I believe that you are correct in your observations regarding graduate level education. Allow me to offer my experiences in undergrad engineering:
In my undergraduate experience, I was of the opinion that a lot of professors simply didn’t bother to put in any effort. Countless times I would visit a professor’s office to be met with the physical manifestation of executive functioning deficits. Frankly, I expected better from professors who required that their students stay on top of 18 credit hours of engineering courses every semester. I sometimes would hope that this double standard was, in fact, malicious. At lest then I could still maintain that these professors were intelligent, albeit aloof (a phenomenon which I may discuss in a future post.) Unfortunately, I don’t think this is the case. I eventually settled on an approach of attending lectures, not to listen, but rather to study and complete homework on a fixed schedule. As somebody with diagnosed (mostly) non-social ASD, I eventually adapted to this environment by developing strategies to overcome my own executive functioning difficulties, so why couldn’t professors do the same? In several STEM courses, it took 3-6 weeks for professors to return graded exams, at which point it was far too late to actually implement fixes for my shortcomings on that particular exam.
- I might add that a lot of these experiences were relegated only to the engineering department. I took several elective courses in political science and international affairs. Much to my confusion, these courses offered everything that I was hoping to experience in the engineering program. I won’t bother to speculate as to why these areas of study had competent, kind, and intelligent professors. Perhaps somebody else (a liberal arts STEM double major?) could shed some light on this phenomenon.
It seems as though undergraduate professors claim to do two things: teach courses and publish research. When I looked into the latter, I found that most (all but one) of the faculty in my department hadn’t published anything since their dissertation (with one exception, a professor who “co-wrote” some 15 papers a year—with no obvious contributions, I might add.) So if STEM professors aren’t spending significant time on lectures (it seems to be common practice to recycle lecture slides that were concocted circa 2000, usually by other professors) and aren’t publishing research, what the hell are they doing? I think that your post makes a very good analogy for this “coasting” phenomenon that is so prevalent in academia. Imagine my shock when 90% of undergraduate professors were previous graduates of my university who floundered in a professional environment and decided to phone it in for the rest of their careers as tenured faculty...
Frankly, I’m not sure how to remedy this state of affairs. I am now of the opinion that professorship (in STEM, at any rate) is reserved for washed up and failed academics, a complete waste. I don’t necessarily think that this is a wholly systemic failure, mostly because I had some good experiences with professors. Is this a case of some bad apples that clutter the university system? If so, what hiring practices could dissuade these bad apples from joining the system? I hold the opinion that tenure is severely detrimental to the university system, since the safety that it provides does the opposite of encouraging professors to excel, not to mention how it is held over the heads of non-tenured faculty and used to take advantage of adjunct faculty.
This reply has turned into a bit of an off-the-rails rant, but perhaps it could be of use to students who are currently in or considering engineering or STEM as a course of study. My advice? talk to students at your prospective institutions and scour ratemyprof (or whatever the modern iteration is called) to get a general impression of your departments faculty (its a lot more accurate than professors would lead you to believe.)
Exploring academia a bit (4 institutions for my bachelors, then 2 more doing boring but useful stuff in labs surrounded by PhDs), my rough impression is that the best teachers are adjuncts at low prestige colleges.
They tend to love their subject and relish the opportunity to teach smart people who are hungry to know things in their area. The fact that they are wasting their life and talents on a job that pays relatively little, and is insecure, and isn’t very high status… doesn’t bother them much because they just love teaching the subject.
We are using the word “coast” differently—what I meant by coasting is that many of the professors I know would have to actively sabotage their own research groups and collaborators to not produce ~five nice papers a year (genuine though perhaps not newsworthy contributions to the state of knowledge).
Of course, the state of affairs seriously varies with the quality of the institution.
I believe that you are correct in your observations regarding graduate level education. Allow me to offer my experiences in undergrad engineering:
In my undergraduate experience, I was of the opinion that a lot of professors simply didn’t bother to put in any effort. Countless times I would visit a professor’s office to be met with the physical manifestation of executive functioning deficits. Frankly, I expected better from professors who required that their students stay on top of 18 credit hours of engineering courses every semester. I sometimes would hope that this double standard was, in fact, malicious. At lest then I could still maintain that these professors were intelligent, albeit aloof (a phenomenon which I may discuss in a future post.) Unfortunately, I don’t think this is the case. I eventually settled on an approach of attending lectures, not to listen, but rather to study and complete homework on a fixed schedule. As somebody with diagnosed (mostly) non-social ASD, I eventually adapted to this environment by developing strategies to overcome my own executive functioning difficulties, so why couldn’t professors do the same? In several STEM courses, it took 3-6 weeks for professors to return graded exams, at which point it was far too late to actually implement fixes for my shortcomings on that particular exam.
- I might add that a lot of these experiences were relegated only to the engineering department. I took several elective courses in political science and international affairs. Much to my confusion, these courses offered everything that I was hoping to experience in the engineering program. I won’t bother to speculate as to why these areas of study had competent, kind, and intelligent professors. Perhaps somebody else (a liberal arts STEM double major?) could shed some light on this phenomenon.
It seems as though undergraduate professors claim to do two things: teach courses and publish research. When I looked into the latter, I found that most (all but one) of the faculty in my department hadn’t published anything since their dissertation (with one exception, a professor who “co-wrote” some 15 papers a year—with no obvious contributions, I might add.) So if STEM professors aren’t spending significant time on lectures (it seems to be common practice to recycle lecture slides that were concocted circa 2000, usually by other professors) and aren’t publishing research, what the hell are they doing? I think that your post makes a very good analogy for this “coasting” phenomenon that is so prevalent in academia. Imagine my shock when 90% of undergraduate professors were previous graduates of my university who floundered in a professional environment and decided to phone it in for the rest of their careers as tenured faculty...
Frankly, I’m not sure how to remedy this state of affairs. I am now of the opinion that professorship (in STEM, at any rate) is reserved for washed up and failed academics, a complete waste. I don’t necessarily think that this is a wholly systemic failure, mostly because I had some good experiences with professors. Is this a case of some bad apples that clutter the university system? If so, what hiring practices could dissuade these bad apples from joining the system? I hold the opinion that tenure is severely detrimental to the university system, since the safety that it provides does the opposite of encouraging professors to excel, not to mention how it is held over the heads of non-tenured faculty and used to take advantage of adjunct faculty.
This reply has turned into a bit of an off-the-rails rant, but perhaps it could be of use to students who are currently in or considering engineering or STEM as a course of study. My advice? talk to students at your prospective institutions and scour ratemyprof (or whatever the modern iteration is called) to get a general impression of your departments faculty (its a lot more accurate than professors would lead you to believe.)
Exploring academia a bit (4 institutions for my bachelors, then 2 more doing boring but useful stuff in labs surrounded by PhDs), my rough impression is that the best teachers are adjuncts at low prestige colleges.
They tend to love their subject and relish the opportunity to teach smart people who are hungry to know things in their area. The fact that they are wasting their life and talents on a job that pays relatively little, and is insecure, and isn’t very high status… doesn’t bother them much because they just love teaching the subject.
We are using the word “coast” differently—what I meant by coasting is that many of the professors I know would have to actively sabotage their own research groups and collaborators to not produce ~five nice papers a year (genuine though perhaps not newsworthy contributions to the state of knowledge).
Of course, the state of affairs seriously varies with the quality of the institution.