Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department | Hacker News Reader

Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

alexandercoward.com

778 pointselinear260 comments

I was a grad student and teaching assistant in Berkeley maths 1998-99. I observed that the department intentionally admitted many more grad students than it could possibly put through the full PhD, and had a well-tuned system for weeding them out after a year or two - chiefly a "preliminary exam" that was notoriously tough and (in my view and that of many others) unfair. A charitable view would be that the department wanted to give many students a chance to shine and graduate, so had a liberal admissions policy; a cynic might observe that those who failed the prelim conveniently taught calculus as TAs for a couple of years for a ridiculously low cost, hence provided cheap labour (much cheaper than Dr. Coward for sure). After two years of experiencing the kind of environment Dr. Coward describes, I definitely adopted the cynical view. I left the university, and mathematics, and have been much happier as a result. I wish Dr. Coward every success in changing what I found to be a very unpleasant system in the department.

It should be noted that this is a fairly common pattern in graduate mathematics departments at public schools - IMO, it is to give students a chance when given outstanding resources.

I experienced something similar while at UIUC for math, but I passed the comprehensive exams solidly (my first attempt at two of them were thwarted by abnormally difficult exams where almost no one passed).

I ultimately left, but largely due to non-academic reasons combined with the state of Illinois stealing the university's budget allocation. Teaching wasn't too bad, but life in the tech industry sure beats academia.

This sounds like a very strange system to me. Where I graduated (and I believe in most of Europe) the university has to have allocated the full funding for the entire PhD for a student before that student is admitted. So the university cannot afford to run a scheme like you describe, which is good since that sounds to me like a borderline predatory system.

Teaching positions for grad students aren't predatory. They are really a form of financial assistance. In return for teaching 3 hours a week 2 hours sitting in your office with the occasional student visitor (with say 5 hours of prep work that could be done during office hours and 3 12 hour days grading exams). That's 8 hours of work a week which works out to a pretty decent hourly salary.

It's hardly luxury and when the state/university system yanks funding out during your tenure THAT is somewhat predatory but usually most departments find a way to tighten belts and make sure current students have sufficent funding.

I've got six hours of teaching a week plus 2 hours of office hours plus meetings related to teaching plus prep plus grading.

Plus classes, homework, exams, plus research meetings, plus doing research, plus seminars, plus commute.

My university's administration has a rule that our department can't pay us more than a fixed amount, and that amount happens to be lower than the living wage in the city I live in. In other words, by the university's own admission they don't pay us enough to live off of.

For what it's worth, when I was still in college trying to decide between pursuing a math Ph.D. or going into the tech industry as a programmer, I remember being advised to think very hard about Berkeley as a graduate school due to the reasons cited above.

So, while this is just anecdata and I ultimately chose the second option, my experience researching graduate math departments is that Berkeley is specifically known for this practice and very few other departments are.

Hmm, my experience in 2001-2008 wasn't the same. While there were certainly funding issues the department worked pretty hard to try and do what it could to help. Then again technically I was in the logic group so things were a bit different for me but I'm conveying what my math grad officemates and friends experienced (i.e. they said they had pretty much the same situation).

Yes, some people didn't finish but math is hard and while the department is large and can be impersonal there were no barriers and efforts were made to assist the students.

The cheap labor argument doesn't really hold water (at least during my time). More students wanted teaching positions than positions were available.

Glad to hear the situation improved after my time. Even back then, I observed that logic treated its students better than maths did. There was precious little help for us in prelim prep, just a student-run seminar and problem book, while I don't remember logic even having a comparable test, or if they did, it was not designed to filter out over 50% of students as the maths one was.

Don't understand your last paragraph. If demand for jobs exceeds supply from the employer, that suggests there will be downward pressure on wages, i.e. the labour becomes even cheaper. Maybe you're suggesting that the jobs can't be that bad if people want to work at them, but that wasn't what I said. I enjoyed being a TA immensely, and it was a flexible job that fit my studies well so I did it even though I had funding - but that doesn't mean I wasn't still massively cheaper for the university than hiring Dr. Coward, or that there wasn't a cynical strategy of getting us students to teach calculus cheaply and then dumping half of us on the street.

I chose not to be a grad student in Berkeley's math department for exactly this reason. I went to a smaller school that didn't have this sort of weeding out.

(I started my PhD in 2005, and it's possible that this was not the situation at the time and I was acting on outdated information. I don't regret it, though.)

If hard working students fail a test, the failure is on the teacher, not the students.

I highly doubt the majority of students at berkeley would be anything other than hard working.

Unfortunately, hard work is not always effective work. When you embark on a journey of learning, it is your own responsiblity to make sure that you learn effectively. Hard work alone does not justify any merits - you have to make it count.

That is exactly the job of a teacher - to make sure you learn effectively.

How many of your teachers focused on efficient learning ? I can't remember one. Even the handful of teacher that left a deep trace in my memory never mentioned 'learning'. They were just so well aware of their subject, they could be the catalyst to bridge gaps in my view of things, triggering inspiration and desire.

There needs to be a desire in the student to learn, but the teacher must also be able to impart things clearly. Otherwise, why bother having teachers at all? Why not have everyone self-learn? Ironically, that's what I'm actually doing right now, but still it's good to get recorded lectures as this tends to really help fill in blanks.

I'm doing a lot of self studies too, and what I'm missing the most is a little peer pressure to focus and test, especially tests. That's why I personally enjoyed MOOCs since they provide that. My experience is doubly biased, I don't recall any teacher being really helping in learning as I said, but I went to college at a time I couldn't interact with them normally too.

It should also be the responsibility of the teacher, however, to guide you towards effective learning techniques.

Just to get into berkeley you have to be the cream of the crop or the best of the best. These students, in general, work hard and study effectively.

When a test fails a majority of these types of students, you can't blame ineffective learning on students that represent the best of the best.

There is a third option: the test is unfairly structured to reduce the number of people Berkeley can put through its PhD program. If Berkeley knows it cannot teach more than x students, yet it consistently enrols y students, then it could use a test to weed out y-x students (regardless of whether those students are capable of completing a PhD).

> I left the university, and mathematics, and have been much happier as a result

is the second bit true? why lump mathematics with your leaving of the university?

what does it mean to leave mathematics?

i stopped looking at the stars because i left the business that hires engineers to build commercial lenses?

Yes, the second bit is true, for me - I am much happier as a consulting CTO than I ever would have been as a maths professor (abandonment of the latter career is what I meant by "leaving mathematics"). I guess I have to thank Berkeley for helping me to discover this fact relatively quickly.

I did not mean to lump maths and Berkeley together - I happened to leave both at the same time, but that doesn't mean I had to, or indeed that this was necessarily best for me, or would be best for others.

i see now that you meant the career: Mathematics; and i am glad you are happier now

my concern was that if you ever found happiness in research that you dropped that happiness assuming the career and research were the same

what happened to all the open thoughts you developed in your area of interest?

I still pursue them for fun occasionally, and my papers (very minor, and never properly published) are cited or used even more occasionally. That's fine with me, as I've been able to do much more in my new field.

A relief, glad to hear this as well

If what he Dr. Coward says is true, and I have no reason to doubt him, this makes me sad as a Berkeley alum. I remember taking Math 53 with an awful professor who could barely speak English and refused to cover the material, asking us to just read the material ourselves and ask him questions. This professor had been there for many years despite repeatedly getting in trouble for failing too many students (that he neglected to teach). This is unfortunately the state of universities now, teaching is nothing, research is everything. Lecturers are treated like crap and barely scraping by. I wonder when the devaluation of teaching will catch up to us; maybe another country that values teachers will be able to attract more of the best students in the world.

I wish I knew some good fix to split up research and lecturing. The teaching should be done by people who are good at it and the research by people who are good at that. I suppose there might be some areas where there are just too few people qualified to teach something at the proper level, but I somehow doubt that's true at the undergraduate level.

I remember distinctly which professors of mine were effective at conveying the material and an understanding of it vs. those who were not.

The National Science Foundation (or other group) should produce high-quality video lectures for all courses.

If this caught on all mathematics departments would lose funding and no longer be able to fund research. It's a strange conflict of interests.

I would hope there would be funding from somewhere, at least at the state/federal level. Mathematical research has proven very important to a number of advances in the sciences, even research that was once thought to have no practical use.

I think a pretty overwhelming majority of math research funding comes from the fact that math departments are service departments for engineering, physics, etc.

The NSF spends a total of just under 250 million per year on math research. The DoD and DoE also have around 100 million each. Some mathematicians estimate [1] about 30k mathematicians in the US, which at a conservative salary of 50k per year (!) is already 1.5 billion.

In other words, either gov't agencies would have to roughly triple their funding (just for math), or about a third of mathematicians would lose their jobs. These are, of course, very rough estimates.

[1]: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/5485/how-many-mathematicia...

I think you meant two thirds would lose their jobs :)

And yes, I don't know where the funding would come from if math education was commoditized, as perhaps it should be.

> teaching is nothing, research is everything

Teaching is nothing, research is nothing; grants, tuition, and donations are everything.

I don't know what's sadder, how far universities have fallen, or the fact that there's no sign that these trends are slowing.

I stand corrected :)

Professors are never required to have a single teaching class. They themselves are not taught how to actually teach students. This is why so many professors are just smart but can't teach to save their lives.

They are ill prepared by their degree and can have huge communication or social issues that stand between them and their students.

Administrators usually push to give good grades for colleges with open enrollment. So the classes are easy and the test are easy. Make me sad and is part fo the reason I left working at a University.

I wonder if we had the same guy, Russian, with his own formalism and his own textbook published online? I remember thinking it may well have had merit but since most of us in there were applying the subject matter in our respective fields which stuck to the traditional formalism. .. it was a challenge.

I think it was a special form of multi variable, forget what he called it. Lecture was in mining. Honestly I went to lecture too rarely to give fair judgement

No, the prof I was referring to was Chinese. It's pretty hard to identify that one prof who can't speak English and can't teach, when there are so many to choose from.

That said, I've also had great profs at Berkeley as well, though I suspect they do it out of the love of their profession the subject matter, rather than career advancement.

Perelman? He's brilliant, but certainly put off a lot of engineering and other students who were just there to fill recs and expected to be handheld through the course.

I took his Math 1A class (1st semester of calculus) in Fall 2013, which was his first semester here.

Pros:

1)He made calculus engaging, exciting, and worth going to for an 8AM class. I never felt like it wasn't worth it. 2)Convinced me to be a math major by inciting my passion for math. 3)He genuinely cares and spend an enormous amount of time working 1-on-1 with students to help everyone. He freely gives out his cell phone number and asks students to call him any time if they need help.

Cons:

1)His class is very poorly structured. No quizzes. The midterms don't count if you don't want them to, which means 100% of your grade can be the final. 2)His Graduate Student Instructors that teach smaller group discussions get carte blanche to be as lazy as they want. They don't have to administer quizzes and the three that I saw didn't give a rat's ass. 3)His exams are a joke. Most of it is literally just memorizing a proof. The basic derivatives and integrals on the test are really easy. Many of the pre-med and pre-Haas students love him because of the easy A's he gives out.

In Summary: The department has valid claims against his classes, but he is doing something Berkeley's math department desparately needs: teaching lower division math better.

"The midterms don't count if you don't want them to, which means 100% of your grade can be the final." And that's your choice. How is it his fault for giving you a choice?

"Most of it is literally just memorizing a proof." Proofs are more important than memorizing a formula and forgetting it after a couple of month.

"Convinced me to be a math major by inciting my passion for math." That's way more important than stuffing you with formulas, algorithms and problems. If you have a passion for something, learning comes more easily and naturally.

