Uttered by an administrator:
“It’s not a curricular decision. It’s a resources decision.”
Category Archives: Academia
A downside of the fact that faculty members are not fully interchangeable.
In response to my post yesterday considering some of the difficulties in restaffing a course when its professor falls ill, Leigh commented:
Sometimes nothing can be done. Last winter I had to cancel my evolution course, which doubles as a laboratory in the philosophy of science, because of a serious illness. (I had already given the course in the fall; I voluntarily added the winter one because the fall course was doubly oversubscribed.) Fortunately this happened just after the course started, so the students were minimally lurchified. The course is quite idiosyncratic, with no actual lectures after the first class, and there just isn’t anyone who could have taken it over.
My first thought was, “I would love to take that course!” My next thought was that Leigh raises another key issue that makes it challenging to reassign a course to a different faculty member, even if you have lead time: our syllabi, teaching styles, and skill sets are not fully interchangeable. This is a fact that rears its head not just when a department is making course schedule, but when that course schedule needs to be remade on account of faculty work other than teaching.
Changing professorial horses midstream.
In comments on my earlier post about what happens to a college course in progress when the professor teaching it dies, a lot of folks raised interesting questions about what would be the fair policy to adopt with respect to student grades. I think actually implementing whatever we might agree was a fair grading policy could be complicated by practical considerations, like whether the professor had left behind updated grade records that were accessible to his or her department, whether he or she had already written a final exam (and a guide to grading that final exam), etc.
It’s an interesting set of questions, but that’s not the subject of this post.
Something else that came up in those comments was that a goodly number of commenters had actually been in a course where the professor died, or fell ill, or had to withdraw from teaching the course to deal with a pressing emergency of some sort. In such situations, someone either has to jump in to take over teaching the course — sometimes without much information from the original professor about how to teach it, or with very different views than the original professor about how the material ought to be covered — or the course ends up being concluded prematurely. I think this, as much as the issue of how to calculate grades at the end of the term raises some big questions, many of them connected to what the students enrolled in a course are owed.
Friday frivolity: what’s this model doing on my desk?
To amuse you while I attend to work that needs doing, I offer a picture of an object on my desk at work.
A couple of questions for you, dear readers:
Hazards of paper grading.
One is that my hands are tired from writing all those comments, which means I don’t feel like typing.
Another is described in this brief video.
What happens when your prof doesn’t make it through the term?
At the end of one of my class meetings today, one of the students noted that her professor for another of her courses this term died about a week ago.
Not that anyone said out loud that this semester is what killed him.
Under the weight of the semester.
It’s the last day of November. I have three more meetings with each of my classes before finals. I have oodles of grading to do before finals. I have one big administrative task and at least a dozen smaller ones to do before the end of the semester.
And, at the moment, I feel as though the weight of the semester is pressing down on me, like the stones used to press to death that one man so sentenced in the Salem witch trials.
Death is not an option: optimizing academic performance edition.
Let’s say you’re a college student.
You have a class meeting today at which a short essay (about 400 words) is due. The essay counts for about 5% of your grade for the course.
At that class meeting, your instructor will be lecturing on the reading assignment upon which that short essay is focused. The material from the reading assignment will likely appear on the final exam, which is only a few weeks away.
Sex toys and human subjects at Duke University.
At Terra Sigillata, Abel notes that the Director of Duke University’s Catholic Center is butting in to researchers’ attempts to recruit participants for their research. As it happens, that research involves human sexuality and attitudes toward sex toys.
Here’s how Abel lays it out:
Father Joe Vetter, director of Duke University’s Catholic Center, is protesting trial participant accrual for a study being conducted on campus directed by Dr Dan Ariely, the James B Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Fuqua School of Business (story and video). …
Ariely and his postdoctoral fellow, Dr Janet Schwartz, received IRB approval to recruit female study participants from the Duke campus community to examine the influence of Tupperware-like sex toy parties on sexual attitudes. A recruitment advert had been posted on the university website, as is commonly done for any clinical or social science study, but was pulled yesterday following the objection of Rev Vetter.
If I understand his quotes correctly, Vetter believes that studying sex toys somehow condones behavior that threatens relationships:“It’s not fostering relationships, and it seems to me that one of the things that we want young people to do is to figure out how to have deep, intimate friendships and relationships,” he said. “I would draw the line at a different place. I don’t think that it’s a good idea.”
I’m not privy to the hypothesis being tested but I suspect that the team is investigating how social norms toward adult products are influenced by groupthink. Ariely has not commented publicly on this story other than to say, rightfully so, that he won’t comment so as to not contaminate the results. However, I suspect that it may now be too late.
Signs of the times.
The times in question being, in this case, the last days of October.
Once upon a Tuesday morning, while I wandered, cold and yawning,
Up the grimy stair steps winding skyward toward my office door,
On the wall’s bile-greenish surface, noticed I a note whose purpose
Took more consciousness to process than I’d had the step before.
“English majors strike,” I murmured, “with tactics I’ve not seen before,
Reciting Poe and nothing more.”