The biggest drawback of being a professor is having to attend faculty meetings. This is the most depressing activity I can imagine. I have no idea why I went to the last departmental meeting of the year. It makes no sense for me to go since I am leaving this fine educational institution for good in exactly 10 days. Still, I went. God, what a huge mistake! These are the things I found out:
1. The field of French literature is experiencing "a slow death." (We are a Romance Languages department, so I can only imagine what is going on with German and Russian, for example.)
2. The entire faculty will undergo a 15% cut. The enrollments, however, will continue to grow. (You can guess what it means to have fewer teachers and more students.)
3. All language departments will be conflated into one department. Basically, the eventual goal is to have one professor of each language (including classics, excluding English.)
4. We will have to stop creating new courses and keep teaching the same courses year after year (this measure is particularly supported by old professors.)
5. The entire university will move towards a trimester-based system. This, of course, takes away the best thing about our profession: free summers. When people are supposed to do research remains unexplained.
If/when these measures take effect, I will immediately leave this profession. As much as I love teaching and research, it makes no sense to stay under these conditions. This is ridiculous.
If this is what is happening at one of the richest and most prestigious universities in the US, you can imagine what is going on in other places. And the worst thing is, everybody is buying this sack of lies about such measures being caused by the recession. Wake up, my friends, these measures started being implemented at least 3-4 years before anybody heard of the recession.
6 comments:
Well,
In our university we were told at one meeting by a vice-provost that according to the governing board the research is a distraction from the main goal of the university which is teaching, and therefore, we should not expect more research support from the university. I was imprudent enough to ask the vice-provost if he could tell us who elects the governing board. (Which in the context clearly meant "who are those idiots?".) The answer was - "The Corporation". And who elects the Corporation? The governing board! :)
Trimester system may be not that bad if organized properly. We formally have trimester system, but very few courses are taught in summer and they are taught by ancient professors who do not do research (another legacy of formerly "teaching university")...
V.
"The answer was - "The Corporation". And who elects the Corporation? The governing board!"
- LOL! This is so silly!
About the trimester system, as long as they don't require that we do this, I won't have a problem. One of the places I interviewed for had the 3-1-3 system, and you couldn't avoid it, though. I'm afraid they will be instituting this more and more often. Especially if we have more students and less teachers.
How can you teach at the university level without conducting research?
This is the difference between "teaching" and "research" institutions. This year at one of my MLA interviews, when I described my research agenda, I was told: "We are a teaching institution, we prefer that our new hire concentrate on teaching and not research. Your research agenda is too broad."
Actually, thank you for your question! You just inspired me to write a post on "MLA Dialogues." :-)
"The biggest drawback of being a professor is having to attend faculty meetings. This is the most depressing activity I can imagine."
Браво!:)))
А загалом, країні різні - проблеми ті ж...
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