By giving you confidence and passion, he gave you the greatest gift he could possibly give. You can find theorems, proofs, problems and solutions in countless books. The information is there, all of it. Structured in many different ways. And he gave you the courage to go out and explore. I wish I had that as a freshman. Instead I got fear. Fear of failing. Fear of being mocked in class. Fear of not being good enough. And I cowered in fear. I learned mechanically, memorizing formulas and problems by heart. What good where the quizzes, hard exams and midterms to me when I couldn't understand and apply what I was supposed to be learning?

"Proofs are more important than memorizing a formula and forgetting it after a couple of month."

I didn't go to Berkeley, but I had exams like this - you could pass them without actually understanding the material by memorising everything in sight. Quoting a proof doesn't show that you have any in-depth grasp of the concepts, that you can actually apply them to a problem you haven't seen before.

While I agree that the most important thing is convincing the 1 person out of 1,000 to be a math major (or physics or whatever) I'm afraid the university isn't ok with handing everyone else As without mastering a certain minimum skill set.

Besides, the math department isn't a free agent in this. Other departments expect students who have passed math 1A to have certain skills. If the math department was free to teach math 1A as an advertisement for mathematics (the way other departments get to teach their base courses) it would be a much different class. Hell, it wouldn't even be about calculus.

So long as the physicists, economists, chemists etc.. etc.. say "we need students with skills X, Y and Z" there has to be a class whose content (and hence a decent grade in) is X, Y and Z. The name of that class is 1A and it helps no one to just teach a different class under that name without reforming the system.

The math department ALREADY OFFERS OTHER CLASSES DESIGNED TO DO EXPOSE STUDENTS TO MATH IN EXACTLY THE WAY YOU MENTION. These are courses that deliberately avoid the equations and rote memorization that generated so much fear in high school and are designed to be low stress while showing off the wonder and creativity of mathematics.

Unfortunately, few people ever take these courses because students don't want any more math than they have to take and the guidance counselors and university won't push or require them.

As you said about the final (which I wholeheartedly agree with) if you give students the choice how is it the department's fault you take it. Students have a choice to approach math in a more exploratory, more encouraging fashion but they choose to do the minimum needed to take whatever other class they need. It's ironic because that's also what makes calculus so hard for them...they want to apply a rule and confidently move on...not think hard about a math problem in ways that might be dead ends.

That is what's so sad about math education. Understanding comes from trying to fit the concepts together and even (especially) professional mathematicians fail 90% of the time. Students, especially those who haven't done well in math find that very distressing. Hell, pick any subject you aren't good at (which has clear success/failure conditions) and really try to do it well. It makes you feel dumb and you give up. Add to that years of pre-college math (often taught by teachers who themselves seek the reassurance of rote procedure) which brain washes the curious kids into believing that doing math is just applying procedures and it's an uphill battle.

Ultimately, I think the problem is that we try and force kids who aren't really interested to know math they don't need. Just like other subjects let the students who want to learn come to you. With the advent of modern computer algebra system no one benefits making kids memorize rote procedures beyond basic arithmetic since without understanding they will never apply it in the real world.

There is no evidence to indicate he deviated from the actual required content of the course, only that his lecturing style deviated from what the department wanted. (This is indicated by the department having reviewed and approved his final, among other things).

Also, I'll repost what I said earlier: there is no evidence he gave out A's more freely than other professors.

The grade distribution for one of Coward's classes (16B) is available online for you to check: https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/explore/courses/SP/2016.... It shows his class average was a B-, whereas most other professors around the year he taught had a B or B+ average.

And that by itself is inconclusive, as all the lazy students looking for easy A's know to sign up for Coward's class.

I wasn't claiming he was harder on the students. I was claiming that there is absolutely no evidence he was popular because he gave out easy As. So you're agreeing with me.

I studied there, and during that time, spoke to and tutored many such students. Anecdotal evidence is better than no evidence.

And I brought to you a non-anecdotal, total-population statistic. Again, justifying the null hypothesis (that there is no evidence he was any harder or easier on students in the grade distribution).

No, you repeated Coward's own assertion, stripped of its original context.

This is a non sequitur.

(more specifically: we weren't arguing about my first assertion, we were arguing about my second assertion. So the fact that you're trying to refute my second assertion, that there is no evidence he have out A's more freely, by attacking my first assertion, is irrelevant. I fully acknowledge that absent the department's response, we don't have the full picture of whether or not the department's issue was with the actual teaching content, but that was not what you and I were discussing)

"Anecdotal evidence is better than no evidence".

Goodness! You mean the anti-vaxxers might have been onto something?

Sure, why not? It's hardly justified to deny the validity of every single step in someone's reasoning just because their conclusion was incorrect.

This would make sense as a counter argument if his students who took Math 1A from him didn't also do better on other math courses than students who took Math 1A from other professors.

There are often very big challenges in the freshman courses. The case I'm most familiar with is the calculus courses (in undergrad I was an engineering and mathematics dual major so I had to figure out how to splice in the coursework and petition to get some courses substituted for others etc).

There is a lot of pressure on the non-majors course to deemphasize the mechanics of calculation and move toward theory and reliance on Mathematica for mechanics (I think this battle has been lost, it was raging in the mid-to-late 90's)--this suits the sciences well and students are happy because they don't have to grind hard. The majors course is more rigorous but needs to be focused on the Mathematics curriculum arc and emphasizes more abstract applications and theorems. This is great except it's challenging and honestly distracting to many freshman engineers who need calculus as a tool quickly for their other courses.

Anyway, the college of engineering was always trying to figure out how to get their freshmen through a rigorous enough calculus so that they weren't having to shadow teach calculus in their other courses. One big option that was always in the air was for engineering to give up and teach it's own mathematics. Of course, the mathematics department fights like crazy to prevent (obviously because mathematics revenue is very teaching dependent, whereas engineering is well funded by grants and industry). Anyway, it's not easy to get the balance correct (nobody was ever happy with the results).

I very much doubt any single professor has enough experience to understand all the compromises these freshman courses must satisfy. It's great to make students happy, but it really puts a drag in upper level teaching if the foundations aren't right.

You still didn't refute that his students are doing better in their later classes. If your complaint is lack of foundation what is causing his students to do better?

_Which_ later classes though? If you disaggregate an engineering set of them might they be doing worse masked by the softballs the majority are taking?

The next math class in the calculus sequence. That's about as direct of a measurement of how well they did in Math 1A than anything I can think of.

The forest is composed of students with a variety of majors and a diverse set of "later classes".

The referenced class was the next in the calculus series.

Some of this might be from his Oxford background -

Oxford and Cambridge have a very strong culture of small-group tuition, where the tutor ("supervisor") has an enormous amount of freedom. And students typically have end-of year exams -- everything up until that is formative.

If you look at it from a semester course-by-course system's perspective it would seem very strangely designed. But Oxford and Cambridge's pedagogy is very effective at producing independently-minded, creative, and somewhat fearless students, who "get" the subject matter.

And there is quite a lot of research elsewhere supporting the effectiveness of small group tutoring (which might go a long way to explaining why the Oxbridge teaching style works as well as it does there).

So when you say that in his first semester, he gave a great deal of independence to the TAs, especially in small-group discussions, and gave students freedom for all the mid-term testing to be just formative if they wish, that sounds to me as if perhaps he was experimenting with bringing some of what he valued about Oxford's teaching practice to Berkeley.

One of his letters suggests that folks at the math department insisted that he water the exam down and reduce the number of questions.

Do you know if other Math 1A sections have more/less difficult exams?

I suspect he found those exams easy because of the quality teaching he got from the man...

That was my guess too. Calculus is actually really simple, and any reasonable test is going to be easy if you were taught well.

> free from quizzes, midterms and your final can be 100% of your grade

sounds nearly mathematically utopian

i once was failed in an intro to logic course at an undergraduate university

i spent the class time working on my own projects, and sitting under trees

when the final came it was maybe the third time i attended the class

i got an A on the final, but when i received my final grade i found that attendance was monitored by daily quizzes that accounted for 40% of my grade

was the class intended to evaluate my understanding of truth tables or to determine how i spent an hour of my day three days a week?

because i thought the final more than confirmed the former

I can also remember my teacher explaining calculus and doing stuff like deriving the formulae for volume of a cone, it was pretty interesting to me; I remember having lots of ideas for engineering problems that could be solved with techniques like this.

I know the system is different in the US, you start university earlier I think? Are the students taking this class 17-18 yrs?

I'm curious to know more about what your syllabus and exam is like, are there past papers online? Here is the maths exam[0] I took when I was about 17 (it's been a while) http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/Images/249523-question... By the way, I doubt I could answer any of the questions now...

My favorite math classes were actually structured like that. I don't regard it as a bad structure, just an unconventional one by US standards.

For what it's worth, memorizing proofs is a lot more than I was expected to do when I took Calculus I. You have to remember that in the modern age Calculus I is a very basic class. I'd expect it to be considered borderline remedial at a place like Berkeley. It wasn't even offered at all at the college I went to from what I remember.

As a UC Berkeley student who's never taken one of Coward's classes, I've heard great things from every single friend of mine whose taken his class ("I love Coward" is heard a lot). I know students are already rallying to keep him at Cal. However, I think that perhaps the Math Department at Cal doesn't deserve such a great professor if the system is as decrepit as described.

> I think that perhaps the Math Department at Cal doesn't deserve such a great professor if the system is as decrepit as described.

At the very least, Coward does not deserve them.

Coward is the Math department. Calling the administrators members of said math department is a disservice to all of education.

I'm not associated with UC Berkeley, but I have been involved in a lot of campus politics in the past. Because I see many alumni commenting here about the effectiveness of this lecturer, I offer a suggestion: Give a restricted gift to the university. Earmark it for something like the salary or research of Dr. Coward. If they want to play politics, you can too and restrict that your donations are tied to his continued employment.

If he's really that great, and if everything he says about the rest of the department is true, then he shouldn't have to work there. Give the money to Stanford or something.

Why on earth would you advocate giving the administrators what they want and depriving Berkeley math students of their one exceptional professor--a professor that they clearly need more than better-supplied students elsewhere?

Depends where the root of the problem lies. Does this story accurately reflect the environment? And if so, is it only this department's chair who's pushing out the innovative professors? Or is the university, at a higher level, pushing out innovative teachers? If the latter then I'd agree with the above, donate elsewhere: administrators are the ones making all the decisions. It's an uphill battle to change that. Giving them money in any form won't help solve this problem. There are plenty of other institutions to support.

On the other hand, there's clearly more to this story, and the school and department should be given a chance to respond before we pass judgment.

This sounds like a terrible idea that can be easily abused. To distill, it amounts to 'get this donation because I'm happy with your work' which is great, until incentives get involved. A parent giving an incentive? A student from a wealthy family giving a kick-back as preferential treatment has been given to them to start a research career? Following a research interest and de-prioritising others? The conflicts of interests are clear and exist and impact today.

It is already possible. Doing this doesn't make it more or less likely to be abused.

I don't see the value in that. Funds are fungible, as Colbert so aptly pointed out in his exposé of state lotteries

Not donations. The university will either have to accept the terms or refuse the gift. I've given restricted gifts specifically imposing that the money be used on pizza for the programming team.

Right but presumably some of the money in the existing budget for said thing can be moved around. So, say you donate $10 to Professor X's classroom and his existing budget is $50. You bumped it to $60. They can just take $10 from the existing budget and put it elsewhere. Your $10 still goes to that class, and the total goes back to $50. What you really want to know is whether the budget has increased by the amount you and others earmarked, year over year. I doubt that level of reporting is given by schools or even requested by donors. We just trust or assume that "earmarked" means the budget increased.

Now at least they can't then decrease his budget to less than $10.

