A Good Professor Is an Exhausted Professor

[KamaAina]

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/04/north_carolina_education_bill_it_would_require_public_university_professors.html

In higher-ed parlance the herculean act of teaching eight courses per year is what’s known as “a 4-4 load” or, alternatively, a “metric ass-ton” of classroom time. And yet a new bill currently under consideration in the North Carolina General Assembly would require every professor in the state’s public university system to do just that. The results would be catastrophic for North Carolina’s major research universities. The region known as the Research Triangle—Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, so named because of the three “Research-I”–level universities that anchor it—would quickly lose two of its prongs—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University—were this bill to pass. And it just might.

According to the official press release from its sponsor, Republican state Sen. Tom McInnis, Senate Bill 593—called “Improve Professor Quality/UNC System”—would “ensure that students attending UNC system schools actually have professors, rather than student assistants, teaching their classes.” Another result would be more courses taught by fewer professors. But that shouldn’t matter, according to Jay Schalin of North Carolina’s Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, who recently explained to the Daily Tar Heel that “the university system is not a jobs program for academics.” What the bill’s supporters either fail to realize—or, more likely, realize with utter glee—is that this bill actually has nothing to do with “professor quality” and everything to do with destroying public education and research. Forcing everyone into a 4-4 minimum (so ideally an excruciating 5-5, I guess?) is a “solution” that could only be proposed by someone who either doesn’t know how research works or hates it. It’s like saying: Hey, I’ll fix this car by treating it like a microwave.

Teaching college, especially if you’re good at it, isn’t particularly hard. But it does take time—and those 75 minutes in the classroom are the least of it. There are the office hours (which most students eschew for for professor as 24-hour email concierge); there’s the prep (anywhere from two to 10 hours for one class meeting); and then, of course, there are the hours upon hours—upon godforsaken hours—of grading. Four (or five!) courses, even with the shortcuts afforded by a teaching assistant here and there (which most people don’t get), are a full-time job in and of themselves....

Whether or not the stated goal is to “close it all down,” that will definitely be the result. The professors forced into a 4-4 will simply pick up their research—and the labs where that research gets done, and those labs’ workforces, much of them nonacademics, Mr. Schalin—and move them somewhere that will fund them. With the inevitable cratering of UNC–Chapel Hill and NC State, the Research Triangle will become the Research Dot, and the 50,000 individuals North Carolina currently employs in Research Triangle Park—a massive conglomerate of nonacademic research labs located where it is precisely because of its proximity to Duke, UNC, and NC State—will have their livelihoods put in danger. It’s easy to sneer that the university isn’t a “jobs program” until you have to answer for your state’s brain drain.

edit: Way to go, McCrony and Pope the Dope!

Disclaimer: This comes from the FB page of a friend who teaches at UNC-Greensboro. She has a disability, so there is no way in Hell she could do this.

[BainsBane]

1. It would destroy their research completely

The most prestigious faculty would leave for better jobs. They would no longer be competitive in recruiting new faculty, and the faculty that remain would be unable to keep up with rigorous publication demands. Those research 1 universities would becoming teaching schools, which may be good for the classroom but is not good for the university or the state. Also they can kiss goodbye much of the federal grant money for sponsored research projects their currently receive. Those funds don't go to teaching schools. Where I work, grants amount to about 25 percent of the revenue of the university. It's no small amount.

[KamaAina]

2. I'm trying to wargame which other schools would try to raid them

thus creating the next Research Geometric Figure. UVA/Charlottesville?

[BainsBane]

3. All kinds of major universities.

not just regional. NC has major universities of national standing. Sure UVA, but also others.

[KamaAina]

7. I guess it comes down to who has the money

Texas does, because its land grant contains oil property. And Austin is already a hot spot for tech.

There's the Ivies, of course. My alma mater Yale has a ready-made Research Quadrangle in the old Winchester gun factory in New Haven, which they have been trying to rebrand as "Science Park" for the three decades since I was there.

[blm]

4. NC university system was one of the finest in the nation - the NCGOP are MURDERING IT.

.

[redstatebluegirl]

5. No research will happen if that passes.

What most people don't realize is the universities are surviving off of the "overhead" of between 35 and 50 percent they take off the top of every grant a faculty member is awarded. After weeks and months of work they swoop in and take their cut first.

How will they balance their budgets if this money is gone for good? The answer is on the backs of the students and their parents. Before long only the rich will be able to go to school.

My husband works like a crazy person to manage a lab, write grants, write papers that are needed to keep getting the grants and serve on the crazy number of committees he is required to serve.

Before long nobody will want to teach at that level. Why bust your butt to get a Ph.D., work for nothing and kill yourself trying to survive.

The rats are winning.

[alcibiades_mystery]

6. UNC Chapel Hill would become a ghost town

4/4 load? At an R1 University?



Any faculty who could leave (and at UNC Chapel Hill most could) would be gone before the scheduling was completed. The school would lose accreditation for graduate education within three years for lack of graduate level faculty. Undergraduate accreditation would fail within five. Nobody coming out of any graduate program of any standing would take a job there.

[KamaAina]

8. And my favorite Chapel Hill resident is a repuke!

(one of Mom's friends )

I just tagged her in my Greensboro friend's thread on this to that effect.