More Why Professors Drink

The semester is winding down. I only have one more final to give and grade, and then I'll be done with classes for a few weeks.

The students are actually behaving themselves so far (relatively speaking, of course). But the administration is picking up the slack in foolishness. Two examples:

#1 - I apparently got some kind of award based on something I did my first year here (Sep. 2008-May 2009). I'm still not sure what I did or why I got the award.

The award was dated Feb. 2010 (remember, this is for the academic year ending May 2009).

I must have missed the award ceremony. I don't even remember being informed about it.

I received the award today via interoffice mail.

To summarize:

• award for year ending May 2009
• dated Feb. 2010
• received Dec. 2011

I emphasize to my students that consequences for behavior should be adminstered as closely as possible to that behavior in order to maximize the effect. Management 101, right?

Did I mention that the president of the university received his PhD in English Lit, and the provost comes from the Biology department? 

#2 - Like many other organizations, we have been affected by the current budget crunch. In response, faculty are being required to teach one additional course with no pay increase. On the plus side, this has allowed us to avoid layoffs, so there is minimal grumbling.

In conjunction with the increased teaching load, the minimum class size has been increased. For upper level courses the new minimum is ten students. That doesn't sound like a lot, but the effect is to cause the cancellation of small, specialized elective courses.

The mindless enforcement of these two edicts, with no employment of common sense, has resulted in the cancellation of two electives for graduating seniors in the Spring 2012 semester. This leaves them with the choice of hanging around until Sep. 2012 - nine months from now - in order to graduate, or else taking some fluff elective that has absolutely no relationship to their major, and will be of no use in the real world ("Leadership Traits of barak obama: Theory and Application").

Furthermore, it leaves one professor without a class to teach. So we have figured out a way to game the system. We are dividing a course I teach in half, creating two sections instead of one, each with half as many students. Sounds like a good idea - smaller class size, more personal interaction, all that good stuff - except that it's an online course.

The course material is delivered through a content management system (an application that was created specifically for online teaching). Homework and exams are given and graded by the system. I do have a running discussion forum where we talk about current events in the field and how they are related to the course material. It takes an hour or two per day to maintain, but it's like blogging. The amount of time and effort is relatively the same, whether you have one reader or one hundred.

So instead of one instructor (me) teaching 60-70 students (which, because it's an online class, isn't that big of a deal) we will have two instructors teaching two classes of 30-35 students. It won't improve the quality of instruction, and it will cost twice as much in terms of instructor time, but it satisfies the whim of the administrators.

Sigh...