Another way to do it is to provide for a certain percentage of "overhead" costs, as with e.g. NIH grants. So if for every $10 that goes to Professor X, $6 goes to the university to use as they please, they can't then fire Professor X without losing the extra $6 as well. (Naturally this only works with relatively larger amounts of money.)

That's a very good question. I will have to ask my mother, as that is literally her business, to know such things.

Cool, let us know what she says!

Even with more transparent reporting, it'd still be possible in some cases to hide where the money is really going. There could have already been a planned budget increase, for example.

Ultimately it just comes down to trust. If I don't trust the wider institution, I will not donate to a subsidiary. And with more and more schools operating like businesses these days, it's hard to know who to trust.

Basically, she says nobody involved would be likely to touch such a time-bomb of a gift with a ten-foot pole.

It's important to consider that academic departments are separate from finance offices, which themselves are also separate from development offices. The finance office determines how much money every academic department will receive, then turns around and tells the development office they need to raise that much money. That number is usually "however much we think you can realistically raise, plus 10-20%", in typical MBA asshat fashion. Of course, they set the budget based on that number, so at the end of the year either the development office has gone above and beyond and actually raised all that extra money, or there are last minute budget cuts (which is the typical outcome).

Usually, if a person were to restrict a gift for a certain purpose, it will have to either go towards an existing endowment for that purpose, or have a new endowment created for it. This is usually stuff like "scholarship with donor's name on it". If the endowment already exists, the money is pretty much guaranteed to get disbursed towards that endowment. If it's a new endowment, the board of directors usually has a set limit on the minimum amount of money necessary to create a new endowment. Anything less than that will just be refused, usually with a sales pitch to try to get it sent to the fungible, unrestricted fund instead. They really don't like to give up money.

Anything that is a budgetary line item will first get funded by any restricted gifts that meet their requirements. If there is an endowment specifically for "maintenance of such-and-such building", then maintenance is first drawn from that pool. Any shortfall thereafter gets filled by the unrestricted funds. You can make gifts towards "expendables". They are earmarked for very specific things like "new jerseys for the football team". If they're for things that aren't on the budget already, then department gets to choose whether or not to spend that money. If they don't, they have to give it back.

So you are correct, theoretically a restricted gift does not increase the department's or a specific professor's budget. But so many gifts are restricted in so many ways that some issues are overfunded, leaving others to be underfunded. For example, if too many people are giving money "for the music program", more than the music program can spend, then they can't turn around and apply it to the general "art department" in which the music program sits.

If the organization spends the money inappropriately, it's majorly bad news. IRS audits, criminal proceedings, someone is going to jail. If they can't spend the money given to them, they will try to contact the donor and get them to change their mind on the restriction. If the donor is particularly set in their mind, they will return the gift.

But there is a grey area in the middle. If something in the recent past had been covered by unrestricted money that could be covered by a newly collected restricted gift, then someone might hand-waive and retroactively say the restricted gift had been used on that issue and suddenly there is magically more money in the unrestricted pool, which just so happens to coincide with the amount of the restricted gift.

This is illegal, but it falls on the donor to prove it happened. If their issue got funded, then they won't have any way to suspect anything is going on.

So, in the specific example of trying to use restricted gifts to keep Mr. Coward's job: the very most likely thing to happen will be that the development office will refuse the gift, because they will probably assume the finance office will refuse to disburse the gift, because the finance office will probably assume the department will refuse to spend the money. If somehow it got past development and finance, the department will just give the money back.

If such a gift marked as "for Mr. Coward's salary" were spent, yet they still fired Mr. Coward, the university doesn't necessarily have to report to the public the nitty-gritty details of their spending, and there are certainly ways they could make things look good on any publications that did go out, but this particular example makes for a situation in which individuals could easily check up through outside channels. The donor who gave the gift would merely have to call Mr. Coward up and ask "hey, do you still have a job?" and receiving they answer "no", they'd have a really good reason for asking for an investigation into the institution's accounting.

Wow looks like you got a lengthy reply. Thanks for sharing!

So donations marked for expendables such as pizza or classroom costs are easily fungible. It is a one off cost that won't be compared year over year.

Interesting viewpoint that small earmarked donations toward non-expendables such as salaries are viewed as time bombs. Sounds to me like acquiring fungible funds is pretty common and a major goal of finance and development offices. That is, they want to encourage people to give unrestricted money. They don't want donations from people who don't trust the organization as a whole. Sounds reasonable.

Calling it a time-bomb was me editorializing. I just meant for this specific idea, since spending the money is at the Department's discretion, and they have shown a desire to get rid of Coward, then it seems likely accepting this donation would be just asking for trouble some time in the future when their conflicting motivations finally catch up to them.

And it's not so much that the expendables are "fungible". By definition, they are not, and it's technically illegal to perform this sort of back-dating. It's just not easily verifiable that such a thing has happened.

If the department decided to do a one-off like "t-shirts for the programming team" and put it into the budget, it's highly likely there isn't already a restricted fund of any type that would cover such a thing. If they got the budget approval for it, it'd almost certainly come out of the unrestricted fund. But then you come along, not knowing that the department has planned on doing this, remembering fondly your days on the programming team, thinking "it would have been really nice if we had matching t-shirts for when we traveled to competitions", and you come up with the idea to give an expandable gift, but you end up giving it after the t-shirts have already been bought.

This sort of serendipity is common enough, for a variety of different things. The correct thing to do would be to send the money back to you, because the money is already spent, they can't unspend the unrestricted money, but they aren't likely to agree to do a second t-shirt run. But it's highly unlikely you'd learn otherwise, or even care if you did, so they whitewash over the issue because there is almost zero chance you're going to find out that there was a budget amendment saying the t-shirts weren't purchased until after your gift, even if the students have had them for weeks already.

And I personally know of plenty of places that will do just that, not tell the little white lie and actually return the gift. They have a standard of ethics they adhere to and rightly view it as a slippery slope. It's a short hop from this sort of thing to, say, back-dating donations given after the first of the year to say they were given before the first of the year so donors can claim them on their taxes, putting you into the realm of full-blown tax fraud.

But yes, unrestricted funds are, by definition, completely fungible. Often, you'll be donating in response to a "solicitation" tied to a specific "campaign", e.g. a mailing as part of a specific project to generate a certain amount of money. They'd likely be asking you to donate towards "the so-and-so endowment for the arts", or some other named fund. This is just a form of salesmanship, structuring things in this way, supposedly people are more willing to donate money when it's to a specific, named cause [0]. If you really care about your organization, you should write in a note that you wish to donate to the unrestricted fund, or to use the funds "as deemed fit by the university/hospital/etc".

[0] I somewhat doubt anyone has actually done a study, and even if they did, I severely doubt it was conducted properly to show significant results. This isn't exactly a field full of statistics professionals.

In some domains, even restricted funds are fungible. Check out John Oliver's video on state lotteries: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9PK-netuhHA

No, that's not what he said at all. Because of a new restricted fund, they changed the budget for other funding sources. The didn't just decide to spend specific dollars on one cause that had been collected under a guise of a different cause.

I think we are in agreement this is all legal, and are just disagreeing about the meaning of 'restricted'. Your usage is in legal terms, whereas I'm talking about what was advertised.

> The didn't just decide to spend specific dollars on one cause that had been collected under a guise of a different cause.

Actually, in the case of the lottery, there are examples of this. See the part at 12:24 - https://youtu.be/9PK-netuhHA?t=12m24s

Perhaps one can say it was legal and not restricted money. Regardless, it is definitely odd how the state advertises that lottery money goes to education, and meanwhile corporate tax money disappears from the education budget.

The point is not legality, it is ethics.

Do they accept earmarked donations?

UC Berkeley does accept earmarked donations, but there is a limit to how specific they can be. I'm not sure what that particular level is, to be clear, but I've heard it's above the "it must go to this lab / group / person" level.

Scott Shenker, a CS Prof actually has an unrelated campaign right now where he'll match his student donations 10:1, so a few friends and I have been discussing some rules lately.

Correcting injustice by inserting more politics doesn't solve the root of the problem.

Why not just send Coward a check directly?

It's not about the money, it's about sending a message.

So why not send a message that isn't open to loopholes? Like mail them a picture of you personally giving him a check with a letter explaining why, and then post it on the internet.

That wouldn't prevent him from being fired. If they don't allow him on the campus, it doesn't matter if he was able to work for "free".

I don't think sending the university a check would prevent him from being fired either, if the university really wanted to make a point of it.

I had the pleasure of taking Differential Equations from Dr. Coward at UC Davis back in undergrad. He was one of the best math professors I ever had.

Have a Berkeley math degree. Two observations. Student ratings are whack. I had a professor I thought was really good but had an average rating. I had one fellow student state that he hated the professor. I am pretty sure the professor did nothing to him that deserved that hatred. People don't like it when they don't do as well as they expect. Second, it appears that the math department hires based on research because I had a newly minted professor who was just plain indecipherable.

I have a triple major from Cal with math among them. All I can say is that Berkeley math classes were the most brutal, boring, and demotivating classes that I've ever encountered. For the longest time I tried to suck it up and blame myself. Luckily, since then I've had enough great classes and mentors to realize it really was the department and its professors that made me miserable, and I overcame the massive GPA drop and near-suicidal tendencies that Berkeley Math drove me to.

You've voiced my own feelings exactly.

Conventional wisdom among teachers is that ratings are mainly a function of the grades that students expect to receive in the course. I was in the room when two profs were discussing their grading policies, and one of them flat-out wanted to give easy grades because he was coming up on tenure.

I found this snippet from an open letter he wrote to the Mathematics Department in the past:

> you instructed me to show a draft of my final to another very eminent member of faculty and former winner of the distinguished teaching award. His comment on a draft that contained 8 questions was that it was already too long and too hard, and should be no longer. I had originally been planning on asking 15 or so questions, including some difficult ones, but I was not allowed to do so. In the end we settled on 12 questions. The result of this intervention by you and other faculty was that the median score was over 90%, and in order to keep to departmental grade distributions I had to set the A- cutoff at 93%

The implication here seems to be that his final exam was notably harder than is typical and yet he was forced to throttle the cutoff for an A- to enforce regulated grade distributions (which in and of itself is a horrendous policy).

The letter is here:

http://alexandercoward.com/OpenLetter.pdf

I think it's hard to ignore this in combination with the highest teaching scores anyone in the department has received in apparently 18 years.

Too many universities fail to teach and only use unreasonably challenging tests to filter students.

You know you have an exemplary teacher when his students start owning these crazy tests. This is what every educational institution should strive for. Teaching is an art, and this man represents the epitome of the art.

That's the case at every university; students are, for the most part, whiny entitled drunk and high children -- especially in intro classes. Giving their opinions influence over an adult's career is absolutely insane.

The skillset required to really get through to kids like that is entirely divorced from teaching more advanced classes or research: it's half nannying and half high-school football coach with a splash of the subject material.

And every department hires almost entirely based on research they have to more and more as budgets are slashed since research is their only opportunity to bring in more funding.

Student ratings for undergrad math in particular are problematic because courses like 1* and 16* are mostly taken by students majoring in non-math subjects who are only taking the course because they are required to pass it.

I graduated from Cal in 2013 in Physics and CS. I had a full time lecturer (not a professor) for a course in Analytic Mechanics and the teacher (Charman) was in a similar situation. Despite having ratings well above average and being immensely popular, he was let go. It seems like lecturers are treated as second class citizens, much like contract workers or outsourced positions.

Lecturers are Cal's version of adjunt professors. Just like how GSIs are Cal's version of TAs.

That's definitely not true in the CS department, at the very least. Lecturers in the CS department can get "security of employment" which is tenure in everything but name and, while I was there, most of the intro courses and some advanced undergraduate courses were taught by lecturers like that.

