Training Professors to be Educators
The Atlantic had an interesting article entitled The Forgotten Student: Has Higher Education Stiffed its Most Important Client? which parallels a recent Op-Ed in the NYTimes on why one former executive left Goldman Sachs because they lost sight of their client. I remember reading the NYTimes Op-Ed over breakfast and I thought to myself, “I really wouldn’t want to work in a place that wasn’t looking out for the best interests of their client.” After reading the article in The Atlantic, I think the veil has been completely lifted from my eyes. I guess I should explain that. This is not to say that everything in the article was totally foreign for me and that I have never thought about some of those things. However, I never really thought of it from the view that administrators might be failing their clients. For example, there’s discussions here and here on college…
Zero is never a good number
These past few weeks have been insanely busy for me. I alluded to this two weeks ago with my post on how blogging is hard. Obviously, it’s not too hard and you certainly don’t need any credentials to do it (otherwise I’d be screwed) but it is time consuming. And right now, time is one form of currency that I am severely lacking. I managed another proposal submission, which should be my last one for a few months. In addition to that, I was lacking in my classroom preparation and it certainly showed. Plus, I’ve started to take delivery of my equipment for my lab which is very cool but another thing to coordinate. Also, my group is a little bit bigger (one PhD student, one MS student, and now one undergrad). On top of all of that, I’ve had the obligatory “new faculty” events to attend, which is an…
The Economics of Academia (Part 2)
Last week, I started to respond to a reader’s question: Why, with the high cost of university tuition, can’t schools have teach-only professors? With a ratio of 20:1 in the classroom and a rate of 100/hour (roughly), why do professors still need to get research dollars? Is it economically feasible to have teaching-only professors? Why doesn’t this happen more? Why do universities have to rely on research funding to stay afloat? We were talking about the demands on researchers and how that prevents better teaching (because so much time is involved chasing funding) and were questioning why not just give up the research side of things? In Part 1, I answered the questions from the perspective of a community college and my estimated numbers simply did not add up to make this feasible. Cherish jumped in to the foray, essentially saying that research and teaching go hand-in-hand. I commented on how…