I think doing it with politics in mind is silly but professors are part of the package consumers receive when they choose where to get their higher education.
This is a popular website where people can find reviews of professors done by their peers.
And as we all know, those reviews are incredibly accurate, since they often contain such comments as “He made it realy hard fur me 2 git a c” and “it wuz an english class and she made us rite a lot.”
I’m saying that that’s what the Alumni group is claiming, and they are now trying to gather evidence to prove it.
I don’t buy the intellectual property argument. No one is reselling these lectures, they are using the transcripts to engage in reviews. And that’s ‘fair use’. This is no different than a movie reviewer taking copious notes while watching a movie so he can write a review of it.
This is classic, soviet-style “political correctness,” of the sort Vladimir Nabokov meant when he coined the phrase: intimidating people into silence, punishing them for criticizing the government, and framing “appropriate” speech for an academic setting. It would be ironic that this is coming from the sorts who generally complain about “political correctness” in its altered, neocon buzzword context. I say “would be,” but I think to be ironic, something has to be at least mildly unexpected.
Maybe there ought to be a group tracking “extreme right-wing” professors, like folks who think targeting people based on their political beliefs is good.
Why would that not be a good thing?
Isn’t that exactly how Plato thought of his Academy?
I attended a small enough program that I did not have to resort to an impersonal website to rate my own professors fortunately, but the quality of those ratings notwithstanding, I see nothing wrong with treating professors as the consumer modularities that they represent within a higher educational institution.
Which part, the far to the left or the pushing of content not germane to the course? I would think the latter would be obvious.
If that’s what you were trying to say, color me confused, as I’m not sure that
has anything to do with the claims of the alumni group. I guessed it had more to do with the posts in this thread (ya know, given that you said that) and a not-so-subtle attempt on your part to claim that everyone would be howling with liberal rage if the situation were as you presented it. However, to make such a claim, the other elements would have to be true, hence my questions: what is this “going off-topic”, and does it happen “constantly”?
The problem is inherint in someone monitoring college classes, determining what is or isn’t appropriate and what is or isn’t “germane to the course,” is anathema to academic freedom.
I was mainly just yanking furt’s chain, but, yeah, the first part. If our professional thinkers mostly reject conservatism, I think that speaks ill of conservatism, not of academia.
Why do people think model higher education should be modeled after Dairy Queen franchises with instructors as customer service clerks, education as sof-serv, and students as milk-fed consumers?
Sigh. As if the handicapped parking scandal, the cadaver-reselling scandal, and the football team’s annual prison-rape at the hands of USC . . . sometimes it’s hard being a UCLA alumnus.
I note a few profiles from the uclaprofs.com website. One target, Robert Watson, doesn’t need a reason to be fearful of this neo-Mccarthyism, since his dad was apparently a target of original Mccarthyism.
Another target is Douglas Kellner. Remember, this alumni group is angered that these professors are indoctrinating students in their classes. Yet their own website says:
In other words, they take offense not at what he teaches, but what he believes. Frightening stuff.
Students are the ones reselling these lectures, they’re getting $50-100 per lecture.
I’m not sure what happened but Noctolator’s post shows a “quote” from me including a link to the ratemyprofessors website. I assume that this is an error in coding since I did not in fact mention that site anywhere in my OP. I don’t know how to include the erroneous quote in this response so you’ll need to go back a few messages to see it.
Among their complaints is that he’s “Anti-Bush.” I guess professors are now required to now required to pledge allegience to Bush. How Stalinist is that?
To hear such people speak of “freedom” is like hearing a prostitute speak of love.
And look what a bleeding heart you’ve turned out to be.
Because higher education is a consumer process and you’re going to have to drop any high-mindedness about how people choose colleges or about how people determine their paths once they are there. College is merely a necessary step to get jobs that once only required GEDs. Incredible amounts of money are spent and the quality of a professor, the informativeness and enjoyability of his/her class as well as how its demands may combine with the rest of one’s schedule are serious factors in planning how best to use that time. One does not go into a Dairy Queen and say “Give me any flavor you want.” One knows if one wants chocolate, vanilla or some other concoction in advance and one expects to get what one orders. Why should it be otherwise?
Yeah, I think I made a copy-paste error and I’m sorry about that. I introduced that link myself and had meant to have your UCLA links in that quote. That’s what happens when I get a phone call while trying to write. I did try to answer your question – that I think political watchdog groups chasing professors is silly, though students doing so would represent a reasonable consumer response… hope that clears it up.
The fact that clerks don’t tell customers what to eat is precisely why business is an inapt metaphor for education. Students can order a BA in Engineering and get it. They still have to earn it, and professors are supposed to challenge them and make sure that they earn it.
Most people in education entertain old fashioned notions of doing something more important than preparing cogs for the wheels of machinery. I suppose that’s “leaning left” already to some people, but it’s actually the traditional notion of higher education as making people well-rounded adults who have basic knowledge of, and appreciation for, the world around them. While it’s certainly possible to emerge from University with nothing more than a degree (most students do), the opportunities and challenges should certainly be part of the mission of the University, rather than suppressed.
Finally, Universities do far more than hold classes and hand out degrees. They do research, maintain archives, engage in community service through extension programs, and generally serve as the producers and protectors of human knowledge.
One of the reasons I left the Republican party is because there’s too much naked anti-intellectualism in the form of opposing free exchange of ideas, in both the arts and education. While there are many intellectuals in the party, they haven’t raised enough of a voice against the religious right and yahoos like these UCLA alumni.
I’ve always found them to be accurate.
There are many ways to an engineering degree. One has a wide variety of choice in what required curriculum and what elective curriculum to engage in. Actually, if you were to advocate people choose classes without reviewing who the professors would be, it’d be like going into a Dairy Queen where they expect you to make a choice of flavor even though they don’t bother to post a menu and they won’t tell you what’s on tap. It is preposterous to suggest education should be handled like this, even if it is not fully analogous to business. At least with Dairy Queen, any knowledge of ice cream at all might give you an idea of what is available. And you can go between different franchises and expect to find that Chocolate is made from a standard recipe using standard ingredients, such that Chocolate @ Dairy Queen is chocolate the world 'round. One cannot apply this to “Engineering” or even to specific classes within engineering which, despite having the exact same curriculum, semester-to-semester, may vary widely based on who the professor is.
How long has it been since you were a participant on a college campus? I own that was the view and the way of it before, but that simply is not at all relevant now. College is now a necessary step to get a job which is not blue-collar or in trade. And it is why kids go these days. The tone is not “I need to be a well-rounded intellectual individual” but “I need to be able to get a good, well-paying job so I can be happy and also escape my mounting consumer debt.”
Relatively few [less than 3 in 10] college graduates even enter careers pertaining to their major.
They do all of that. This has nothing to do with professors or with what metrics students might wish to devise to get the most out of the pedagogy on offer.
Yeah, the UCLA alumni are yahoos. They’re just sniping. Services like ratemyprofessor.com provide for accountability and may even inspire professors to tailor and improve their style. After all, students typically /do/ write evaluations on professors, [at least where I went], but these usually go back to the departments and are not put back at the disposal of future students who are choosing what classes to enroll in.