Of course, the CS department is in a different college (Engineering), has a different culture and, probably, way more funding than the math or physics departments, so there's plenty of reasons for it to be different.

Now that may be the problem. Perhaps the mathematics department should be moved to Engineering. Stanford did that with computer science back in the 1980s. It used to be part of Arts and Sciences, run by a rotating committee, and was graduate-only. The education side was disorganized, with schedules and staffing not matching up with admissions. The entire department was transferred to Engineering, was better organized, and got much better on the educational side.

The research side was dominated by logicians to and through the "AI Winter". Then they brought in machine learning people for the DARPA Grand Challenge, and that turned the research side around. Now the machine learning people are in charge, and most of the logicians and expert systems people have retired.

Science progresses one funeral at a time.

While EECS treats its lecturers well, they are still essentially adjuncts. Lecturer SOE is very different from just lecturer, because as you pointed out they have tenure. From what I can tell of my time there, the EECS department very much appreciates good/great Lecturers SOE teaching the lower div classes. Apparently the math departmnet does not.

Charman is still here!

Alexander Coward: 'My student evaluations for the two classes I had completed were the highest on record in the Mathematics Department'

Berkeley Mathematics Department: ".. I hope and expect that you will be able to align more with our standards for the remainder of this semester and during the next academic year."

Translation: Your students are doing significiently better than ours and therefore showing up our mediocre teaching performance and for that reason - you're fired ..

http://alexandercoward.com/BlowingTheWhistleOnUCBerkeleyMath...

Note that this should not validate or invalidate his claims, but here are videos of his teaching: http://math1afall2015.blogspot.com

Wow. He is a really engaging lecturer. I'm actually going to watch these videos to learn. I would have loved a professor like this.

Instead of teaching at a large research school which cares more about professors obtaining grants, he should teach at a small liberal-artsy school where the professors are expected to spend more of their time actually teaching students.

Having done one part of undergrad at a "liberal-artsy school" and another part at a larger tech school, I couldn't agree more.

If you were a lecturer at a research-focused institution, in which the quality of your teaching is a minor factor in your "success", and the social norm is mediocre teaching, would you teach at a high level?

He'll have more students (and therefore more total impact) at a large public school.

Also, maybe the goal is to change the expectation that research universities lack good teachers? Public colleges educate many times more students than private ones, let alone small liberal arts schools.

UC Berkeley IS a large, public school.

Seems like dwaxe knows that and was suggesting why the OP would prefer Berkeley over a smaller school.

That's kind of sad though, isn't it?

Sometimes I ask the question, "What would I want if I were God of Everything?"

It makes sense to have elite universities, where the people who society will shove millions of dollars in grant money all go to get educated. And if I were God of Everything, I'd want them taught by excellent, dedicated educators. Right?

If you care deeply about educating students, and you are able to do a good job of that with large lecture groups, then choosing to move to a position that slashes your class size by 75%+ would be shooting yourself in the foot, wouldn't it?

fwiw, there's a tenure track for lecturers at UCs

but as the post notes, it's underutilized in Berkeley's Mathematics Department

> "We explained to you before you accepted the position that the idea of employing a full-time lecturer is controversial in our department."

yeah, quite unfortunate

Most mathematicians prefer research to teaching. Some absolutely detest teaching and hate the fact that they're forced to do it, while some rather like teaching and just wish it didn't take up so much time, but pretty much all of them would rather be doing research.

So the idea of employing a full-time lecturer seems quite appealing -- let the lecturers take care of all the boring crap like teaching freshmen how to integrate, and leave the research to the professors.

But wait! What if the university starts to figure out that they can get all their teaching done waaay more cheaply just by employing full-time lecturers? Professors have been doing well for the past few centuries by selling the idea that only a researcher is qualified to teach at the highest levels, and hence that they should be allowed to spend most of their time thinking about mathematics and only be obliged to teach a couple of classes a year. Full-time lecturers threaten not just the jobs of mathematics professors, but the entire future of global mathematics

So I can definitely sympathise with this view.

2 things about this fascinate me:

1) The knock-on effect of having this cross-published on HN and reddit will somehow make this story reach some form of news-media -> which in turn will influence UC Berkeleys decision, as they will be under the media-spotlight.

2) I always thought many STEM professors were useless educators who only taught students as a by-the-way while they chased fame/recognition among their peers for academic-success (or status). I guess this rings true for Math departments in many parts of the world.

As many others are saying, it would be better for this guy to leave, because if the department was overtly toxic before, the true assholism will shine once the other profs create a siege mentality against this guy for "outing them".

> 2) I always thought many STEM professors were useless educators who only taught students as a by-the-way while they chased fame/recognition among their peers for academic-success (or status).

Well, you forgot Research Dollars. It's an open secret that STEM undergraduate education is seen as a departmental obligation, and that your goals, and what you were hired to do is produce new research. Best case scenario you use classes to filter and train people to perform your wage slave researcher staff. Realistically, STEM is moving towards a Lecturer / Researcher model, though faculty unions, senates, and ethics panels have opinions on the matter.

In contrast, instead of research dollars subsidizing undergraduate education, math departments generally are set up to use education to subsidize research. Fortunately mathematician's needs are typically quite modest. But when cheaper Lecturers are introduced to the department, it's clear that the department could be cut.

> As many others are saying, it would be better for this guy to leave, because if the department was overtly toxic before, the true assholism will shine once the other profs create a siege mentality against this guy for "outing them".

Realistically, it sounds like they're already in siege mentality. The picture he paints is that hiring an adjunct was controversial within the department because it represents a shift away from research, especially if he can improve on outcomes despite larger class size. Several tenure track faculty lines could feasibly be cut as a result of decreased need for teaching.

His best case scenario would have been for the information in that open letter to reach the hands of the people in power pushing for more Lecturers (and less tenure track faculty lines), before he was fired.

It's true; while his grievances are valid in effect he's putting forth a very good argument for the MBAs running the show in the administration that are frothing at the mouth to cut faculty, hire adjuncts and pay them nothing, which makes room in the budget for fancy unnecessary buildings and higher admin salaries -- Sorry, I mean "make universities more efficient".

Very good point. A professors job should be foremost to teach. Research and chasing fame should come second. In my opinion, universities have flipped this on its head. They've allowed and in some ways forced professors to relegate teaching to a level of "by the way". Students pay and go to university to learn from teachers, not to subsidize researchers. There's something very wrong when a University places more emphasis on research than in teaching students

There are research universities and teaching universities. If you want to go to a college that focuses on teaching calculus 101 they exist though I don't know why as a budding mathematician you'd want to sprint full speed away from doing real mathematics.

The research has to be done somewhere. It's supposed to be subsidized by the public or private donations but funding is regularly and methodically cut so the only remaining reliable source of income is tuition which ends up having to pay for both.

Not an ideal situation but unless Americans start deciding research is worth paying money for (unlikely) it's what we have.

Umm why? For the most part a professor is a talking text book that stands in front of the class. You can go download charismatic people with fancy approaches to the material online. However, I don't think this really makes much of a difference (choosing the right curriculum does though).

The one place I've seen professors have real impact is in their ability to both answer innovative and novel questions and convey a sense of excitement and interest in a subject. While these only affect a small fraction of any given class they are the important value add and they are what someone who is personally passionate about the field and deeply knowledgeable about it brings to the table.

Worse, what seems like "good teaching" can often reflect a counterproductive attitude to the subject.

Everyone I know who has become a mathematician has done so DESPITE (not because) of their pre-college teachers (some have had the good fortune to run into one or two exceptions but still struggled past teachers who attempted to ruin the subject). These teachers were chosen entirely for their teaching ability but to no avail since without the perspective of a research career they weren't teaching people how to duplicate a computer algebra system instead of understanding the math. Focusing on accurate symbol manipulation and memorization is in active tension with understanding but is an easier rote to solving the kind of problems you can ask on AP tests.

College students are big boys and girls. They can read the damn textbook if needed. I spent an entire semester at caltech (my most productive one) without attending a single class (I had my friends turn in my homework in section). However, having professors available who could accurately convey (through course content, discussion and even research projects) what a discipline was about was invaluable.

Let's give up the charade people and let professors play videos of better speakers in lecture but lend their expertise to answering questions and talking to students.

Just throw in the towel and leave? By that thinking, he'd have already acquiesced and not let the world know about this, and we wouldn't be having this discussion. I say don't give in easily without trying to improve things... he might even stay and shake up the department for the better.

What a great and inspiring letter from someone who is clearly under significant public and private pressure; I'm sure he was repeatedly advised not to go public in any way by friends, enemies and lawyers on both sides.

My favorite part is where he imagines the Math department is "jolly cross".

I agree. He really knows how to substantiate his grievances with choice words and data. I don't know any of the players involved in this drama but the letter was so damning that I could not help but look up profiles of Stark, Ogus, Christ, and Evans just to get a picture of their faces.

Politically, this was an excellent play - with his popularity among students, the Math department (and in particular, named faculty) will have a really tough time getting students in their classes.

I don't know the full story and obviously his perspective is biased, but all the same, I pity the fool who has to battle his wits.

I tried to be a skeptic reading his commentary, but I definitely drank his kool aid. That being said... as a healthy dose of realism, nobody will care next year. The administration can easily just ignore this.

I know Christ as an acquaintance and he's an all-right guy, but have no idea how he behaves in context of the math department.

Apparently there is now aa student protest in his support on Tuesday... So he certainly is playing his politics well.

No, he's saying the other departments (engineering and physical science) who are supposed to be "served" by the math dept. are "jolly cross" at the mathematicians for shirking their duties. This situation is by no means limited to Berkeley. UCSB did an excellent job but other universities I have worked at I have heard exactly the same complaints.

My bad; I was just so into reading 'jolly cross' in his letter, I forgot just who was cross.

I have a mathematics degree, and I can say that most mathematicians I have known consider the math needed for most physics and engineering undergraduate degrees to be deadly boring. It's a rare math professor who enjoys teaching calculus year after year.

My university did not have this budget-grabbing approach from the theoretical math department; I think I can understand both the appeal of it, and the perils from the perspective of the department. 20 years after the choice is made to grab budget with large freshman calculus seminars, it makes sense to me you'd have a bunch of bad behavior and culture embedded.

> The Mathematics Department uses its privileged role in providing service teaching for undergraduates in all the sciences and social sciences to justify its size and all the trappings that go with that like funding and office space.

The above is a very important point and deserves attention in its own right. What it means is that because the requirements for graduation in a particular liberal arts major include several math courses, this gets the math department lots of headcount which translates to budget.

The key lesson for students is to try to avoid those "cattle car" classes with tons of students competing to meet a requirement that they are not interested in learning about.

Not the only skeleton in the UC Berkeley Mathematics closet - see the story of Jenny Harrison [0] for another example.

[0] - http://articles.latimes.com/1993-05-02/magazine/tm-30007_1_j...

I had her for a class a few years ago, and like Coward, she was an excellent teacher who didn't care for the norms of the department. She was actually working on a new textbook at the time which was all about teaching the fundamentals of mathematics in a completely different way to give a better foundation for higher level mathematics. At the time, she had just taken a small group of non-STEM majors, and using her book, got them to graduate level math in just 1.5 years. Sadly I haven't seen the book released, but one can only hope the work of these talented individuals will not be hindered by silly politics.

I am glad you enjoyed my course, archmikhail. The last chapter of my text needs to be written. I will do that as soon as the department lets me teach H110 again. Birkhauser accepted it years ago, but we need a new contract. I could just sell it on amazon as an ebook, I suppose. I have gotten a flurry of emails asking for copies this morning. This is very encouraging, but I have to finish it before releasing it.

