commented since. It all depends on your conditions / context. Tenured folks can hold the line if they haven't yet been overcome by the wooziness that afflicts Dr. Venerated and others. The rest of us are in a more uncertain position. Adjuncts who live or die by evaluations have little choice but to lob softballs. Assistants and visiting folks? Well, it depends on what you have to gain or lose. When you have a potential tenure decision at stake, it's tough to be the guy or gal who gives someone their first C.
But of course you know all this. I would say that the only real solution is a college-wide policy against grade inflation. Some places still have that. Then the students might anticipate, even expect, fair grades, and an A would mean something beyond "student in question has a pulse." How do you get that policy? Damned if I know.
thank you Grad Flake. I am trying my best to keep it real with my students and show them what they are capable of by pushing them to do more. I'm glad there are students out there who recognize that this approach to grading actually benefits students in the long run.
ReplyDeleteI work at a public university in California, so I serve the great state of California. Often, when students snivel at me to be "easier," I remind them that the great state of California is badly served when I am lax with standards in their educations.
ReplyDeleteIf I worked at a private university, I would primarily serve my university. I would do this by serving truth and reason. I sound like a Boy Scout saying that. See how cynical and corrupt contemporary culture has become?
And yes, I have tenure. It helps a lot. I am deeply ashamed to confess that when I was on the tenure track, I did lower my standards, particularly after being yelled at repeatedly by a jagoff department head that I got more student complaints than anyone else. If he said that to me today, I’d retort that I wear their scorn like a badge of honor, and that you should have higher standards, because your students are so scandalously semi-literate, they are a source of public danger. I very nearly didn’t get tenure, because I wouldn’t lower my standards enough, and repeatedly argued with flaky senior faculty and about it. It was tough.
It helped that I don’t have dependents. What has academia devolved to, a monastery? The Pony Express used to advertise, “Orphans preferred.”
P.S. to Grad Flake: Get back to work at once.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it: we serve the trustees of our universities. For public universities, these serve the state, but for private universities, they do not. One might hope the trustees are sufficiently savvy to recognize that a university's enrollment and income depend critically on its reputation for educational quality. Therefore, to serve a university well, faculty must serve truth and reason. Heaven help you if the trustees and their designates have forgotten that.
ReplyDeleteFrod, haven't our trustees (the Regents) completely sold us down the river?
ReplyDelete@F&T: At least, as a state university, I can evoke the name of my state, when I say, "The state of California is NOT well served by students who are badly educated!" I'm pretty sure Jerry Brown would agree, even if he doesn't have much money he can give me. I'm glad I don't work in Wisconsin.
ReplyDelete