How Professors Play the Cat Guarding the Cream

How Professors Play the Cat Guarding the Cream PDF Author: Richard M. Huber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Parents groan as college tuition rises faster than the rate of inflation. Students wonder where the distinguished professors are hiding as inexperienced graduate students take over the classroom. Business executives, straining to increase employee output, question how faculty productivity is measured. Alumni suspect the trustees of their alma mater are not exacting accountability for administrative performance. The public is concerned that "political correctness" is warping the curriculum. Taxpayers ask whether they are getting their money's worth on state-supported campuses. Richard Huber addresses these issues in a book that is both entertaining to read and striking in its insights. Tuition rises faster than the rate of inflation in part because universities enhance their academic reputations by hiring high-salaried scholars with low teaching loads. Undergraduate teaching is often terrible because professors are trained as researchers and rewarded as scholars, not teachers. Faculty output is measured by crude instruments which encourage goofing off as a masquerade for productive work. Trustees fail to enforce accountability because they are typically not familiar with the academic world and are confused by a university culture so totally different from their own corporate culture. The current brawl over the curriculum is not just an ivory tower dispute over race and ethnicity but a challenge to what kind of place America is to be. Taxpayers are not getting their money's worth because research and doctoral-granting universities, the focus of this book, are locked into outmoded personnel practices that assume all tenured professors will be productive scholars. Huber concludes with realistic reforms to improve the teaching of undergraduates and reduce the cost of higher education. And that would be a win-win prescription for the nation as well as the universities.

How Professors Play the Cat Guarding the Cream

How Professors Play the Cat Guarding the Cream PDF Author: Richard M. Huber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
Parents groan as college tuition rises faster than the rate of inflation. Students wonder where the distinguished professors are hiding as inexperienced graduate students take over the classroom. Business executives, straining to increase employee output, question how faculty productivity is measured. Alumni suspect the trustees of their alma mater are not exacting accountability for administrative performance. The public is concerned that "political correctness" is warping the curriculum. Taxpayers ask whether they are getting their money's worth on state-supported campuses. Richard Huber addresses these issues in a book that is both entertaining to read and striking in its insights. Tuition rises faster than the rate of inflation in part because universities enhance their academic reputations by hiring high-salaried scholars with low teaching loads. Undergraduate teaching is often terrible because professors are trained as researchers and rewarded as scholars, not teachers. Faculty output is measured by crude instruments which encourage goofing off as a masquerade for productive work. Trustees fail to enforce accountability because they are typically not familiar with the academic world and are confused by a university culture so totally different from their own corporate culture. The current brawl over the curriculum is not just an ivory tower dispute over race and ethnicity but a challenge to what kind of place America is to be. Taxpayers are not getting their money's worth because research and doctoral-granting universities, the focus of this book, are locked into outmoded personnel practices that assume all tenured professors will be productive scholars. Huber concludes with realistic reforms to improve the teaching of undergraduates and reduce the cost of higher education. And that would be a win-win prescription for the nation as well as the universities.

A Professor's Work

A Professor's Work PDF Author: Matthew Melko
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761812173
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
A year-long participant-observer study of the work of a university professor at a mid-level urban university. The author explores his role as a sociology professor in research, teaching classes, attending seminars, dealing with administrators, serving on committees, and dealing with students and peers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Universities as If Students Mattered

Universities as If Students Mattered PDF Author: John H. Scanzoni
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742545670
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Universities As If Students Mattered is centered around the goal of coaching college students to become active, self-directed learners whose obligation to serve society is integral to their active learning. At the same time, the innovations in this book would focus the attention, energy, and considerable talents of professors, graduate students, and post-docs on some potential ways and means of addressing urgent social issues, contributing to a more thorough and comprehensive understanding of the social world.

Crisis in the Academy

Crisis in the Academy PDF Author: Christopher J. Lucas
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312176860
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Not since student turmoil and unrest wreaked havoc on the nation's campuses three decades ago has American higher education been the subject of so much controversy and popular criticism. Countless indictments compete for the public's attention as critics explore vital issues confronting today's institutions of higher learning: curricular fragmentation, declining academic standards, the apparent erosion of liberal learning within academe, widespread neglect of undergraduate education in favour of academic research and unprecedented financial woes. Confusion over fundamental priorities and purposes, the author argues, lies at the heart of the dilemma facing end-of-the-century higher education. Thoughtful and timely, Crisis in the Academy offers a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary higher education while making an important contribution to the ongoing public debate over the future of America's beleaguered and diverse institutions of higher learning.

Democracy and the Academy

Democracy and the Academy PDF Author: Robert Weissberg
Publisher: Nova Publishers
ISBN: 9781560727835
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Treatises on democracy in higher education are hardly original undertakings in today's troubled, often acrimonious campus environments. All the "hot button" issues -- racial preferences in admissions, sexual harassment, government funding, multiculturalism, speech codes, even formulating the core curriculum -- sooner or later drag in "democracy". In fact, academic democracy has become a virtual scholarly mini-industry. The authors bring a breath of fresh perspectives to this expansive subject, a collection of analyses written by scholars seldom invited to prestigious conferences dominated by eminent presidents, trustees, provosts, and all the other educational "leaders" who normally define pubic discourse at a safe distance from the classroom. The authors eschew the customary offering of high-sounding speeches, platitudes and rhapsodizing about the democratic role of education, especially well-funded education.

