Strange. Tenured professors get paid the same regardless of how many students they teach so it helps them if another instructor attracts lots of students thereby reducing the tenured professor’s teaching burden.
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.
As a more general observation, it’s hard to comment on this row without having some idea about the local office politics. These, of course, tend to be dominated by jockeying for power/status/prestige and not by discussions of effective teaching methods.
The political fault lines he’s describing exist at every flagship state public university, and so I’m not at all surprised to hear that a quake has happened along those lines at Berkeley.
But also most performers have a flair for the dramatic, and Coward’s excellent student reviews seem to come in part from his talent at performance. So his interpretations are likely massaged in some form, and the object-level claims could be easily exaggerated.
But he claims that he and the department differ on a fairly simple statistical claim—how to estimate the effect of his courses on students’ future performance. The related email correspondence is here, and well worth reading, both to judge that specific matter yourself, and get a sense of how defensive Coward can seem. (He’s definitely escalating emotionally, but justifiably is harder to know.)
My summary: In a report, Stark, a statistician, makes a three-way comparison between the three 1A classes (two of which were taught by Coward), and finds that they are not statistically significantly different. Coward asks why a three-way comparison is done, instead of comparing the Coward group to the non-Coward group. Stark replies that since the students were assigned non-randomly, we can’t separate the direct effect of instruction from any confounding variables.
Which is, of course, correct—it’s very likely that the students who got into the class with the instructor widely believed to be superior by students are more competent than the students who didn’t, and so should be expected to do better in future classes—but an equally valid point against the three-way comparison.
What I expect: even if we find a naturally randomized subset of students (maybe they are forced into certain sections only due to scheduling conflicts), or even if we find things to adjust for, we will find no significant effect. It’s nothing about Coward himself, it’s just hard to find effects.
But I don’t know if UC uses that sort of reasoning anyways to figure out which contracts to renew, I think adjuncts are super mistreated in general. I often defend academia on LW, but I think the tenure-track/adjunct system is super dysfunctional and awful.
Strange. Tenured professors get paid the same regardless of how many students they teach so it helps them if another instructor attracts lots of students thereby reducing the tenured professor’s teaching burden.
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.
Are we sure this man is telling the truth?
As a more general observation, it’s hard to comment on this row without having some idea about the local office politics. These, of course, tend to be dominated by jockeying for power/status/prestige and not by discussions of effective teaching methods.
The political fault lines he’s describing exist at every flagship state public university, and so I’m not at all surprised to hear that a quake has happened along those lines at Berkeley.
But also most performers have a flair for the dramatic, and Coward’s excellent student reviews seem to come in part from his talent at performance. So his interpretations are likely massaged in some form, and the object-level claims could be easily exaggerated.
But he claims that he and the department differ on a fairly simple statistical claim—how to estimate the effect of his courses on students’ future performance. The related email correspondence is here, and well worth reading, both to judge that specific matter yourself, and get a sense of how defensive Coward can seem. (He’s definitely escalating emotionally, but justifiably is harder to know.)
My summary: In a report, Stark, a statistician, makes a three-way comparison between the three 1A classes (two of which were taught by Coward), and finds that they are not statistically significantly different. Coward asks why a three-way comparison is done, instead of comparing the Coward group to the non-Coward group. Stark replies that since the students were assigned non-randomly, we can’t separate the direct effect of instruction from any confounding variables.
Which is, of course, correct—it’s very likely that the students who got into the class with the instructor widely believed to be superior by students are more competent than the students who didn’t, and so should be expected to do better in future classes—but an equally valid point against the three-way comparison.
What I expect: even if we find a naturally randomized subset of students (maybe they are forced into certain sections only due to scheduling conflicts), or even if we find things to adjust for, we will find no significant effect. It’s nothing about Coward himself, it’s just hard to find effects.
But I don’t know if UC uses that sort of reasoning anyways to figure out which contracts to renew, I think adjuncts are super mistreated in general. I often defend academia on LW, but I think the tenure-track/adjunct system is super dysfunctional and awful.