Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:56:39 -0500 (EST) From: Jamie Smith You've got some very interesting data and points in your article. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 04 Dec 1998 14:03:59 -0500 From: Peter Olsen I thought that it was very well thought out and excellently written. I particularly liked your proposal to let teachers "buy out of research." Now (as we used to say in the Coast Guard) "stand by for heavy rolls." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 04 Dec 1998 14:10:19 -0500 From: [REDACTED] I expect you to delete any reference to me on the web immediately. This is extremely unprofessional. You do not know of my service because you do not ask. You further do not seem to care that I am using over 25% of my salary as buyout. I think you run the risk of writing innaccurate documents on the web. This type of publishing is not sustainable. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 5 Dec 1998 03:52:07 -0500 (EST) From: "Dr. Alan Sherman" To: [REDACTED] Please let me know if there are any factual errors, or if you would like me to add any more specific detail (e.g an example of your service). One of the advantages of web-based public speech is the ability to modify documents (as I have just done) as the author sees fit, including in response to comments from others. By contrast, errors in printed journals cannot be easily corrected. Also, others are welcome to express their opinions in their own web documents. For example, if you would like to contribute any opinions on the issues addressed by my essay, I would be happy to link your comments to my essay. Web-based publishing is a wonderful democratic mechanism for free speech, which is a catalyst for constructive change. I hope that my article will help UMBC improve its education, research, and service missions. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 4 Dec 1998 14:09:42 -0500 From: "Pollack, Ann F." I read and enjoyed your reflections. From the experiences of myself and many of my friends as both students and professors, many universities could benefit from this type of introspection. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 04 Dec 1998 15:49:22 -0500 From: Larry Wilt Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I just finished reading it with a critical eye, and though I tried to find holes in it, I could not find any. Also, I liked the link to Caribbean vacations.... ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 04 Dec 1998 16:17:25 -0500 From: Henry Katz Just read your Reflections.html. Well said. I appreciate your thoughts on the subject. Many times, my wife has asked me - "Can't you ask them for more money?" Thanks again. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 04 Dec 1998 16:43:32 -0500 From: "Gary L. Burt" I enjoyed reading your essay and perspective on the issue. The lecturers had already noted several of your items. I would like to make a couple of points: A. Lectures have TAs helping in all of ours courses (that I am aware of). B. I think that we do not have more Undergraduate TAs because not more qualified candidates applied. C. I personally hate this large lecture hall introductory classes for several reasons, one being that I never wanted to take one. D. I enjoy teaching and the student contact, but I believe that a major part of this job is outside the classroom and working with the students one-on-one when they are having problems. In defense for UMBC, CMSC 201 has TA's so that the students meet in groups of forty outside of the lecture. Students get me for three hours a week and an hour with the TA. Then the TA's and I have office hours for the students. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1998 11:42:47 -0500 From: "Kenneth R. Berg" First I pass along a quip: When a colleague was recently awarded a reduced teaching load because of his excellence in teaching, someone commented that a truly superb teacher could be excused altogether from teaching, while of course the less capable would be penalized by giving them extra courses to teach. I have long mused on current trends, as have others, and I think the Chronicle of Higher Ed would welcome an article with some hard data. A point I have been pushing, although I have tired of repeating myself, is that faculty cannot keep pushing off responsibility for the large enrollment courses onto adjunct faculty. By "cannot" I mean that sooner or later someone, probably the state legislature, will make us regret it. The economics of the situation must be fully considered, and I believe adjucts can make both educational and economic sense, but it seems to me that more and more these courses, and the people who teach them, are not something we the tenured faculty think about. This can't be healthy, and I doubt that it is stable. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 4 Dec 1998 16:28:18 -0500 (EST) From: Steve Matuszek BTW I read your essay on teaching. It's very telling. I had noticed that professors like [REDACTED] never taught more than one course, but I'd assumed it was related to how much research they did in a more supply-and-demand type of way. I didn't know it was formalized to the point where you could "buy out" of teaching. Wow. Personally, I never had any trouble with any of my teachers -- but of course I started four years ago, and thus was lucky enough to have Chang for 201, Mayfield for 202, Stephens for 203, and Turner for 341. (I won't address what I thought of my 211 and 311 teachers, because I think that is more of a CS vs. EE issue.) The salary issue also hits close to home because my father, Dr. David Matuszek, is looking to get back into teaching CS after 15 miserable years in the industry. He was always an excellent teacher who didn't want to play publish-or-perish. He's an adjunct professor at Villanova now, but as you say, gets paid little enough that he's teaching "primarily for joy". If more schools were really as committed to teaching as research he'd be full-time somewhere right now. