Why Do They Hate Us?
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
An English degree will do more to teach you about communication than a Comp. Sci. degree. Unless you go on to graduate-level work, in which case you'll probably learn the art of writing completely incomprehensible literary criticism. (e.g. How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html )
Getting into arguments on the internet, for instance, is a usable way to improve your writing ability. If you don't get your points across clearly, people will misunderstand you and flame you, which is both more immediate and more incentivizing than writing class papers and having them graded. Then you learn to anticipate how people will respond to how you write things and how to get your points across better.
But even in school, if you take something you're interested in that requires a lot of writing, like philosophy or history, then you get practice writing about something you care about, often in a certain style which is useful later. History, supposedly, is great for learning how to pull together different facts into a coherent picture while philosophy, in my experience, is good for learning how to write about tricky subjects clearly and logically.
If you enjoy writing about whatever people in English classes are assigned to write about, it may be worthwhile. Your school was probably better than mine--I've known more than one English major who was a terrible writer.
Ultimately it comes down to practice. A humanities degree at a decent-ish college should force you to get that practice at communicating in English in order to graduate. Conversely, a science degree should force you to learn a lot about how to communicate in the specialist terminology of your discipline. But going out and spending four years starting a business would probably be at least as good as both of these, if you're motivated.
I've known many English majors and graduate students, and I have never gotten the impression that the discipline is focused on communication.
He also characterizes this article (http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Do-All-Faculty-Members-Real/25...), "Do All Faculty Members Really Need Private Offices", as "anti-faculty", though my reading of the article doesn't lend itself well to this interpretation. (Let's take as given the obvious joke here.) Even on the surface level of treating private offices as symbols of prestige and status, it's rather disingenuous to claim one's profession is under attack by the mere suggestion of abandoning their private offices when many if not most white collar workers don't have private offices in the first place.
I believe I would feel the same way if my passion were English literature. The barrier to entry is so low that if that's your thing, after some initial training you can accomplish whatever it is you want to do absent the assistance of a highly-paid professor.
I don't understand why you would eschew the monetary value of something in one breath and then complain with the next that nobody is willing to pay you to teach it. If you're that passionate about it, screw the money and do it anyway. Either that or what you have is a hobby, not a profession.
Or maybe I'm wrong and society is lacking that final breakthrough deconstruction of Proust before we all happily move forward toward enlightenment. But I doubt it.
> Or maybe I'm wrong and society is lacking that final breakthrough deconstruction of Proust before we all happily move forward toward enlightenment.
We already do have a group of people in our society who believe something similar: priests. They've survived quite a long while as a group without needing to be paid for any actions that directly benefit the people paying them; churchgoers just keep them alive and fed through donations, from a moral sense of obligation to the church itself.
Perhaps, then, the readers of quality English literature need to form a religion (or, at least, a cult) around it, and pay tithes to the professors? Heck, that could probably also pay to get the literature itself written in a much more sensible way than publishing houses manage... ;)
Or are you maybe actually getting paid for your programming language work in the form of useful contacts, better reputation, better experience, and so on which increase your salary?
I'd place money on the later -- so you don't do it for free, you just don't do it for direct money. I doubt you would write programming languages nearly as intensely if you were the aforementioned negotiator. The reward would be less and you would instead be going for drinks with clients and otherwise networking, it is a hobby people like that also ends up in professional payout...
Only in the sense that "hate" is not too strong a word for how New Englanders feel about the New York Yankees: the hate is valid for the duration of conversation over beers or one call to the sports talk station. I think about "professors", oh, five minutes a month if I'm preoccupied with higher education.
...see parts one and two of my column "On Stupidity"...
...professors were worthy of some respect: We were gatekeepers, and we could help you.
I'd be curious to see the source of that statistic, and what exactly it's including. For instance, is the PhD process part of those 20 years, as well as postdocs? Also, is there a difference for the sciences vs the humanities?
At many/most well-known US research universities, a tenure-track position in Engineering (and possibly, Sciences too) is up for evaluation after six years from start of hire. The exact term may vary from institute to institute, but is six for most of the top universities. At that point, they either give you promotion (i.e., tenure) or a one-year notice (i.e., fire you).
Note that this is not "full" tenure, this is technically a promotion from Assistant to Associate Professor. However, it is still tenure, and you can keep the job for life. It doesn't have the prestige of a full tenure. Full tenure is likely to follow, if you keep similar pace, in 3-5 more years.
In summary, tenure can be had in as little as 6 years after completing PhD for professors in Engineering. But, those are probably the 6 hardest working years of their life. Makes the PhD almost feel like a cakewalk.
Source: my wife, PhD and professor in Accounting. Also member of her schools tenure committee.
Why does every professor/university need to prepare their own courses?
A research university is supposed to be a place where experts at the bleeding-edge of their fields congregate. That expertise is expected to trickle down to their undergraduate teaching, and so the argument goes that only they are qualified enough to prepare those courses. I think this is all largely unwritten and largely unsaid, but undergraduates would be pretty unimpressed if they were getting standardized lectures.
A teaching university isn't bound by that sort of expectation, so one could imagine that courses can be more homogenous without penalty. Lots of textbooks provide "sample" slides to use, and if you're teaching out the textbook anyway, you may as well use the slides you're given. Having had no experience at a teaching university, I can't make any claim as to whether this happens with any regularity.
The system could work a different way, but it doesn't, and you can't really get there from here.
1. Schools recruit by bragging about famous/accomplished graduates -- all taught by the $UNIVERSITY_NAME method.
2. Many schools research teaching methods, and therefore new things and materials are actually part of some experiment.
There is actually a 3rd, sort of meta-reason. In academics it is considered "incestuous" for students to undergrad->phd->position at the same university. They like to send people around various places as a way of spreading ideas. This mostly plays out in graduate levels, but that same thinking applies to "different schools teach different ways".
A final thought -- just like it is good to have multiple varieties of plants in fields, multiple brands of networking gear in a security conscious network, and so on, perhaps multiple teaching methods are good too, as a way of innocculating against "bad thinking".
That said, my mom teaches math a community college and she teaches in a very particular style (good German upbringing). Her first semester teaching any particular course involves a lot of late nights.