The one book I saw in her list of publications[0], Universal linear algebra for students of mathematics and physics, seems to be awaiting publication, supposedly from Birkhäuser (a division of Springer), although I was unable to locate any reference to it on their site (possibly because the site sucks). It seems to be currently used, in pdf form, as a text for a course or two. I'd love to get my hands on a copy.

[0] https://math.berkeley.edu/~harrison/Publications.html

1993? I see the relevance, but I think that's a bit dated. Even a math department Berkeley has come a considerable amount of ways from 1993. Back then I think she still had gender working against her

His lectures are up on Vimeo, eg: https://vimeo.com/140890185

From what I can see, he's a talented lecturer. He's articulate, genuinely interested in his students' understanding, and has some uninhibited dramatic enthusiasm that keeps the audience engaged.

He's doing a start-up centred on teaching skills for lecturers/professors; I wonder if behind the scenes the issue is simply about that?

Not sure how this particular argument will play out (yikes, it's quite public now though) but he's a smart chap and should land on his feet.

I don't know much about this guy's story, but I do remember from my time as a UC Berkeley undergrad that being a popular lecturer with the students is a sure fire way to get yourself unpopular with the tenured staff.

The brass professors at UC Berkeley seemed to be catty like that in all departments. They didn't like it when some young gun became more popular than them for teaching the same topics that they'd been teaching for a generation. Which makes sense, popular professor sell things and get rich, and they way they saw it, they weren't going to lose to some young upstart.

For a healthy dose of realism... regardless of the publicity, nobody will care next year. The administration can likely just ignore it if they are actually comfortable with the status quo. If they had already wanted to make a change, this is just a nice springboard for them.

As someone who is not going to berkley, but studying higher level math.

Alexander, if your students are giving you a 6.4-6.5 out of 7, for calc 1a and 1b, you're a beast.

In addition there are further mischaracterizations of my teaching in my personnel file that I am prevented from sharing because the University claims it is their property.

That's worth confirming with a lawyer. AFAIK most states require employers to let you copy your personnel file.

My guess would be that you're allowed to copy, but they probably don't want you to publicly share what you've copied. Whether that desire for you not to disclose is legally enforceable should be confirmed with a lawyer, of course.

I had Ogus at Berkeley! He still looks like a lemming. :)

Keep in mind this is only one side of the story.

Also, if you are going to come out against Berkeley, Klein Perkins, or someone else equally powerful then please make sure you can easily prove every allegation. It's the best way to avoid defamation lawsuits.

My lawyer said "It's not slander if it's true." ;)

Curious. Was it ever considered that this may be fallout from the decision to hold classes during the campus AFSCME strike back in late November 2013, justification outlined in an impassioned e-mail sent to students? see: http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2014-... and the collection of heated pro/con responses which followed. Absolutely bizarre. Reminds me of the dismissal of the physicist David Bohm from Princeton in early 1950s orchestrated by then president Harold Dodds, a rabid anticommunist with close ties to the McCarthy era State Department who viewed Bohm as a Marxist unionist. May be what goes around comes around. Does Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks and a majority in the Math department happen to have close ties to Sacramento and AFSCME? If so the real rationale for proposed dismissal may be that the professor is deemed insufficiently Marxist unionist by the powers that be. Just glad I had the financial resources to eschew that institutional quagmire.

Doubtful. I was a student during that time and I can't recall any math or CS (or STEM) classes that cancelled a class session because of the strike. The most that happened was some teaching assistants cancelled their section for one day.

Started reading Peat's 'Infinite Potential - The Life and Times of David Bohm' yesterday and came across this post on HN. Knowing of the stir created by the 2013 e-mail, the possible parallels with events associated with Bohm's dismissal from Princeton (although for seemingly opposite political reasons) were striking. As an irrelevant aside, Bohm's 3-world intentionality/stochastic/objectified space hypothesis is interesting because it reduces the Schrödinger cat metaphor to a useful fiction.

This question is one that I asked, and in response it was made very clear to me what is meant by the norms of the department. It means teach from the textbook.

Incidentally, some of the worst instructors I've had were these. It doesn't inspire much conference when you see one whose teaching involves verbatim copying from the textbook onto the blackboard and making serious errors on the parts where he/she doesn't. The impression I get from those is basically "if you can't even figure out clearly what you're doing, what makes you think you can teach us about it?" The best tended to be ones who didn't ever use a textbook at all.

Coward is such an ironic name for him, as from this article he is anything but a coward. I think he should find a better place to work where his skills are far more appreciated. That's what I did when I encountered a similar situation in computer science.

He was previously in the news for "crossing a picket line":

http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2014-...

Let me offer up another version of Dr. Coward's story: An employee is hired and does his job brilliantly in some aspects and along some metrics, but his employer has complaints in other areas, which are hard to read since we haven't heard their side. These issues are brought up with the employee in writing multiple times over the course of a year: September 2013, April 2014, and November 2014. Apparently, the employee does not address the issues and instead insists that he's doing a brilliant job and that the employer's criticism is really about him being too awesome. Employer decides that they don't want a rogue employee and fires him in October 2014, effective June 2016. Why such almost 2 years of lead time? Maybe it's contractual, but I'm sure that if they really wanted to, they could fire him at the end of the academic year. I read this as the employer trying to get the employee to take them seriously and still giving him another chance to change. Now, in 2015, the employee obviously still doesn't care what the department thinks.

Not everyone who claims to be a misunderstood and persecuted genius actually is one. There are people who are brilliant in some areas, but unwilling to accommodate being part of a larger group and difficult to work with. In programming terms, imagine an extraordinary programmer who's unwilling to use the organization's standard programming language or version control. I'm not sure that the Berkeley math department is really any different in preferring a pretty good in all areas to someone brilliant in some, but flawed in others, and, most importantly, unwilling to change.

At first, I wondered why he was blowing up the whole issue and whether it would actually help. If part of the issue is in the level of preparation for science classes, then the administration is going to be just as unfavorable as the department. Then I noticed that he's started some kind of teaching-related company. So, the department told him to change or be fired and he decided he'd rather do the latter, but as long as he's going out, he might as well try to get some publicity for his company.

My read: math teaching @Berkeley is in fact horrible and this offended him. He was happy to shame the incumbents and refuse to submit to mediocrity. Naturally he'd prefer to keep his job and reform by example, but his compensation for being fired is that he can righteously expose the corruption on evidence of his firing (and knowing he had this leverage is why he was so uncompromising in pursuing good teaching).

Yes, but in a public school, who is really the employer?

I'm 100% on the side of Berkeley's math department here. In my opinion, the way AC has gone about things reflects upon his personality and why he is (probably) disliked by members of the math department. Read through what he calls his "evidence" to support his claims and you will see that there is more than enough reason to doubt his claims.

All the comments about Berkeley not caring about undergraduate math education are far from reality. Sure there are a number of professors who don't take teaching seriously. But there are a large number of them who do, and are very good at it. Among them are Ogus, Hald, Christ, Evans, and Rezakhanlou, all named by AC as people having to do with his dismissal.

Hald in particular is everything Coward wishes he could be. He does a great job of teaching undergrad calculus in a way that is engaging while still meeting expectations of other departments.

Yet another anecdotal proof that the idea of elite universities is not practically useful. I studied math in Germany and the quality as well as the level of lectures is mostly quite awesome.

I hope they can work it out. It would be a shame to lose someone who loves teaching and who students appreciate. My 1A prof at Cal said openly (and with a dash of humor) that he was being forced to lecture and would rather do his research but that he periodically had to teach a class. I wonder if that was the accepted culture in the department and Coward broke a bit against the status quo.

Mine too!!!! Harbir Lamba at George Mason University called us all spoiled brat's, and said he hated teaching, and would much rather be doing research. There was no humor in his voice whatsoever. He really hated being forced to teach.

I found at George Mason University that my best professors were lectures, adjunct, and those not on a tenure-track. I recall my first calculus professor loudly proclaiming his disdain for teaching. He told us explicitly that he would much rather be doing research, he hated teaching, but because he was tenured, there's absolutely nothing we could do about it. So we could deal with it or find another class. He was the reason I didn't pursue mathematics at George Mason University, because I sadly realized that most of the department had the same feelings.

This reminded me of my favorite professor who was also "a full-time lecturer".

Just sent him an email and cc'ed my prof. His address it linked from the root domain:

"Alex, I just read your letter "BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON THE UC BERKELEY MATHEMATICS DEPARTMENT" <http://alexandercoward.com/BlowingTheWhistleOnUCBerkeleyMath... linked to from Hacker News <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10372181>.

While I've never attended UC Berkeley, nor have we met, I was moved by your letter. It reminded me of one of my favorite professors in college, who was also "a full-time lecturer," as opposed to a professor that split time between research and teaching. The quality of teaching from a professor dedicated entirely on the pursuit of education is unsurpassed. This professor was well known/beloved and also had classes that would fill up quickly. Not sure if there was statistically significant evidence in this case, but wouldn't be surprised at a strong positive correlation between prior students and subsequent class performance.

Anyways, without hearing from the other side of the lecture, what happened to you sounds like some shit. Best of luck in your next pursuit. Good people like you shouldn't have to put up with nonsense bureaucracy like that."

I applaud Mr. Coward for trying to stand up to the institution that is motivated by money and not academic performance. An institution that has blinded themselves to what education is supposed to be all about. Mr. Coward - if you are reading this: You can't succeed in your effort alone. If students like you as much as you say they do, you must rally them to your cause. Get the student council involved. You must get as many of these students and their parents involved and hopefully several of these parents hold political power or donate large sums of money to the institution. If you have the hard facts to support your argument, you must get the media involved as well. Trust me on this - you must make this bigger then it is and begin to get the higher ups concerned about not only money, but their reputation. If you do not get the students involved, you will lose. I was a graduate student at a large, respected University, and taught every semester for years. I had a great reputation among the majors who sought me out for their lab TA. However, when freshmen started coming in less and less prepared but with increased feelings of entitlement and the thought that there is no need to work hard for a good grade, my test means for my non majors course started declining. The institution wanted me to dumb my non majors course down and I resisted telling them that there are more students coming into this University that just don't bother working hard and expect to get a passing grade anyway. My means were fine years before and if anything, my teaching had gotten better and my tests had gotten slightly easier. I resisted, but I knew that I would never be able to survive in that environment without tenure. So, I changed my career path. I would have been a great teacher and I do miss teaching. But the system is currently designed to stamp out those who do not conform no matter how successful they are with their students.

I'm a bit puzzled by the statement that he is asking "campus authorities" to "overrule" his firing. Why would he want to continue working there, or, how could he expect to be able to work in a department after indicting it in this fashion? With this document hasn't he pretty thoroughly burned his bridges?

For the pleasure of teaching 400+ students a year who could all benefit from his instruction?

> I'm a bit puzzled by the statement that he is asking "campus authorities" to "overrule" his firing. Why would he want to continue working there, or, how could he expect to be able to work in a department after indicting it in this fashion? With this document hasn't he pretty thoroughly burned his bridges?

He probably doesn't expect to keep working there. However, the department can't quietly give him bad references to torpedo his attempts to get a job elsewhere.

His capability is now acknowledged and in the public record such that they can't deny it.

So, he now doesn't have to explain the lack of a reference when he applies for a new job. Fairly smart maneuver actually.

Because the student body, even those who haven't had him as a lecturer, adore him. He may be burning bridges with others in the department, but he has an incredibly strong bridge with the rest of campus.

it's part of the process for wrongful dismissal.

for most employment stuff you go through the company's internal grievance procedures first (and if those procedures are inadequate it helps you) before going to courts.

although if he was going to take this to court I'm surprised he created the webpage.

