George Leef :Proof that Top Priority For College Officials Isn’t Teaching
http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/415614/proof-top-priority-college-officials-isnt-teaching-george-leef?target=topic&tid=3264
You learn a lot by observing the way people choose to spend their money. Forget about what they say, and look at what they do. College officials endless proclaim their devotion to academic excellence, student achievement, blah, blah, blah. But instead of putting their resources into the faculty, more and more they prefer to spend money on administrators and bureaucrats who don’t teach at all. That’s the argument Mary Grabar makes in her new essay “Save Money With Adjuncts, Spend It On Bureaucrats.”
From her own experience teaching English at Georgia Perimeter College, Mary points to expensive but academically risible initiatives such as “civic learning.” A highly paid VP at the school called for courses with a “civic-engagement or service-learning component.” Among the results was having students serve as docents at the Margaret Mitchell House. Mary comments, “I failed to see how such activities, whether ‘global’ or ushering at a local historic site, would help students struggling with grammar.”
Since there is no way to tell whether college students have really learned much, officials can devote their limited resources to all sorts of extraneous things. It certainly would be good to see, as Mary writes, “the ouster of bureaucrats and the restoration of higher education to its rightful purpose,” but we won’t see anything like that until there is some feedback loop that rewards officials for doing a good job educationally and punishes those who squander resources on frills and trendy ideological diversions.
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