North Carolina is attempting a wholesale destruction of its research universities.
It is mystifying to me why Americans would just choose to destroy their higher education and turn the country into a backwards little place with zero capacity to compete on the world arena.
The word “lemmings” comes to mind when I hear of these self-defeating efforts.
This is so distressing. UNC is one of the best universities in the country and they just want to destroy it’s research capacity? And this will have reverberating effects throughout higher education.
Personally I don’t think a 4/4 is even particularly reasonable. I teach a 3/3 I am BUSY with my courses. And recently administration at my school has raised the specter of increasing our teaching load. I can promise that if I taught a 4/4, even discounting research altogether, I would be less effective as a teacher. I currently meet with every single student I teach outside of class at least once a semester. For many student I meet with them between 2-4 times. I couldn’t provide that kind of specialized attention if my teaching load radically increased.
It’s just amazing to me that somehow teachers and college professors have become Public Enemy #1 with some factions of the American public. I keep trying to understand how this happened. All I can think is that teachers and professors tend to love their work and somehow this is verboten and equated with laziness? There are many crooks and criminals that wreaking havoc with this country: the oil industry, the financial sector, arms manufacturers, Wall Street speculators etc etc. Teachers and professors are not the enemy and the vast majority of us make so little that we are hardly living the life of fat cats. I am so angry and frustrated. A true travesty for our country.
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“Personally I don’t think a 4/4 is even particularly reasonable. I teach a 3/3 I am BUSY with my courses. ”
“I currently meet with every single student I teach outside of class at least once a semester. For many student I meet with them between 2-4 times.”
“It’s just amazing to me that somehow teachers and college professors have become Public Enemy #1 with some factions of the American public.”
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“All I can think is that teachers and professors tend to love their work and somehow this is verboten and equated with laziness?”
I’ve had a few professors that it was fairly obvious that they were research professors and not teaching professors, but they were forced to teach anyway. Not my favorite classes.
Professors should, in my opinion, be allowed to do what they do best (either teaching or research). If they can do both, why that’s great. The requirement to do either is ridiculous.
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No, it’s not “ridiculous.” People who don’t do research are incapable of teaching at a college level.
Ask yourself this question: what is the professor who doesn’t do research going to teach? The ancient crap she learned 20 years ago in grad school? Do you really think this is what students pay for? To have the stuff recited at them from the prof’s grad school notes from a bizillion years ago?
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“No, it’s not “ridiculous.” People who don’t do research are incapable of teaching at a college level.”
Exactly. And I think that even brilliant researchers should teach–even if it’s 1 course a year (and for the majority of research faculty, four courses is the norm and seems to be fair.) The university serves two primary function: a research function and a teaching function. Both functions are integral to a well functioning civil society. It’s fine for faculty to prefer research or to prefer teaching everyone who enters the profession should understand that this career requires both research and teaching.
And. in my experience, most faculty agree with what I wrote above. I’m at a small, teaching- oriented school now. But I got my PhD from a large research university and the faculty I worked with there were all very concerned with being good teachers even as they were vigorous and well- known researchers. So I just don’t think the research/teaching schism exists for the vast majority of faculty: most faculty are happy and find joy in doing both.
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“Exactly. And I think that even brilliant researchers should teach–even if it’s 1 course a year (and for the majority of research faculty, four courses is the norm and seems to be fair.)”
Or take Cervantes. There is an explosion of new, exciting scholarship on his work (due to the anniversaries of the publication of Part I and II of Don Quijote, this has been a decade of Cervantes). Should a professor who teaches on Cervantes not be aware of this? Should s/he keep teaching as if these new developments have not taken place?
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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