The Dark Side of Tenure

"Education Reform" posted by deanfiihr, October 6th, 2011

The role of tenure, from what I gather, is to protect our professors from “arbitrary dismissal,” or getting fired for reasons that are either not very good or completely false.

In reality, while it doesn’t need to be dismissed entirely, tenure is a system in need of revision. There should be avenues by which professors who are incapable of performing decently as educators can be fired.  Some tenured professors are, undoubtedly, atrocious educators. And despite years of terrible student reviews, these men and women are protected from ever losing their jobs.

At the very least, there should be a way we can force such abysmal professors to take pedagogy classes. If they fail those classes they should be given a warning. And perhaps after 3 warnings they should get fired. Enforcing this kind of plan would actually require a lot of money the UC system probably doesn’t have, but still it sounds like a good idea.

Ultimately it’s not okay for some professors to put us through weeks of pure torture with absolutely no consequences. And to be clear, I am not complaining about a class being too difficult because of the material. I am complaining about the wholly dubious teaching methods implemented in such classes.

The remainder of the argument will be centered on specific instances of said wholly dubious teaching methods (WDTM):

WDTM #1:

Going through circa 200 slides of material each class. And spending half of class on tangential banter that does nothing to help us grasp the material in any more depth. The kind of what-you-see-is-what-you-get method of teaching, which negates the use of class-time: we might as well stay home and stare at the power point ourselves. As far as I can tell there is no real need, or demand, for a conceited researcher to read it to us. In fact most of us do read at a university level.

WDTM #2:

Not having a book for the class; only incredibly dense research articles. Actually that’s just fine when the professor takes time in class to go over the reading, ensuring that we are all retaining the important information. No such luck with some of our tenured professors.

WDTM #3:

Assigning graded homework, collecting it and never returning it, ever. It is my personal opinion that these professors take the whole pile of papers and give As to people who completed the assignment, regardless of content. They then assign Bs, Cs and Ds to whoever handed it in late, or didn’t turn it in at all.

Failing to return important homework makes it unnecessarily difficult for us to improve, because we cannot see what we are doing wrong.

What’s the point? Obviously the goal is not to educate us. Why would it be, right? University is not for learning; it’s for writing grants and getting your projects funded. Teaching a class is just one of those bothersome hurdles, and anyway that’s why there are TAs. Some professors do think that way.

Best-case scenario we end up with an awesome TA, pass the class with the grade we want, and carry on with our lives. Worst-case scenario the TA is as preposterous as the professor. Then the only thing to do is to weather the storm.

WDTM #4:

“You should know this already.” This kind of comment is fine when followed up with suggestions on how to access the information we “should know already.” This kind of comment is not okay when it is followed with “Otherwise you are in trouble and you’ll probably have to repeat this class.”

This only shows that the professor has no interest in being a helpful resource for students. Considering how much money we spend on tuition, professors should really ensure they are doing everything they can to help make us better scientists, writers, or basket weavers….whatever the class, the professor’s duty is to instill knowledge. If the people in charge of educating us are odiously inept mentors, there ought to be a way to relieve them of their duties.

However, unless we can prove that a professor is “grossly incompetent,” he or she will never get fired. Our only hope is to write sound, rational complaints on the review forms at the end of the quarter. Instead of dismissing the task as boring and time-consuming, we should compose our comments carefully –if enough grievances pour in, administrators will eventually have to investigate the matter.

Ultimately tenure is important because it ensures that highly motivated and intelligent professors will continue to staff our universities. Tenure is also a problem because it gives a lot of leeway to professors who absolutely do not care about us.

We will not be able to reform the institution of tenure in the near future. But we must continue to openly disapprove of inadequate professors, because we just never know –education may become a priority again in California, and we should disseminate the seeds of change in the minds of future student generations.