Professor Fired for Requiring Students to Think
3rd November 2011
Seniors in Maranville’s “capstone” business strategies course complained because he didn’t lecture enough. After a year on the job, citing negative student course evaluations, the university denied Maranville tenure.
What was going on in Maranville’s classroom that generated such a backlash? He says he simply required students to do what most employers wish colleges would do: connect academic concepts to the real world. To facilitate that process, Maranville used the Socratic method, creating classroom dialogue by asking students open-ended questions that necessitated creative thought and participation—even if they hadn’t raised their hands. He also required them to work in teams and participate in small-group discussions during class time.
Pretty heinous.
November 3rd, 2011 at 10:00
I parted ways with a community college where I used to teach digital logic, basic electricity, and motors and controls over the same issue.
I expected students to master the material in the given time. It was Mission Impossible.
I didn’t have time to hold anybody’s hand, as the college had inexplicably concatenated two courses into one and there was too much material to cover; I was dealing with open-enrollment students who were for the most part unfamiliar with the concepts in any way and had shaky math skills (not talking calculus, here, just advanced algebra).
So I was faced with a choice: 1) Go slowly enough that everybody gets it, and leave out a third of the material (induction, capacitance, transformer theory, impedance, filters–you know, that unimportant stuff), or 2) go hell-bent-for-election and devil take the hindmost. I chose the latter course (pun intended). I began with 27 students and ended with 9. Needless to say, my student evaluations were not sterling, so I was canned. It didn’t break my heart. I didn’t really wish to be involved with that sort of fiasco, as it was detrimental and unfair to the students.
In the end, I don’t fault the students at all, as it is a community college and there is an open enrollment policy; this was an intro course, and one should (I think) reasonably expect that the course outline be tailored to folks who are returning to school, have limited time, and may not have been top of their class the first time around. Why the administration decided to “accelerate” it without also adding some prerequisites remains a mystery to me to this day.
November 3rd, 2011 at 11:22
Academia has been the cultural stronghold for socialism for decades. I guess the professors never expected the students to begin running the program. This is the equivalent of having the Cubans fire Castro.
Colleges are falling back on the capitalism they eschew publicly. There is an over-supply of professors and they can be replaced easily. There’s money to be made in running students through school as quickly as possible and little or no fallout over how uneducated their graduates may be.