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Re: Lazy?



In response to my statement about my dean wanting all our faculty to be better than average, Hugh Haskell mentioned:

Was he raised in Lake Woebegon? Or maybe that's where he should start
recruiting his teachers.

Actually, that question has arisen quite often on my campus. There are some of us who think he listens to Prairie Home Companion
and believes everything he hears there. I'm not kidding, he literally says, "We need to recruit and keep only those faculty members
that are better than average." If he said this once it might be written off as a slip of the tongue, but he keeps saying it;
publicly. It even came up during a tenure decision.

I suppose one could rationalize that he wants us to have faculty members who are better than the national average. The problem is
that the criterion for determining average is the numerical ranking obtained from the bubble-sheet responses students complete for
our course evaluations. Thus, he is clearly comparing our faculty to our faculty when he tries to implement his policy.

In regard to another question about whether we would end up with one faculty member (as I said) or whether we would actually replace
half our faculty each year... the answer is not obvious. We lost a faculty member two years ago during the tenure determination I
mentioned above. We haven't replaced that person yet.

Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics and Chemistry
Chair of Sciences
Bluffton College
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu

This posting is the position of the writer, not that of SUNY-BSC, NAU or the AAPT.