Harrison sued UCB for sexual discrimination 20 years ago and she's continued working there the whole time.

Ratings from http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1835732 might illuminate some of the back-story. Lots of unhappy reviews in there:

>He went off on so many tangents, nitpicked on random things and when it came down to it, taught the material rather poorly. I took his class with prior calculus knowledge so it was alright but for those that never had calc, it would've been so awful.

>Tries to teach math in a confusing essay format, and marks you down when you don't use his method correctly. Extremely arrogant and set on proving how his principles in teaching are the best. Class was very disorganized and grading until the very end of the course. Avoid taking a class with him if possible.

>Doesn't give homework, doesn't have a syllabus. Exams are a bunch of meaningless boring calculations. He's a genius but not a good teacher.

>He is a nice person, but not a good teacher. Instead of math, he spends most of the lecture telling you how to be a good person: he starts with telling you 'not to give up', and then discusses a mathematical problem(which is not tough) and gets stuck. For the rest the lecture, he will actually show you what 'not to give up' means.

There are also many positive reviews in there (more than negative ones), but they often focus on his charisma and dedication:

>Coward is an inspiration- he deeply cares about his students' learning and believes that you must be infatuated with your education. He really cares for his students and always asks the class if he's being clear.

> I have never had a Math professor who I truly admire - he changed that. The level of interest he takes in the class is unmatched and he really wants his students to do well. Rebellious, fun, helpful and unimaginably intellectual. Best class at Cal so far.

I looked up one of Alexander Coward's lectures here:

https://vimeo.com/137661254

I was really impressed! He started with logic notation to explain the definition of a limit, which IMO is actually really important... do most lecturers cover this in an introduction to calculus?

I've heard a lot people complain on this forum that he didn't cover the material in the way that the math faculty liked. But this doesn't dumb down the material, this explains it in more detail!

Maybe I'm wrong though, maybe this is covered, but I don't seem to re all it in any calculus book I've seen. He was also very open about the text-book industry practice of making minor changes between editions just to sell new books. Maybe he fell afoul of them there as well.

    Having a Lecturer teach twice the number of students for 
    half the money and do a fabulous job demolishes that 
    argument, and that is why so many people conspired to make 
    it not so, to mischaracterize my teaching, and do 
    everything in their power to remove me.

I went to Cal and I took Math 1A and I agree that the professors there don't give a fuck about engaging and motivating you. Math 1A is a weeder class and is meant to discourage dumb people from the sciences and push them into easier majors like Communications or PoliSci, etc.

This helps me understand why someone like Dan Goldston left UC Berkeley to teach at San Jose State.

Wow, this blows my mind, but it doesn't surprise me. I encountered similar frustrations while doing an excellent job in the Marine Corps. I've come to believe that virtually any bureaucratic institution will be weighted this way.

Agreed. He's describing an organization where the leaders are not actually interested in doing a good job. An organization that's not a true meritocracy. An organization where actually playing the game is more important than doing a good job.

Heartbreaking as it is, that describes most large organizations, and most small ones too. If you work at a place where the leadership supports you and truly wants you to do a good job, where the best people get promoted regardless of whether they're "playing the game" then you have found a rare place indeed!

I think that our education system was trying to teach me this all along, and I failed to learn it until I was in my 40s.

If he's this good sounds like it would make sense to build him an online platform for offering his classes over the Internet to the world rather than letting him suffer in that toxic environment. Let's set him free!

I'll just be over here waiting on the other side of the story...

I have no dog in this fight, but his description lines up with my experience. I showed up at Cal in 2001 as a nerdy kid super-jazzed about math. I took Math 1A my first semester, and the lectures started with the professor turning his back to the class and proceeding to write proofs on the board for 90 minutes in indecipherable handwriting with little to no explanation. People would show up to class with pillows, no joke.

I got a middling grade (B+), but the experience was so bad it was the last math class I took. It took me seven years to fully realize my mistake and get back to working in line with my passions.

Anecdata I know, but at least one case where bad Cal math instruction derailed a trajectory.

I would love to have someone secretly record that lecture and put it on YouTube to shame the lecturer. I'm curious if someone has actually done this?

The other side of the story is that they probably want a consistent approach to education,

having people go "unconventional" as they say.

might work but it also might backfire. Its like being on the bleeding edge.You might bleed.

I think the fast food analogy plays on the fact that every burger should be equal quality.

Innovation comes at a cost in education, you are playing with lives.

Surely gathering performance metrics and analysing them is the method of avoiding the backfire? Surveying downstream faculties and see how they like the results is another way to measure and move forward from a system of cronies with a low risk of degradation.

Having graduated from Cal a year ago, his description is on point. The education there is not great for undergrads

Classic Sayre's Law:

"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law

I think the stakes are quite high. If he is truly a superior lecturer, at stake is the calculus education of over 800 students per year at one of the top schools in the nation, many of whom will be future scientists and engineers.

The stakes are perceived as low because it's not a life-or-death decision and nobody but math students at a single school care about it.

Except that this isn't just petty political infighting among the faculty over office space and such. It affects students' educations, which are pretty high stakes (the main purpose of the university, some might even say).

A skillful writer can make any job sound indispensable. Money is a better indicator than words when it comes to what society really values beneath all the soundbites.

Money also flows freer from where it is more available, though. Your statement would imply that rich people's proclivities reflect general values, regardless of the source of their wealth, which doesn't seem right.

Society doesn't always value economically what it needs existentially.

I wonder if other universities are lining up to land him since he seems to be an excellent teacher. My guess is that it won't be the case since the problem is systemic. Hope I'm wrong, good luck to Mr. Coward.

More likely the opposite. Departments don't like people who generate this much drama for simply being let go. Why would anyone? This unfairly hurts Berkeley's reputation.

Why is this unfair?

He should come back to Sydney!

Radical suggestion:

1. Persuade Dr. Coward to teach at a community college, where his strong teaching abilities can enable a broad crew of would-be nurses, schoolteachers, etc., to succeed.

2. Compel, by petition and other means, the Cal administration to grant credit for CoCo science and math college courses taught by persons with more than four years' faculty experience in Ph.D.-granting accredited institutions.

Did you even read the article?

This makes more sense why someone like Dan Goldston would leave Berkeley for San Jose State

Does this guy have any video lectures? I'd like to watch and check him out.

An earlier comment has a video link...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10372658

Coward has justifiable grievances with the UCB mathematics department. It must be extraordinarily depressing to work hard at exposition of lower division mathematics to a class of otherwise largely unmotivated students, only to be fired for doing so.

Having said that, I am going to adopt a somewhat contrarian viewpoint. The math department fired Coward for deliberately and repeatedly subverting their requests to conform to departmental standards [1]. It is not surprising that behaving in a fashion that continuously pissed off senior faculty (with the power to fire or initiate the process of firing) got Coward fired.

Coward's student ratings were consistently high. Based on anecdotes, he sounds like an instructor I would love to have (he spontaneously derived a formula!).

However, this does not matter because Coward refused to participate in the system. What I term 'the system' is the set of departmental norms and standards that exist as they do for very good reasons. These reasons might not be understood by all actors.

My understanding of the state of the system is informed by the following: UCB is an institution that trains thousands of students in mathematics annually. They have a large faculty [2]. The numbers of people involved imply that there is tremendous variation amongst students and instructors - in areas such as raw aptitude, experience, language proficiency and motivation. The benefits of systematizing the process of training in a university of Berkeley's size are manifold. The system has to exist the way it does in order to produce large numbers of adequately (and usually only adequately) educated people. The purpose of disallowing faculty from deviating from such standards is to allow the system to function independently of the people involved in it. There are many disadvantages to this approach, such as stifling lecturer creativity and disabling course-level optimisations (like a particular professor's vivid geometric intuition for something abstract).

I could enumerate the reasons the system exists as it does (at length) but do not have space here, so here is one example: Using a standard textbook means that course content is instructor invariant. This makes the level of training robust to shitty lecturers, who necessarily exist in any sufficiently large system. It gives students recourse to a standard reference they know is correct. It decreases the variation in quality of students. This is particularly important for co-requirements. It is a huge problem when course B depends on course A and students do not have a firm grip on course A. This happened to my class: we arrived in applied mathematics 3 with a totally broken knowledge of multivariable calculus.

Essentially, the system exists as it does to provide a lower bound for the quality of training. Some people will be incompatible with it. UCB should probably have been more gentle in their handling of Coward - he was 'suicidally depressed' - but I say this with the benefit of hindsight.

[1] >> On September 22nd, 2013 he wrote in an email "But I do think it that it [sic] is very important that you not deviate too far from the department norms." On November 12th, 2014 he wrote "I hope that, on the basis of our conversation, you can further adjust to the norms of our department."

[2] https://math.berkeley.edu/people/faculty

[3] One might think that mathematics is mathematics, and any reference material on a topic will do. I can tell you from experience that this is false. A complex analysis novitiate trying to sort out what 'holomorphic', 'analytic' and 'complex differentiable' all mean will inevitably run into equivalent but different definitions.

If he is teaching mathematics successfully and well yo undergraduate students, then shouldn't they be the only actors who count? And if he is a staff member, perhaps they should explain why they require their procedures, even if most people seem to find them not only ineffective but demotivational?

Having actually taught (well TAed)in the UC Berkely math department I can say that generations of both graduate students (who have most of the contact with students) and professors have struggled to the best of their ability to teach calculus in an engaging and interesting way to their students. Now research talent and teaching talent don't always come together but there were plenty of dedicated and talented teachers. Dr. Coward is basically claiming that he is so amazingly talented (or that not one of the multitude of intro calc teachers over the years was competent) that he single handedly does the impossible and rises head and shoulders above all these other teachers.

Even though he quotes from the letter from the math department disturbingly selectively I think he gives away what is really going on in that quote:

"They also reveal some significant differences between your practices and what has been typical in our department [...] I hope and expect that you will be able to align more with our standards for the remainder of this semester and during the next academic year."

Surprise surprise, the students like the guy who doesn't make them learn (those in 16A/B aren't continuing on in a technical field but only take the course to satisfy requirements and/or because their counselors stress the importance of having math on your transcript).

If this isn't suggestive enough consider his statistics: his classes have 400+ students enrolled but the supposedly equivalent class taught by a faculty member only has 100. If he isn't cherry picking an 8am lecture (in which case we should be even more distrustful) this difference is so drastic as to be extremely suspicious. My experience TAing these very courses was that students were quite willing to put up with a bad lecturer (or poor TA in my case) to have a nicer schedule (leave earlier, avoid trudging back and forth etc..) but they were very cogniscent of even minor differences in supposed ease of grading and subject matter.

Besides, anyone who rights an open letter like this while supposedly appealing a deciscion is an ass who would be a nightmare to work with. Even if you (unwisely) believe he was unjustly terminated delibrately impugning the motives and integrity of the people he supposedly wishes to remain colleagues with is just a super asshole move.

I've met great teachers who were very dedicated to improving mathematics education. Every one of them avoided self-aggrandizement and did their best to share their approaches and experience with other educators. The mathematics department at UC Berkeley would be ecstatic if someone figured out how to teach intro calc content in a way that invigorated the students. Hell, it's almost a holy grail their as generation after generation of grad students (and professors) burn themselves out against students whose experiences in highschool have created an instinctive dislike of mathematics and the unshakable belief that math is about formulas and procedures (meaning they instinctively panic if a problem requires creativity...which is sadly what makes math interesting and fun).

---

Look, I have big issues with the way UC Berkeley (and most other universities) teach intro calculus courses. It's the 21st century and no one is served by forcing uninterested students to learn computational techniques by rote any computer mathematics system can easily accomplish. Either you are going to go into a technical discipline where having a conceptually grasp of integrals matters or you can just blindly plug them into a computer.

