This remark that I should align more with department standards has been the resounding theme of my time at Berkeley, and Arthur Ogus’s comment in the April 18th, 2014 memo was not an isolated slip. On September 22nd, 2013 he wrote in an email “But I do think it that it [sic] is very important that you not deviate too far from the department norms.” On November 12th, 2014 he wrote “I hope that, on the basis of our conversation, you can further adjust to the norms of our department.” This raises the question: What does it mean to adhere to department norms if one has the highest student evaluation scores in the department, students performing statistically significantly better in subsequent courses, and faculty observations universally reporting “extraordinary skills at lecturing, presentation, and engaging students”?
This question is one that I asked, and in response it was made very clear to me what is meant by the norms of the department. It means teach from the textbook. It means stop emailing students with encouragement, handwritten notes and homework problems, and instead assign problems from the textbook at the start of the semester. It means stop using evidence-based practices like formative assessment. It means micro-manage the Graduate Student Instructors rather than allowing them to use their own, considerable, talent and creativity. And most of all it means this: Stop motivating students to work hard and attend class by being engaging, encouraging and inspiring, by sharing with them a passion for the beauty and wonder of mathematics, but instead by forcing them into obedience with endless busywork in the form of GPA-affecting homework and quizzes and assessments, day after day, semester after semester.
In a nutshell: Stop making us look bad. If you don’t, we’ll fire you.
“But I do think it that it [sic] is very important that you not deviate too far from the department norms.”
Yep.
Bureaucracies chew up and spit out people who deviate from norms. You apparently think that you are a better teacher. How relevant is that to your success in the bureaucracy? Is it necessarily beneficial? Do your students get a vote on whether you get tenure? Get a raise? Get a lab?
Some people at work work on the purported purpose of the bureaucracy Others work the bureaucratic reward and punishment system.
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
It’s also worth pointing out that conflicting institutional loyalties are a huge source of conflict. The “standard” practice in organizations is to collude with your direct management against their management—do things that favor your boss over your boss’s boss. Coward is doing things the ‘honest’ way, favoring his boss’s boss (i.e. the university as a whole) instead of his boss (the math department), which leads to both the conflict and his expectation that he’ll get support by making an ‘internal affair’ public.
But, of course, that also means he has lots of ready-made allies, regardless of the facts on the ground. We’ll see how this shakes out when more voices and details are added.
favoring his boss’s boss (i.e. the university as a whole) instead of his boss (the math department)
Favoring the “goals” of the organization as an abstraction over the actual punishment/reward structure of the living, breathing, and interacting cogs of the organization.
I’ve come to look at bureaucracies as parasites on the host organization.
Aligning the goals of the bureaucracy with the goals of the org is actually a very hard, very interesting, and very important problem.
Strange. Tenured professors get paid the same regardless of how many students they teach so it helps them if another instructor attracts lots of students thereby reducing the tenured professor’s teaching burden.
In the short term, yes. In the long term, no, especially for ‘support’ departments. At most large state schools, engineering is king, and physics and math are both subsidized by engineering because they need a sufficient number of professors to teach non-major physics and math classes to engineers. This isn’t to say that there’d be no math or physics without engineering, but that there would be less positions for math and physics faculty.
The math and physics departments, typically, insist on being research faculty, i.e. independent departments subsidized by the university as a whole, rather than pure service organizations. Coward, as a full-time lecturer, is in the ‘pure service’ role, and as one would expect the guy that’s specialized towards teaching does a much better job of teaching than the people specialized towards research. This is good for the engineering department but bad for the math department—instead of eight professors all teaching one non-major course each, you could have two lecturers teaching four non-major courses each, with the attendant loss of prestige, funding, and political clout for the department.
So his characterization of the department’s approach to him as “you’re making us look bad” seems probable to me, especially if the math department has been playing the “our job is hard, you need to fund us more so we can do better” card.
This seems strange to me. Engineering departments should have faculty that are perfectly capable of teaching the math and physics that their students will need. And this happens to a limited extent. For example, at UC Berkeley, the computer science department offers its own discrete math course instead of telling students to take the roughly equivalent discrete math course offered by the math department. Is there something preventing this from becoming more widespread?
This is good for the engineering department but bad for the math department—instead of eight professors all teaching one non-major course each, you could have two lecturers teaching four non-major courses each, with the attendant loss of prestige, funding, and political clout for the department.
Would the university really stop subsidizing Math and Physics dept’s to the same degree if it weren’t for their “service” obligations? I don’t think this is right—I think the administration is broadly happy with the status quo, in terms of prestige, etc. If the department has two full-time lecturers, the only consequence is that they will also hire a bunch of full-time researchers to balance things out. By contrast, the “service” role is probably a lot more important politically for departments which teach lots of fluffy GenEd courses.
As a more general observation, it’s hard to comment on this row without having some idea about the local office politics. These, of course, tend to be dominated by jockeying for power/status/prestige and not by discussions of effective teaching methods.
The political fault lines he’s describing exist at every flagship state public university, and so I’m not at all surprised to hear that a quake has happened along those lines at Berkeley.
But also most performers have a flair for the dramatic, and Coward’s excellent student reviews seem to come in part from his talent at performance. So his interpretations are likely massaged in some form, and the object-level claims could be easily exaggerated.
