A Response to “What's the Point of a Professor?” | Hacker News Reader

A Response to “What's the Point of a Professor?”

thetattooedprof.com

75 pointsslvv20 comments

>These professors will knock on a dorm room door if one of their students has missed several classes and is in jeopardy of being on academic probation (this may or may not have been someone who looked remarkably like me). These professors are on the hospital floor for 8-hour clinicals with a cohort of 19-year-old Nursing majors. They help find translators for a Bosnian student’s parents (who don’t speak English) to open up a bank account in town. They sit through interminable afternoon meetings and then teach a three-hour Social Work seminar two nights a week. These professors go to their student’s graduation parties, they get thank-you cards from grateful students (and relieved parents*), they go to former students’ weddings, they are invited to law school commencements for former advisees.

It's good that, you, the author do that. It sounds like you're the sort of professor that the article wants to see. But let's not pretend the majority do this, especially at R1/R2 universities, or the article was specifically saying you were failing your students.

Yep. I'm a current student and the thought of a professor doing some of the things listed here is comical.

When I was a student at South Dakota State University in South Dakota and also when I was a student at Massey University in New Zealand, a lot of the "comical" things from this post were fairly common.

Don't be so dismissive.

Yep. I'm a current student and the thought of a professor doing some of the things listed here is comical.

I'm an adjunct now and was a grad student, and doing some of these things is actually dangerous: http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Angel-Novel-Francine-Prose/dp/006... or http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia/190351/. Most of the time of course they won't be dangerous, but it only takes one person to really fuck up a career.

There are colleges that focus a lot on teaching -- Rose Hulman, Harvey Mudd, Swarthmore, etc. I think the problem is that people want academic fame as well as good teaching.

However a lot of fame comes from, I think, path breaking research (and startups) coming out of universities -- that's why you see the universities' names in newspapers. That's why US news ranks those universities as having great departments (in their disciplines of speciality)

So if you want that you by necessity have to value research and entrepreneurship in profs a lot higher than you value teaching.

What one can try and get is good teaching colleges which may not be necessarily famous for research, etc. but are still popular with recruiters for recruitment out of ugrad. The colleges mentioned above do do that. There are other colleges too -- University of Warsaw is a very popular recruitment ground for big tech companies like Google even though it's not on the same level as a top US school for research. University of Waterloo and Brown are a couple of others that come to mind that are popular with recruiters to a bigger extent than their rankings would indicate. Perhaps we need more advertisment of such options.

The other possibility is for prestigious schools to hire more teaching fac. But that would mean taking resources away from research oriented fac. So the market dynamics make it hard to do that.

Ideally universities would have the financial resources to hire both teaching and research oriented fac but given the current political climate...

In my view, a huge issue is that no matter how you try to recruit and manage separate research and teaching faculty, it will always quickly devolve into a caste system.

At the university where I taught math as an adjunct, the teaching and research faculty didn't even interact with one another.

Teaching and research fac have very different goals though so I don't think it's a bad thing if they don't interact much.

There's a lot of ego on part of some research fac though, I agree that that one should try and address.

That's fair enough. In fact, I never even met my supervisor, which was just fine.

One thing that I've seen that I thought helped a lot is having a tenure-track style system for teaching faculty. I believe at UVa it was called "expectation of continued employment" instead of "tenure", but the idea was similar; after working for 6 years your performance was evaluated and if it had been satisfactory, your job was guaranteed in, as I understand it, a similar way to a tenured faculty member.

All of the teaching faculty in the Computer Science department, if I remember correctly, were on that track (or had been and now had the guaranteed employment), and were definitely a big part of the departmental life. When the department's accreditation was renewed, they were highlighted as a particular strength of the department: which I think would be really rare for the typical adjunct teaching model as I've heard it described.

That being said, I did see the adjunct/research faculty caste system develop elsewhere at the university, although I don't know what the details were RE: expectation of continued employment/etc. I think it is possible to avoid, but requires a concerted effort by the department as a whole to avoid, and that requires it being something enough people in the department want.

Oops, the correct link should be: http://www.thetattooedprof.com/archives/356

Can a moderator please fix the link?

Link to the original Hacker News discussion here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9518814

As a recent graduate, I much more agree with this author than the author of the original.

I am pretty disappointed with my academic experience at University for the same reasons that NYTimes highlighted, and I don't agree with this "tattooed prof" but it's just my experience.

I don't know that any of my professors did the stuff he mentions. However, he's quite right about the piece he was responding to.

> And I’m really hacked off when that scolding comes from obliviously pretentious Older White Male Professors

Stopped reading here, because the piece is obviously racist.

If the author is trying to evoke a stereotype, say that explicitly. To say it this way, even if it's not meant, provides cover for actual racists (which are growing---see the "white privilege" movement).

"Racism" is properly defined as any view that implies that a person's ideas are determined by their race. See also Marxist class-ism, which is the same thing applied to economic class.

Rather, individuals are individuals, and they have free will. Nothing determines the content of a person's mind.

Consider reading the rest of the piece, there is some good content past where you stopped.

I think you understand what the author was trying to get at with the "White" comment, even if you weren't happy with how they phrased it. I think the author was trying to make a legitimate point about privilege and perspective, but since racial privilege wasn't the main point of the piece they touched it only briefly.

The author explicitly invoked a stereotype, as you requested. I'm not sure why you didn't read it that way.

It's even capitalized.

An ironic response given that the author is himself white [1] and he also wrote, "The Case of the Missing Adjective: Writing and Choosing Whiteness" (http://www.thetattooedprof.com/archives/350).

[1] Since you question his mention of race, I also find it interesting that you didn't also question his mention of sex or age.

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