So give up making students memorize the various tests for series convergence, tricks for integrating etc.. Hell give up teaching computations at all in 16A/B. Slow it way the hell down and just do basic qualitative reasoning about functions, derivatives and integrals, e.g., focus on things like if we know the derivative is positive here what does that tell us about the function.

However, that choice to abandon the established curriculum is rightly something that needs to be handled by the department as a whole. Indeed, I suspect it would have long since been adopted if other courses (like intro econ...yet again not really for econ majors) didn't assume students had these tools. Changing the math curriculum in this way would first require other subjects change theirs...something that won't go over well and would take time.

You know, the grade distribution for one of Coward's classes (16B) is available online for you to check: https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/explore/courses/SP/2016.... It shows his class average was a B-, whereas most other professors around the year he taught had a B or B+ average.

> Surprise surprise, the students like the guy who doesn't make them learn

His students go on to do other courses. Those students do better in those courses than the students of his colleagues. Do you disagree with that?

Statistically insignificantly better. As tested by the chair of one of the top statistics departments in the country. Yet AC is convinced all these people are out to destroy his life. He is hired as a lecturer as part of an experiment to see if lecturers can teach calculus more effectively than permanent faculty. Statistics shows he isn't significantly better. Add to that the fact that he's disliked by the math department for personality issues, and there's really no reason to keep him.

Sure. But you do realize that means he teaches at least as well as anyone else in the department, if not better. And he's beloved by his students (as evidenced by the evaluations).

So would you rather have a professor that teaches on par with the department and has strong rapport with his students, or a professor that teaches on par with the department and does not have strong rapport with his students?

Again, the hiring decision isn't based just on teaching prowess. His emails to department members show a sense of entitlement and disrespect toward people who are directly involved with his hiring decision. Why would they want to keep someone like that?

Don't forget, he didn't get fired. He simply didn't get his contract extended. He was never guaranteed a permanent position. The math department had no wrongdoing here. They didn't want to keep someone that was widely disliked by the department. And does it matter that a lot of students like him? The most important thing is that the students learn, not that they make a friend. It's certainly not a negative to be a friendly instructor, but it really isn't a key factor here.

More rotten news from Berkeley. Just this week, it was revealed that the university administration decided a warning was sufficient punishment after a Title IX investigation revealed Prof. Geoff Marcy participated in a decade of abusive and harassing behavior.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/science/astronomer-apologi...

> In June, the university concluded that Dr. Marcy had engaged in inappropriate behavior with students, including groping them, kissing them and touching or massaging them.

Very gross.

I'm not sure if "complaining about getting fired" counts as "whistleblowing".

I'm not necessarily inclined to take this guy's side of the dispute just because I read it first.

I think this goes far beyond complaining about getting fired, and delves into the pernicious attitudes of the department's faculty. For example:

"Given the success I am having with students, one might think that the Mathematics Department leadership would be expressing curiosity about how I am achieving that success. Instead, Craig Evans [the interim chair of the department] in early 2014 asked me 'If you had a job at McDonalds and came along with all these new ideas, how long do you think you'd carry on working there?' The fact that the now Interim Chair of the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department should compare undergraduate education to fast food reveals everything you need to know about how students are regarded by the leading clique of men at the helm of the Mathematics Department of the number one public university in the world."

Should faculty be punished for having new ideas about teaching (which happen to be successful[1], and well-liked by students)?

[1] "My Fall 2013 Math 1A students were tracked into the next course in the sequence, Math 1B, and it was found that their average grade in Math 1B was 0.17 grade points higher than that of those students who took Math 1A with another instructor."

Should departments have standards they expect their lecturers to enforce?

People would actively welcome new approaches to teaching math. It's fucking frustrating not getting through to your students or having them dislike the course. Most of the faculty has tenure and the focus is largely (but not entirely) on research. THE IDEA THAT PEOPLE ARE THREATENED BY HIS SUCCESS IS ABSURD.

He is succeeding in the truly obvious way. Lowering standards and making it easy for students to ace his class without the skills the university has deemed necessary.

If he was really so deeply gifted at teaching he could have just used the same final exam as another faculty member and taught his students that material. Why doesn't he?

I'm not sure you read the article correctly. He was asked to make his tests easier, and his students performed better in subsequent classes taught by different professors.

Indeed. It actually puts UC Berkeley in a pretty horrible position by going public like this. It does not look good for employers to have the same kind of public litany of complaints against an employee.

Some things stand out from a quick skim of the personnel file/included complaint. Among these: he did not practically assign homework or have regular quizzes. This was noted as not being consistent with department norms. It actually _is_ of value to have consistency between multiple sections of introductory classes and as preparation for follow on classes in the same sequences (e.g Calc 1, 2 3 having similar structures in class organization) he seems to have disagreed philosophically with his boss (department chair) on this front. There are some other parts of the files posted that suggest he apparently did not work well with his graduate student instructors (teaching assistants). In my mind those are big enough reasons to let someone go.

He might be a great instructor. It might be a huge mistake for them to let him go, but it certainly doesn't seem like the only available explanations are completely specious or wrongly-motivated reasons. Also missing from submitted link is some info in the complaint that this was attempted to be worked out with a new incoming department chair, as evidenced by this being posted it seems like that didn't work out.

"It actually _is_ of value to have consistency between multiple sections of introductory classes and as preparation for follow on classes in the same sequences (e.g Calc 1, 2 3 having similar structures in class organization)"

Apparently, learning the material better is more important to future success than consistency: the students in his classes did better in the following classes by .17 grade points than students from other (presumably more consistent) classes.

I would like to see the Department's response too. Hopefully, they reply with their reasons rather than attack the argument that Coward has written here.

For legal reasons I doubt they can reply at all.

As a former CAL student, I am saddened to read about this.

I didn't have to take Math 1A or any math course for that matter, but I did have to take an AC course per University requirements. I wasn't looking forward to it.

I ended up taking the Southern Border with Professor Shaiken. That was by far one of the most educational and interesting courses I had taken at CAL.

I too would like to see the University's side, but I am inclined to believe they can't respond for legal reasons, and if they could their response would be far more vanilla then Prof. Coward's side.

"Here is an email I wrote to my students in the Fall of 2013 that went viral, and was read by more than 1 million people."

That's a very strong statement for a mathematician to make. I wonder how he can prove that 1 million people "read" it.

This is ludicrous - I was taught by Professor Ogus, and he had an excellent grasp of didactic techniques. He dedicated a large amount of time to having me come in during office hours so I could do a mock lecture before it was actually delivered, and I could compare notes when he delivered his. Yes, he was exacting and demanding, but it made me a better student.

The fact that a lecturer with low standards happens to be popular with students is irrelevant. The math department has a large presence on campus because it is the best in the world. My advisor was Robin Hartshorne, and I took advantage of courses with a Fields medalist. That sort of department has standards that it enforces because it demands quality, not coddling.

This is all underlined by the fact that the lecturer in question states he has a breakdown of some sort due to the stress of the position. We're to take this seriously? I feel for the man, but it clearly indicates that the criticisms might be divorced from reality.

If you're too weak to excel in an environment filled with the world's top researchers, and where you are responsible for your own achievement, then find another school where they let prop comics teach math and spoon feed you.

I'm still learning mathematics. I'm in fact largely teaching myself. I can assure you, though, that a Fields medalist is not required to teach me Differential Calculus (Math1A). In fact, I'd prefer it if they didn't.

Likely you don't care because you have no intention of pursuing mathematics in a research capacity at any point. However part of the experience for those who care more about math than an easy "A" is ensuring you have access to amazing role models early on. People who take an interest in you, and spend some of their incredibly valuable time shepherding you through a unique, beautiful field.

Where is your sense of wonder, or your desire to know these exceptional people while observing how they think? How myopic. If you're at Berkeley, you're wasting your time being bitter and hopefully you'll transfer. That isn't a personal criticism, so much as recognizing that a top research university isn't for everyone, and the unique resources and access it provides should be given great weight or you shouldn't be using them.

Professor Ogus cared, as did almost all of my professors. I was amazed I could take classes and spend time with people who are shaping our understanding of mathematics. It's the same shock you have when you go to the SFMoMA and realize that some of the greatest post-Impressionist works in the world are sitting entirely unprotected in front of you. It impacted me, it impacted the way I think, and I will always value what they did for me. An adjunct simply can't provide that experience, and if you're just looking to pass Math 1A go to a community college for those credits. If you want to make a mark and know some of the brightest minds of our age, go to Berkeley.

No, that's not it. My reasoning is very simple - in all likelihood an extremely advanced mathematician will be incredibly bored by very simple mathematics, and not want to spend much time explaining it clearly.

Unless they are that rare commodity - the extraordinarily talented mathematician who can remember what it was like to struggle with the basics and who is able to keep the teaching of concepts simple enough it doesn't go over the head of the class, or go too fast - then I would prefer to be taught by someone who cares about imparting the basics of mathematics in an understandable and reasonably paced way.

I've been to lectures where a clearly brilliant mathematician was teaching basic maths, and it nearly turned me off maths. You speak of killing wonder: well, there you have it.

(P.S. I'm an Australian who will never get the opportunity to go to Berkeley, and I'm definitely not bitter! If I was doing highly advanced math, then in that case I'd want a Fields medallist teaching me!)

"""If you're too weak to excel in an environment filled with the world's top researchers""" What kind of attitude is this? Seems pretty cruel and horribly antisocial. If you're too weak...what is this the animal kingdom?

And I'd think that it would be way more interesting if a Fields medalist would be freed up to teach more courses about his/her specialty instead of the intro to calculus stuff (or arguably not teach at all but I disagree with that position).

First, because I implied it rather than stated, let's explicitly scope that statement to students. I am saying that if weaker math students like a professor because he has easier material, they should find another school. Top research universities should not be diploma mills, and students should appreciate and take advantage of unique resources at these schools. It may be the last time a student has exposure to a world-class mathematician.

The reality is that top math departments are very competitive places. It's realistic, not cruel. And feelings, yours or mine, aren't the ultimate arbiter of truth.

I, for example, am a weak football player. It's okay to say you're weak on certain dimensions, and it's in fact very important to assess as impartially as our limbic system allows because it prevents you from wasting time.

I wouldn't break down trying to run the football field with Gronkowski because there were some elbows thrown. I don't feel entitled to be a football player. I'd recognize the nature of the game I'm playing and find another one better suited to my skills. I also wouldn't try to turn football into a different game.

Suggesting a student go to a liberal arts college focused on teaching rather than a major research university isn't "cruel and horribly antisocial". It's allocating scarce resources effectively.

How exactly do you arrive at the conclusion that they like him because he has easier material? He even says that he wanted to conduct harder tests but was forced to dumb them down/reduce the scope. And why is it only weaker students that appreciate the class? As far as I know the class is open to anyone no matter how smart they are (assuming they are Berkeley students)

He's simply significantly better at teaching if the provided data is correct.

The takeaway here should be...why are (other) Berkeley math professors so bad at teaching? I guess you could question the reported statistics and if it makes sense to rely on evidence based teaching. Feel free to suggest a better approach.

I think the reason why students might like a lecturer is because they find the lecturer can impart mathematical concepts more clearly than other, and possible "smarter" lecturers.

Whilst someone who teaches must clearly understand the material they are teaching, that's not enough. They must also be able to explain it clearly, and preferably find a way of engaging with students. Their subject matter expertise probably needs to equal or even be slightly less than their pedagogical skills.

I fear you are mistaking the concerns here with the teaching of higher level math courses. Teaching lower level math like Math1A means teaching students who are NOT going on to be professional mathematicians. There are a raft of fields where you need to know foundational mathematics - like civil engineering, electrical engineering, physics and even economics. A good grounding in maths is very important, but students in these courses don't have to be doing ground breaking mathematical research.

