By Professor
Doom
I can’t emphasize enough how scary it is
to work in higher education. Granted, if you’re an administrator, you’re
guaranteed pay raises and advancement no matter how poorly you do your job, but
if you’re an academic, you’re on eggshells all the time.
The reason for this is our systems are
loaded down with bureaucrats whose very job is to find faculty guilty of
something, and punish them for it. The most trivial accusation by a student
causes insanities1 of administrators to swoop in and justify their
job.
Allow me to set the scene for the
latest. A law professor asks a test question. It’s a multiple choice legal
question, and I’ll put a snippet here:
P owned and member managed “Day Spa & Massage
Therapy Company, LLC.” P catered to men and women. Among other services, P
offered Brazilian and bikini waxes – sometimes called “Sphynx,” bare waxing, or
Hollywood waxing…
Now, I granted the question has a vaguely
sexual nature, but this sort of stuff comes up often in lawsuits, so it doesn’t
seem overboard. The question offers a choice of 4 answers, after it describes
the case in detail, regarding whether there was harassment:
(A) Yes, because T had established that A was a servant who was
placed into A’s position as an Aesthetician, which enabled A to harm to T.
(B) No, because T expressly and impliedly consented to A touching
T in any manner that was reasonable for A to provide the FB service that T
requested.
(C) Yes, because P benefited from the revenue paid by T to P for
services performed by A.
(D) No.
This is the kind of stuff legal students
should know. Two students complained about the nature of the question. In the
olden days, admin would be an actual faculty member, would take 5 minutes to
look at the question, and tell the students to calm down and focus on learning.
But now we have whole fiefdoms whose
entire purpose is to search out and investigate in the manner of a witch hunt.
The fiefdoms also get to mete out punishments, and even administer those
punishments…the gentle reader can guess how often faculty are found guilty in
this system.
First comes the investigation:
I emphasize: 504 days to investigate the students’ complaint, over one test
question, a question that takes all of 5 minutes to read. Again, actual faculty
would have dismissed the case, because actual faculty care about education and
research (i.e., the whole point of higher education), and not so much about not
making students uncomfortable.
But admin cares about justifying their
job, so you’d better believe they’ll spend well over a year, blowing a million
or more of student loan money on what should have been a trivial investigation.
It isn’t just the faculty under investigation who live in fear: we all know
that stepping out of line, an invisible line only administrators can see, could
just as easily subject any us to a year or more of purgatory.
So, the committee of witch hunters takes
forever to investigate (read?) this one frickin’ question. Well, at least we
can take comfort in that, given how much time admin put into it, they’ll come
to the right decision and dismiss the complaint, right?
No way:
…administrators determined that Robinson would be
required to undergo mandatory sensitivity training, prior administrative review
of future test questions, and classroom observation. Robinson also received a
stern warning that any further “violations” of the university’s Title IX
policies may result in his termination.
What a beating! I’ve talked about that “sensitivity
training” before,
it’s excruciating. He’ll have a further humiliation of needing administrative
approval for his test questions, and classroom observations. The gentle reader
needs to know how nerve-wracking it is to have clueless admin sit in your class
and tell you how to do your job (I remember spending a decade at a community
college, and every “classroom observation” was given by an utterly unqualified
administrator, who nevertheless felt the need to make idiotic suggestions every
year).
You want to bet every other professor on
that campus will make sure nothing (arbitrarily) objectionable comes up in
their class? How do you teach anything if you can’t push boundaries even a tiny
bit?
Look, I’m no fan of lawyers, but we really
do need to train these people to deal with unsavory questions. The chilling
effect here is not restricted to just this one school, because out-of-control
administrative fiefdoms occupy many schools. It’s why professors are reluctant to
teach rape law—if
one student doesn’t like the topic, even though it’s the subject of the course, he could have his career destroyed.
The institution here does have a free speech policy, and promises to grant it to
faculty. I’ve never seen administration honor policy when it gets in their way,
in fact, I’ve seen them violate policy at every opportunity where doing so is
in their favor.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education wrote to Howard on June 16 demanding that Robinson’s
sanctions be removed. Howard did not respond by FIRE’s June 30 deadline.
--of course they didn’t…why should they care at
all?
The professor can certainly try to fight
for what should be an obvious right to ask questions but I know what will
happen if he tries to appeal the ruling of the insanity…they’re reject it. This
just isn’t a system designed for fairness, it’s designed to support and
reinforce administrative power in every way.
The decision for professor Robinson here
is if he wants to undergo the punishments, or take his own employer to court,
which, naturally, could take a year or more to resolve.
Focusing on how this matters to the
typical reader: why would you want your kid to pay $100,000 to get anything
at all out of such an insane system?
1) Just as there are schools of fish,
murders of crows, and prides of lions, I propose a word to describe a group of
administrators: insanity. I’m open to other suggestions, for readers that would
like to make some.
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