About a week ago, professor Dominique Homberger, a tenured professor at Louisiana State University, was relieved of her teaching position because she was accused of making her teaching curriculum too difficult. About 90 percent of her class was failing or had dropped the class after the first of four tests.
Homberger has been a professor for more than thirty years teaching graduate and senior-level biology classes, and up until the latter half of the semester an “Introduction to Biology”.
In her introductory biology class, she gave quizzes at the beginning of each class. As for tests, instead of using the general format of four answers per multiple choice questions, she used ten.
She lectured the class at the beginning of the semester that she has high standards, but is very generous with points when a student demonstrates improvement throughout the course.
Homberger expected her students to make an extra effort to comprehend and apply the material, rather than just memorize and regurgitate facts. Because of her students’ inability to meet her standards, the students complained to the dean, and she was relieved of her position by the LSU administration.
Given the background of the professor, the prestige of LSU and the subject of the class, I find this to be absolutely terrible for higher education and our student body as a whole.
This act demonstrated by LSU’s administration undermines everything a professor works toward when pursuing her career — academic freedom.
The professor’s academic freedom has been undermined by lazy, over-privileged students — which hurt us all.
We need higher standards in our classrooms. If we do not have higher standards in our classrooms, how do we expect to gain a competitive advantage in the workplace when we graduate? What would you as a student have to offer if you were just handed your grade?
Higher standards in the classroom allow us to actually work for our grade. Higher standards give us the opportunity to not just memorize the material — but to apply it. Higher standards allow us to learn how to learn, learn how to be curious and learn how tackle problems outside of the classroom.
But as Homberger’s revoked position reflects, that is not what universities want.
Universities do not care about a student’s education or higher standards but about numbers. Those numbers would be how many students are enrolled in the university, how many students stay enrolled until graduation, and how much money the university is receiving from those students.
We have to understand that students like us are just tuition dollars to the university’s eyes. If we complain about standards being too high, the university will lower them. If a consensus is reached by students that a class is too difficult, the university will dismiss the professor — merely because the university does not want to see dollars lost to actual learning.
However, we should not be demanding lower standards, but higher standards. We should constantly push our university to give us better equipment, better professors and better classrooms.
Why? As students and future members of the workforce, we need an environment that will prepare us for the global marketplace.
We need to make sure professors’ and teachers’ academic freedom isn’t encroached upon because we need to be satisfied that our professors have the ability to teach us what they deem prevalent in the world outside our classrooms.
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mustafa 2 years, 1 month ago
“Try reading Paolo Freire or John Dewey on democratic education to open your mind to some different ideas about education.”
Different from what? When was the last time anyone heard advocacy for the rote method?
It is the long running dominance of ideas like Freire’s that have sparked resentment and calls for ending the tenure system, and sparked a drive for an Educational Bill of Rights.
check out http://studentsforacademicfreedom.org/
LauraGibbs 2 years, 1 month ago
Hi Jaco99, I have a different view of education than you do it seems. I see human beings as natural learners, and by putting your education in someone else's hands, you give up a precious freedom: the freedom to learn. Try reading Paolo Freire or John Dewey on democratic education to open your mind to some different ideas about education. It's not about meeting someone else's standards - it's about challenging yourself to learn something meaningful and important.
I understand your complaints about academic quality at OU - but that is a perpetual problem you will never solve because there is not going to be agreement about institutional change. All students at all universities complain about academic quality all the time. That is natural, and it is good: it is the beginning of students taking charge of their education. The educational needs of the students are heterogenous, not in agreement with the university's limited goals, and not universally shared among all students. The best you can hope for is agreement among a small group of like-minded students, in which case you should make a study group and work together, based on shared goals.
You argue that there are standards at OU and that the standards are low. The real issue is that there are no standards at all: professors grade arbitrarily, and the university gives them complete freedom to do that. If you think that the university is going to impose standards on professors, you are mistaken. The writer of the editorial sang the praises of academic freedom, and it is because of academic freedom that there will never be "standards" that professors are required to enforce.
Universities are not places where you will find standards - but they are places where you will find plenty of intelligent and exciting students and faculty and staff. Seek those people out, discover what you can learn from them. Don't let the university's sclerosis get in the way of your quest for knowledge - and asking them to impose standards on you may be something you regret. Here's a fable from Aesop: "There was a horse who was the sole owner of a meadow. Then a stag came and wreaked havoc in the meadow. The horse wanted to get revenge, so he asked a certain man if he would help him carry out a vendetta against the stag. The man agreed, provided that the horse took the bit in his mouth so that the man could ride him, wielding his javelin. The horse consented, and the man climbed on his back but instead of getting his revenge, the horse simply became a slave to the man." That meadow is the meadow of education, of which you are the owner, that stag is the annoying person in your Russian foreign policy class - and the man is the university, with the bridle being the standards you say you want: asking the university to put reins on your mind because of an annoying student in your Russian foreign policy class seems to me a very wrong strategy to pursue.