Using Quality Benchmarks for Assessing and Developing Undergraduate Programs

Using Quality Benchmarks for Assessing and Developing Undergraduate Programs PDF Author: Dana S. Dunn
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470892471
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Praise for Using Quality Benchmarks for Assessing and Developing Undergraduate Programs "This welcome volume provides discipline-friendly, carefully crafted frameworks for focusing faculty and staff on the dimensions that matter to student learning and institutional effectiveness." —George D. Kuh, Chancellor's Professor and director, Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research "A welcome contrast to narrow, mechanical views of assessment, this volume provides a comprehensive model for academic program improvement. Readers will find a powerful framework, flexible tools, and a human touch that brings the whole process to life." —Pat Hutchings, former vice president, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching "Comprehensive in its scope, detailed in its research and analysis, practical in its examples and recommendations, this book provides a refreshingly developmental approach to program assessment and improvement." —Timothy Riordan, associate provost, Alverno College

Zealotry and Academic Freedom

Zealotry and Academic Freedom PDF Author: Neil Hamilton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351298828
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Zealotry and Academic Freedom began with the author's personal experience with suppression of academic speech and obstacles to the pursuit of academic quality. Using his own tumultuous experience as a starting point, Hamilton explores how significant efforts to create an autonomous space for academic speech within the university over the past 125 years have been thwarted.Hamilton charges that a fundamentalist academic left in some humanities and social science faculties views the exercise of standards of academic quality and merit-based performance evaluations as tools of oppression and bigotry. Academic zealots ferret out and oppose hidden structures of so-called oppression in our "Eurocentric" culture. Any faculty member overtly supporting academic quality is thus suspected of bigotry and subject to investigations.The opening portion of the book locates similarities with the religious fundamentalism of the nineteenth century in waves of zealotry in American higher education. The first part covers student activism in the 1960s through the emergence of a radical academic left in the early 1990s. The second part examines the meaning of academic freedom and the protection of expression that should be secured. The third and final portion shows how targets of the coercive tactics of the zealots in any period of zealotry can, and have been effectively rebuked, and ultimately overcome.Neil Hamilton's book will generate controversy, particularly the chapters that inquire into the current wave of academic suppression. Hamilton warns that "history instructs that it can happen here." This candid look into the politics of higher education will be gripping reading for all those concerned with the future of education: professors, administrators, students, and parents. There has been a growing literature on this subject, but none cover the legal-political aspects of political correctness with such precision.

Theory and Best Practices in Science Communication Training

Theory and Best Practices in Science Communication Training PDF Author: Todd P. Newman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351069357
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
This edited volume reports on the growing body of research in science communication training, and identifies best practices for communication training programs around the world. Theory and Best Practices in Science Communication Training provides a critical overview of the emerging field of by analyzing the role of communication training in supporting scientists’ communication and engagement goals, including scientists’ motivations to engage in training, the design of training programs, methods for evaluation, and frameworks to support the role of communication training in helping scientists reach their communication and engagement goals. This volume reflects the growth of the field and provides direction for developing future researcher-practitioner collaborations. With contributions from researchers and practitioners from around the world, this book will be of great interest to students, scholars and, professionals within this emerging field.

The Pleasures of Academe

The Pleasures of Academe PDF Author: James Axtell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803259386
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In this timely book, historian James Axtell offers a compelling defense of higher education. Drawing on national statistics, broad-ranging scholarship, and delightful anecdotes, Axtell describes the professorial work cycle, the evolution of scholarship in the past three decades, the importance of ?habitual scholarship,? and the best ways to judge a university. He persuasively confronts the critics of higher education, arguing that they have perpetuated misunderstandings of tenure, research, teaching, curricular change, and professorial politics.

Critical Issues in Higher Education

Critical Issues in Higher Education PDF Author: Michael Kompf
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9462090467
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The ideas and papers in this volume primarily showcase the work of a group of new scholars who will lead the next generation of educational practise and inquiry. While the topics explored are critical issues, the ways in which these new scholars have chosen to address them illustrates the diversity of voice, venue and value that has led them to present their work. Education and what it means has entered a new era in which the primary focus on education for the sake of education is strained. An educational free-for-all, in the sense of a no-holds-barred fight, seems in place as competition for market share, effective branding exercises and movement towards a client-based delivery of educational services (on demand as demanded) has been fuelled and compounded by litigation, accreditation, transfer credits and matters of patents, copyrights, ownership and monopoly. The link between education and financial well-being has been co-opted as the key to personal success. Unfortunately, the degree pursuit, often called the “paper chase” has become competitive for learners seeking scholarships, awards and entry into graduate school. This transition indicates movement from becoming well educated to employability potential paralleling much institutional retooling and sustenance of enhanced reputation and fiscal viability.