In the short term, yes. In the long term, no, especially for ‘support’ departments. At most large state schools, engineering is king, and physics and math are both subsidized by engineering because they need a sufficient number of professors to teach non-major physics and math classes to engineers. This isn’t to say that there’d be no math or physics without engineering, but that there would be less positions for math and physics faculty.
The math and physics departments, typically, insist on being research faculty, i.e. independent departments subsidized by the university as a whole, rather than pure service organizations. Coward, as a full-time lecturer, is in the ‘pure service’ role, and as one would expect the guy that’s specialized towards teaching does a much better job of teaching than the people specialized towards research. This is good for the engineering department but bad for the math department—instead of eight professors all teaching one non-major course each, you could have two lecturers teaching four non-major courses each, with the attendant loss of prestige, funding, and political clout for the department.
So his characterization of the department’s approach to him as “you’re making us look bad” seems probable to me, especially if the math department has been playing the “our job is hard, you need to fund us more so we can do better” card.
This seems strange to me. Engineering departments should have faculty that are perfectly capable of teaching the math and physics that their students will need. And this happens to a limited extent. For example, at UC Berkeley, the computer science department offers its own discrete math course instead of telling students to take the roughly equivalent discrete math course offered by the math department. Is there something preventing this from becoming more widespread?
This is good for the engineering department but bad for the math department—instead of eight professors all teaching one non-major course each, you could have two lecturers teaching four non-major courses each, with the attendant loss of prestige, funding, and political clout for the department.
Would the university really stop subsidizing Math and Physics dept’s to the same degree if it weren’t for their “service” obligations? I don’t think this is right—I think the administration is broadly happy with the status quo, in terms of prestige, etc. If the department has two full-time lecturers, the only consequence is that they will also hire a bunch of full-time researchers to balance things out. By contrast, the “service” role is probably a lot more important politically for departments which teach lots of fluffy GenEd courses.
In the short term, yes. In the long term, no, especially for ‘support’ departments. At most large state schools, engineering is king, and physics and math are both subsidized by engineering because they need a sufficient number of professors to teach non-major physics and math classes to engineers. This isn’t to say that there’d be no math or physics without engineering, but that there would be less positions for math and physics faculty.
The math and physics departments, typically, insist on being research faculty, i.e. independent departments subsidized by the university as a whole, rather than pure service organizations. Coward, as a full-time lecturer, is in the ‘pure service’ role, and as one would expect the guy that’s specialized towards teaching does a much better job of teaching than the people specialized towards research. This is good for the engineering department but bad for the math department—instead of eight professors all teaching one non-major course each, you could have two lecturers teaching four non-major courses each, with the attendant loss of prestige, funding, and political clout for the department.
So his characterization of the department’s approach to him as “you’re making us look bad” seems probable to me, especially if the math department has been playing the “our job is hard, you need to fund us more so we can do better” card.
This seems strange to me. Engineering departments should have faculty that are perfectly capable of teaching the math and physics that their students will need. And this happens to a limited extent. For example, at UC Berkeley, the computer science department offers its own discrete math course instead of telling students to take the roughly equivalent discrete math course offered by the math department. Is there something preventing this from becoming more widespread?
Would the university really stop subsidizing Math and Physics dept’s to the same degree if it weren’t for their “service” obligations? I don’t think this is right—I think the administration is broadly happy with the status quo, in terms of prestige, etc. If the department has two full-time lecturers, the only consequence is that they will also hire a bunch of full-time researchers to balance things out. By contrast, the “service” role is probably a lot more important politically for departments which teach lots of fluffy GenEd courses.