LauraGibbs 2 years, 1 month ago
Some students come to university for an education; some students come to do the minimum required to get a degree. There will always be that mix of students. So too with professors: some professors are here because they really care about teaching, some professors care very little about teaching. There will always be that mix of professors. So, if you are a student who cares about your education, the only way to avoid the frustration of dealing with students who don't want to learn and professors who don't want to teach is to SET YOUR OWN EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS. If you want to get a good education, take responsibility for it yourself. Go to the library and read books and academic journals. Go online and read more books and academic journals, watch lectures at iTunes University, participate in online learning communities dedicated to the topics you care about, publish the results of your own research online. Waiting for the university to take care of your needs is going to be a long wait. Learners have the power of learning right there in their own hands (and minds) - you don't need the university to get an education. You need the university to get a degree, yes, and if you take charge of managing your own education, getting the degree will be easy. It's the education that really matters in the end, and in the end it's up to the student to manage their own education. Waiting for someone else to do that for you is not a good educational strategy. The clock's ticking: go read! Then read some more. That's how to get an education. As long as the library is open or the Internet is on, there's nothing to stop you from getting a great education, raising your standards for yourself as high as you can.
Jaco99 2 years, 1 month ago
@Laura Gibbs:
But doesn't a university exist to provide the very educational opportunities that you claim we must seize on our own? Just because academic standards are often so low that we have no other recourse than to take our education into our own hands doesn't excuse the fact that these standards are low in the first place. You wouldn't tell some bright teenager stuck in a sub-par high school that, yes, the school might be bad, but it's still ok because the onus of learning is on YOUR shoulders. To do that would be to exculpate the school from its failure to provide meaningful intellectual stimulation. The attitude you evince seems to be more of an "overcoming adversity" sort of mindset that, while perhaps necessary, takes as a given low standards that should not be tolerated to begin with.
I agree that higher education, at least at OU, is a numbers and money racket. While some faculty members do seem to be more interested in research than in teaching, one main problem that I think exists at this university (and one that I have heard some graduate students complain about) is that there is no real "average" student between the bright and not-so-bright for the teachers to teach to. OU offers lots of scholarships to many smart, motivated students so that they choose to come to this school, but the majority of people in many classes are still going to be generally uninterested, and are here not because they love learning but to do the bare minimum necessary to get their diploma (as one person sitting next to me in a Russian Foreign Policy class once said, "You don't come to OU to be academic"). To which of these groups is a teacher to teach? More often than not, they adopt lower standards as opposed to higher ones. More state funding, smaller class sizes, raising admission standards, etc.... all this would certainly help, but these changes are slow and generally beyond the power of students to affect.
I agree with the sentiment of this article, and I thank the author for writing it, but I've heard many other students complain before about academic quality at OU. Now that we agree that standards are low, how do we, as students, raise them?
LauraGibbs 2 years, 1 month ago
"The long-running dominance of ideas like Freire"...? You lost me there, Mustafa. There is nothing much at the university which resembles anything like Freire's educational methods. I would be very glad if we remodeled the university with Freire as a guiding model. That, in my opinion, would be far preferable to this call for so-called "higher standards" by the original author of the editorial.
The website you have linked to has, as its motto, something antithetical to Paolo Freire's philosophy - how can there be a "disinterested pursuit of knowledge"...? (http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/about/) If people are disinterested, why would they pursue anything at all...? The "disinterestedness" of what passes for much of the college curriculum seems to me the biggest problem that students face: not lack of high standards, but lack of relevancy. Admittedly, that is a separate issue from what the original editorial was focused on, but my biggest problem as a teacher is finding ways to make my General Education courses relevant to student interests. The students are in my courses under duress (graduation requirement), so my hope is to find a way, nevertheless, to make the subject of interest to them personally, in the hopes that they will embrace the class as part of their education, making it something of real value to them. They are interested in getting a diploma, which is why they are in my classes. My goal as a teacher is to, somehow, find a way to create an educational interest in the class, too, in addition to its bureaucratic usefulness in their degree checklist.