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 5 Dec 1998 22:40:01 -0500 (EST) From: "Curtis R. Menyuk" I read through your missive on undergraduate education and found it thought-provoking and well-written, although I disagree with it. In the "teaching vs. research" debate, UMBC has to make its choice as do all institutions. There is no doubt that research universities deliver education at a much higher cost than do non-research institutions. At the same time, the most sought-after degrees come from institutions like Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford which emphasize research in a far more single-minded way than we do. In brief, the research excellence of these institutions increases the reputation of these institutions which in turn increases the value of the degrees for the students. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 6 Dec 1998 04:18:07 -0500 (EST) From: "Dr. Alan Sherman" To: "Curtis R. Menyuk" Thank you for your thoughtful response. Perhaps I could and should have made my conclusions clearer. I am not saying that we should be a teaching-only institution. I think we should be (and are) an institution that has a balance of research, education, and service activities. I simply think that in our actions and values our balance is somewhat out of kilter. I focused on the economics of teaching. I could have made similar calculations for the economics of research. Just as a teaching-only school can deliver teaching more cheaply than a research-focused school; a research-only institute can deliver research more cheaply (e.g. with post-docs) than can a teaching-focused school. I would argue that the most sought-after technical degrees are mostly from schools that combine excellence in research and teaching, such as MIT and CalTech. There are also some highly sought-after degrees from schools (such as Swarthmore) that focus primarily on undergraduate education. Maybe the commonality is excellence in mission, not solely excellence in research. I think we at UMBC should strive for excellence in research and teaching, but not by unrealistically demanding dual excellence from each individual. Instead, as we do to some extent, we should demand minimal competence in both from all, and collective excellence from the group. I think in our current state we are a bit out of balance: we should be doing better in research and in teaching, and we should value teaching more than we do. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 6 Dec 1998 08:31:07 -0500 From: Tom O'Haver This is a very interesting and thought-provoking article. I agree (with a previous responder) that you should submit a version of it to a national publication. These problem seems to stem from a general lack of appreciation of teaching as a demanding *intellectual* endeavor. We appreciate and respect research, but we underestimate the intellectual aspect of good teaching. The public view of teacing, especially at the k-12 academic levels, is that it may be an emotionally demanding profession, but not particularly intellectually demanding (compared, for example to research, medicine, or law). Oddly, teaching seems to be free of the usual supply-and-demand dynamic. Usually, limited supply and great demand increase the value of a product or service. But repeated calls for more and better teachers, especially in urban areas and especially of sceince and math, has not radically increased the public view of those teachers. Why not? Perhaps part of the problem is that we that we are more likely to tolerate poor teaching, whereas we are less likely to tolerate poor research or poor medicine or poor law practice. I mean that we have more rigorous systems in place that evaluate the performance of researchers, doctors, and lawyers and that effectively "punish" poor performance. But the demand for teachers is so high that we dare not raise the bar too high or we won't be able to staff our classrooms. Strange, no? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 6 Dec 1998 13:48:46 -0500 From: "Thomas T. Field" Thanks for sending me a copy of your paper on teaching. You did a great job pointing out the inconsistency between our discourse and our practices. We really have not faced up to this dilemma--all of the committees I've been on have essentially thrown up their hands and admitted that we just have to accept the status quo, while inventing band-aids for the most salient abuses. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: THE FOLLOWING UNSOLICITED RELEVANT COMMENT WAS MADE BEFORE I WROTE MY ESSAY. Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:29:07 -0500 (EST) From: [REDACTED] [snip] There was an article in our school's weekly paper about the downfall of UMBC hiring so many part-time instructors. I unfortunately would have to agree with the article. I have only had 3 professors in CS; the rest were part-time teachers, and I'm ready to graduate. I think that a lot of the academic versus practical area of computer science is lost when being taught by practically all part-time outside people. In this major, these instructors don't seem as concerned with absolute correctness so much as "getting the idea," and seem to take a lot less responsibility for knowing what they're supposed to know. I can't tell you how many classes I've been in where I or someone else will point out that what they're teaching is in direct contradiction to what's written in a book, and they'll answer, "oh, the text is wrong," when truthfully they should say, "oh, I don't know what I'm talking about." And then when it comes time to get a recommendation, and no one you've had is around, it's all very frustrating. I could go on and on about my opinions of the department, but the big point of this email is that I trust the people that have offices in your little corner of ECS a lot more than I do many of the other teachers I've had these last four years. [snip] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 7 Dec 1998 09:45:23 -0500 From: Richard Bebee Well put. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 7 Dec 1998 15:33:23 -0500 (EST) From: Tom Anastasio Your continued interest in the undergrad program is very important. Your 'essay' contained some mind-bending ideas for me. Notably: - the Presidential Teaching Professor being 'rewarded' with _fewer_ teaching duties - the notion that a researcher can buy out of teaching but not vice-versa. I agree that these are telling indicators that the University is not as serious about teaching as it might be. A few comments from my experience: - John Pinkston has made an attempt to recognize the 'part-timers' by having an annual social gathering in our honor. The second such annual event is tonight. I think it's a positive step toward "encouraging part-time faculty to become more involved in the UMBC community." - You have identified two basic avenues of reward for full-time lecturers, namely pay and professional growth. Pay is a difficult issue - the University seems to have no trouble getting good lecturers at the current pay levels - why pay more? Opportunities for professional growth should be much more emphasized than it is. Lecturers will stay more current and will be rejuvenated by attendance at conferences and tutorials. Another possibility is for full-time tenure-track faculty to write lecturers in to their research grant proposals for summer work. I offer myself as an example. I did not consider applying for a full-time lecturer position because of the workload without balancing professional benefits. I would not have considered it at even twice the pay. - I do not think adjunct pay is an important issue. I suspect that most adjunct faculty have other sources of income and teach because they want to. Pay can't be insultingly low, but I do not think it motivates this group. CSEE seems to pay at about the going rate. My cousin is on the Math faculty at SUNY New Paltz - they pay their adjunct faculty (often researchers from nearby IBM) under $2000 per course (info from about 3 years ago) and have no problem filling the openings. I do have strong feelings about one aspect of pay - and this might be for full-time lecturers as well as for adjuncts. I came to this feeling after attending a departmental meeting at which Jo Ann Argersinger spoke. After saying how "excited she was about her work at UMBC" (evidently with a high decay rate), she talked about University "profit centers." This was a demoralizing revelation for me. I realized that the real drivers were not effective undergraduate teaching, no matter how "excited" the administrators may be. I had just taken on "one" section of 202 and one section of 341. Each 202 "section" had over 50 students for a total enrollment of well over 100 students. The pay: one section's worth - a great profit center. I was then given the responsibility of selecting students from the 341 hold list. The official class size is 40 and the hold list size was close to 20. Although I am free to restrict the class to the 40 registered students, I am not comfortable with doing that. Anyway, here's a suggestion: a section size should not exceed 40 for pay determination purposes. Pay should be a base pay for each course taught - currently around $3300 - and a per-student bonus for each student over 40 ($82.50 per student). A 202 adjunct instructor with 100 students would be paid $8250 ($3300 for the first 40 students, 82.50 each for the next 60). I know this is just $82.50 * 100, but I'm making the point that every course pays a minimum of $3300, even if fewer than 40 students. A 341 instructor who accepts 10 additional students would be paid $4125 rather than $3300. I think this scheme might encourage the administration to add sections rather than depend on the good will of overburdened instructors. It lessens the the financial advantage to the university of piling on to the instructor. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 07 Jan 1999 08:46:26 -0600 From: "Dr. Christian von Kerczek" I just had the opportunity to read your two documents on teaching ("Reflections on Teaching Computer Science at UMBC" and "Nurturing and Evaluating Effective Teaching at UMBC"). I want to express to you my compliments and gratitude for taking the time to produce such excellent documents. I completely agree with almost everything you have said in these documents. I support your sentiments and believe (hope) I have nurtured the same in my four year tenure as Interim Chair of Mechanical Engineering. Perhaps an interested group of faculty can get together as an informal advocacy group to support the further development and implementation of many of your ideas. I believe that for UMBC to honestly live up to its slogan of "Honors University" we, the faculty, must first and formost be honorable in living up to our commitments to students.The primary obligation we have is education of students and all we do, including research, must be informed by this obligation. In this regard I strongly agree with your sentiments expressed in the document "Reflections...". If teaching contributions (both qualitative and quantitative) were recognized with professional respect and rewards on the same basis as research we would truely be living up to our slogan. -----------------------------------------------------------------------