100% agree. Others posting regarding this issue have no idea about any facts in this issue. The much more plausible reality is, this guy didn't get an extension as a lecturer and is butthurt and attacking the math department which he believes to be hiding evidence about his "amazing teaching prowess" and is getting rid of him because everyone wants to take his class instead of from full time faculty. Seems to me like he is disillusioned. Maybe his teaching is effective and maybe he is a good lecturer, I can't argue for or against that. But he didn't do his job in a way that the department expected and was let go. Live with it. It is completely over the top to become suicidally depressed because your boss told you that you have to assign homework and tell your TAs what to do. Sorry, but this really takes away from his credibility as a person.

> It is completely over the top to become suicidally depressed because

Holy shit, are you a robot? Are you really just going to trivialize his depression? Just think about the kind of person you are for a second. To me, you have absolutely no credibility if you can't conjure up an ounce of sympathy for the guy.

But I guess that lines up with the fact that you support the Mathematics department here. Having gone to Berkeley and experienced the mediocrity of STEM education there, I have no idea how you can be on their side.

Keep in mind how you would handle this situation if you managed a large and well-established dev team with procedures and policies you worked hard on and are proud of.

It is not enough for a team member to be fantastic in a solo role. I'd be more interested in hearing from other faculty than I would from the students, who don't much experience actually working with Coward.

A software dev team requires far more one-on-one interaction between "faculty members" than teaching does (where faculty are the ones producing the software and the students are the users).

And in any case, if someone on a dev team got significantly better numbers by bucking the trends, I would be obligated to try and understand their methods and help them gain greater acceptance. It doesn't make sense to remove someone who gets results. It makes sense to integrate them.

Not always. I have seen cases where the most productive/well liked person on the team has got fired cause they made the wrong people look bad.

Did that turn out bad for the team? Not really. Life goes on. And sometimes its just a good learning experience for both parties.

That sounds more like a testament to the sociopathic nature of business in practice, rather than the ideal way to carry it out.

But it is a solo role. There is no team, no procedures, no policies.

I taught math as an adjunct at a Big Ten university with a prestigious math department several years ago. I never once met with any member of the faculty, even my supervisor, and nobody ever observed my teaching. All of the sections of the course that I taught had the same syllabus and exams. I had students from other sections sitting in on my lectures.

As for hearing from faculty, oddly enough I was on the other side of the issue as well, since I also taught the 3rd year "weeder" course in electrical engineering. My students were woefully unprepared in math despite N semesters of calculus in the math department. Once during a break in the activity, I asked my engineering students how the university could improve engineering education. Their consensus: Better math teaching.

His entire job was teaching students, so I don't give a rat's ass about what the rest of the faculty thinks if the students like him and perform well.

Right. I was skeptical in first few paragraphs, since students' teaching assessments do have their flaws. But if there was a statistically significant improvement in his students performance in later classes, then the man's doing his job.

Yes, there could still be confounding factors. He is seen as an enjoyable lecturer, and students who care about their classes enough to select the better lecturer might be better students. But still.

If you want to continue the analogy to software engineering, the modules he's producing are students, and they are meeting their specifications (later performance) quite well.

It's not really comparable between a dev team and the teaching position. At the very least, there are argument to be made that superstar but annoying dev can have detrimental effect on other devs. There are approximately 0 chance that an amazing professor can have negative effect on other professor's teaching ability (yes, they can, but you know what I meant and please don't get into pedantry here).

The closer comparison would be a Big 4 accounting partner (or law firm partner) that bring in revenue, is well loved by his clients. You know what would happen if the firm fires them? The clients leave with the partner. Luckily for Berkeley their clients can't leave nilly wily here.

Edit: On second reading, this was mentioned: "Further, the current Interim Chair, Craig Evans, explained that I am causing problems because students are not signing up for other Professors' classes on account of me. This is to be observed this semester, Fall 2015."

Yeah, if this was some consulting professional firm, the firm would be in big trouble already.

"Further, the current Interim Chair, Craig Evans, explained that I am causing problems because students are not signing up for other Professors' classes on account of me."

Perhaps it's the other professors who are causing the problem by not putting any effort into teaching well?

Or maybe they're not putting the effort because they're "just doing what they've been told to do"...

If your procedures and policies within a well established team cause poor performance, then I think your pride is probable unjustified.

Mathematics is actually fascinating, but teaching and listening to math lectures is generally not interesting at all. Anyone who can teach it and keep Students interested and have them understand the material is a gem and should be kept at all costs!

Unpopular opinion, but I think he's being overly dramatic.

"My Fall 2013 Math 1A students were tracked into the next course in the sequence, Math 1B, and it was found that their average grade in Math 1B was 0.17 grade points higher than that of those students who took Math 1A with another instructor."

0.17. Not even a whole point.

Student evaluations don't really count since those are highly subjective. Students tend to hastily mark whatever they want on them because they want to get the evaluations over with as soon as possible. If a professor is somewhat amicable and invests a moderate level of effort into his/her teaching, then it's not hard to score at least a 6 on average on these evaluations (as students would mark either 6 or 7 in such a case).

Anyway, his performance as a lecturer is irrelevant to his argument. There are three criteria that junior faculty are assessed against in order to become tenured at UC Berkeley (or, otherwise, dismissed): teaching quality, reputation and research. Funny how he left out the last bit. He hasn't published anything since 2013.

And the university is probably firing him to hire another professor at a cheaper salary in order to save money, contrary to his belief that the university is firing him because of disagreements with his teaching philosophy. Universities tend to do this to professors who don't have much research potential and don't teach specialized, upper division courses. The UC system is crippled financially, so departments are more inclined to carry out dismissals of non-tenured professors who don't publish much and who solely teach lower division courses. Non-tenured professors can be fired at will. That's just another day in the life of academia.

The part about the micro-managing harasser and treatment of women, staff and lecturers is definitely worrisome, though. But we need to be careful about believing in these implications absolutely because of Coward's state of mind at the moment. He has already blown the quality of his teaching out of proportion.

He isn't employed as a research professor. He's employed as a lecturer. Berkeley does have a lecturer position with security of employment (commonly called lecturer SOE or teaching professor). These positions are evaluated on teaching rather than research. I don't know how common it is in other departments, but I know the EECS department employs several teaching professors (which means many classes, especially 61A and 61B, are taught by professors whose primary job is teaching).

The math department here traditionally doesn't hire long-term lecturers, as mentioned in one of the email chains Coward attached.

That's a pretty poor reflection on the math department!

"Funny how he left out the last bit. He hasn't published anything since 2013."

The post suggests that he's "full-time lecturer". The grievance says that his job title is "Lecturer". Why would that require him to publish research?

I assume by grade point he means GPA (i.e. out of 4.0). So 0.17 is actually fairly significant.

If you read the whole article you'll see that he's actually lower paid. One of the reasons the department doesn't like him is that he demonstrates that it's possible to teach more students better (even if just slightly) at a lower salary, and that scares them because they're so focused on increasing their budget.

By my reading of the essay, he was hired as teaching faculty, so he is not being judged on his research or reputation within the research community.

It seems pretty clear that it is immensely difficult to score at least a 6 average on these evaluations. Based on the article, it sounds sufficiently difficult that almost no one else managed to score above a 6 in two decades.

Student evaluations are heavily influenced by perception of the professor's personality. Look on Ninja Courses and you'll see what I'm talking about. Coward has a cult of influence that makes him seem like a close friend to his students, and this no doubt skews his ratings and potentially distorts students' perception of the professor's performance as a teacher (rather than his personality).

There are professors whose teaching quality is actually proficient and sometimes excellent, but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc. Student evaluations are flawed in the same way intelligence tests are flawed; student evaluations favor professors who speak and communicate most closely to the popular consciousness of students at the time in the same way intelligence tests are biased against non-native test-takers (some questions posed on intelligence tests may use culturally native objects).

> There are professors whose teaching quality is actually proficient and sometimes excellent, but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc

And those teachers deserve to have lower student ratings, because the quality of the experience for the students is drastically lower even if they learn the material at relatively the same level of competence. I myself have social deficiencies, and I don't expect people to give me sympathy points if I ended up lecturing a large class.

I fail to see how anything you've written about Coward's "cult of personality" is bad at all.

>are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well

How can your teaching quality be proficient if you can't speak English well? Sure there are teachers who get unfair evaluations because they have a bit of an accent, but if you actually can't speak English well, how are you effectively teaching in English?

Though I think most of VanillaSwirls comments are generally confused, there are some biases that show up in this space. In particular, people rate the intelligibility/clarity of Caucasian speakers higher than that of East Asians even when the audio is the same.[0]

[0]: http://www.academia.edu/6126025/Expectations_on_Speech_Evalu...

Key quote from page 444: In a typical study in this paradigm, participants listened to 4 minutes of a tape-recorded lecture produced by a native speaker of standard American English. Some participants were lad[sic] to believe that they were listening to a North American NS[native speaker] instructor, whereas others were lead to believe that the instructor was an international NNS[non-native speaker].

[...]

[I]ndeed, listeners who were exposed to the Chinese/NNS guise perceived more of a foreign accent and scored lower on a recall test than those who were exposed to the Caucasian/NS guise even though the audiotape they heard was exactly identical (standard American English).

Yeah, that's definitely true. My brother is an applied linguistics grad student, so I've heard this before.

I've had instructors who had accents but could still speak English very well, and many people just dismissed them outright as unintelligible without even trying.

But I've also had instructors who just weren't fluent in English (mostly grad student instructors). When VanillaSwirls said they didn't speak English well, that's what I was thinking of.

>but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc. Student evaluations are flawed in the same way intelligence tests are flawed; student evaluations favor professors who speak and communicate most closely to the popular consciousness of students at the time in the same way intelligence tests are biased against non-native test-takers (some questions posed on intelligence tests may use culturally native objects).

Teaching is intrinsically tied to communication. Failure to communicate, failure to speak english well, is a failure in performing the art of teaching.

Who do you think the primary beneficiary of rating systems are, students or teachers?

Any benefit the teachers see from knowing their ratings is purely so that they can improve the experience for their students. If a professor can't speak english well or have social deficiencies preventing from communicating clearly, they aren't excellent teachers.

His salary is $67,886. Are you really going to hire somebody to do his job for less money than that?

In regards to your points about research, maybe the math department should consider establishing a "teaching professor" role like the EECS department has done. Most of the lower division introductory CS courses are taught by teaching professors like Paul Hilfinger, John Denero, Dan Garcia, and Josh Hug. Given that math is so important to a variety of majors on campus, why shouldn't we demand that large, lower division math courses be taught by people who are experts in teaching?

$67K is on the high end of the spectrum for a newly seasoned non-tenured faculty member. Anyway, teaching salaries are required to increase incrementally, so his original starting salary was most likely lower than that salary.

Most universities, particularly public ones, will engage in the practice of recycling lower-division teaching faculty every so often in order to avoid the wage jump from non-tenure status to tenure status.

Yeah, established teaching positions are a thing in other industrialized countries like Canada. The public higher-education system in the state of California has many flaws, and the absence of established teaching positions is one of them ... because the system is financially crippled.

And that's the point I'm trying to make here. Coward should not be mad at UC Berkeley's Math Department. He thinks the buck starts and stops with the Math Department. The department is the way it is because of the greater UC system's financial insolvency molded by factors out of the control of UC Berkeley's Math Department and UC Berkeley as a whole. The UC system sucks because of inappropriate state economic policies over the past decade or so that include egregious spending on unnecessary things.

The professors in the UC system are not paid well, but the administrators are all $100K+ with pensions

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