But he claims that he and the department differ on a fairly simple statistical claim—how to estimate the effect of his courses on students’ future performance. The related email correspondence is here, and well worth reading, both to judge that specific matter yourself, and get a sense of how defensive Coward can seem. (He’s definitely escalating emotionally, but justifiably is harder to know.)
My summary: In a report, Stark, a statistician, makes a three-way comparison between the three 1A classes (two of which were taught by Coward), and finds that they are not statistically significantly different. Coward asks why a three-way comparison is done, instead of comparing the Coward group to the non-Coward group. Stark replies that since the students were assigned non-randomly, we can’t separate the direct effect of instruction from any confounding variables.
Which is, of course, correct—it’s very likely that the students who got into the class with the instructor widely believed to be superior by students are more competent than the students who didn’t, and so should be expected to do better in future classes—but an equally valid point against the three-way comparison.
What I expect: even if we find a naturally randomized subset of students (maybe they are forced into certain sections only due to scheduling conflicts), or even if we find things to adjust for, we will find no significant effect. It’s nothing about Coward himself, it’s just hard to find effects.
But I don’t know if UC uses that sort of reasoning anyways to figure out which contracts to renew, I think adjuncts are super mistreated in general. I often defend academia on LW, but I think the tenure-track/adjunct system is super dysfunctional and awful.
Schools comparable to Berkeley have one of three common organizations of math teachers. One, Berkeley’s old structure, is to employ no lecturers. Another is to employ a lot of lecturers, whose job is simply to teach as well as possible.
But I think the most common organization is to employ a small number of lecturers who do a small amount of teaching, but whose real job is to handle the administrative details of teaching, such as placement of freshmen, curriculum design, and instructing graduate students in teaching. I think the complaints make most sense in the context of the department expecting him to grow into such a job.
Blowing the whistle on the uc berkeley mathematics department
Some people disagree with his version of events.
Yep.
Bureaucracies chew up and spit out people who deviate from norms. You apparently think that you are a better teacher. How relevant is that to your success in the bureaucracy? Is it necessarily beneficial? Do your students get a vote on whether you get tenure? Get a raise? Get a lab?
Some people at work work on the purported purpose of the bureaucracy Others work the bureaucratic reward and punishment system.
It’s also worth pointing out that conflicting institutional loyalties are a huge source of conflict. The “standard” practice in organizations is to collude with your direct management against their management—do things that favor your boss over your boss’s boss. Coward is doing things the ‘honest’ way, favoring his boss’s boss (i.e. the university as a whole) instead of his boss (the math department), which leads to both the conflict and his expectation that he’ll get support by making an ‘internal affair’ public.
But, of course, that also means he has lots of ready-made allies, regardless of the facts on the ground. We’ll see how this shakes out when more voices and details are added.
Favoring the “goals” of the organization as an abstraction over the actual punishment/reward structure of the living, breathing, and interacting cogs of the organization.
I’ve come to look at bureaucracies as parasites on the host organization.
Aligning the goals of the bureaucracy with the goals of the org is actually a very hard, very interesting, and very important problem.
Strange. Tenured professors get paid the same regardless of how many students they teach so it helps them if another instructor attracts lots of students thereby reducing the tenured professor’s teaching burden.
In the short term, yes. In the long term, no, especially for ‘support’ departments. At most large state schools, engineering is king, and physics and math are both subsidized by engineering because they need a sufficient number of professors to teach non-major physics and math classes to engineers. This isn’t to say that there’d be no math or physics without engineering, but that there would be less positions for math and physics faculty.
The math and physics departments, typically, insist on being research faculty, i.e. independent departments subsidized by the university as a whole, rather than pure service organizations. Coward, as a full-time lecturer, is in the ‘pure service’ role, and as one would expect the guy that’s specialized towards teaching does a much better job of teaching than the people specialized towards research. This is good for the engineering department but bad for the math department—instead of eight professors all teaching one non-major course each, you could have two lecturers teaching four non-major courses each, with the attendant loss of prestige, funding, and political clout for the department.
So his characterization of the department’s approach to him as “you’re making us look bad” seems probable to me, especially if the math department has been playing the “our job is hard, you need to fund us more so we can do better” card.
This seems strange to me. Engineering departments should have faculty that are perfectly capable of teaching the math and physics that their students will need. And this happens to a limited extent. For example, at UC Berkeley, the computer science department offers its own discrete math course instead of telling students to take the roughly equivalent discrete math course offered by the math department. Is there something preventing this from becoming more widespread?
Would the university really stop subsidizing Math and Physics dept’s to the same degree if it weren’t for their “service” obligations? I don’t think this is right—I think the administration is broadly happy with the status quo, in terms of prestige, etc. If the department has two full-time lecturers, the only consequence is that they will also hire a bunch of full-time researchers to balance things out. By contrast, the “service” role is probably a lot more important politically for departments which teach lots of fluffy GenEd courses.
Are we sure this man is telling the truth?
As a more general observation, it’s hard to comment on this row without having some idea about the local office politics. These, of course, tend to be dominated by jockeying for power/status/prestige and not by discussions of effective teaching methods.
The political fault lines he’s describing exist at every flagship state public university, and so I’m not at all surprised to hear that a quake has happened along those lines at Berkeley.
But also most performers have a flair for the dramatic, and Coward’s excellent student reviews seem to come in part from his talent at performance. So his interpretations are likely massaged in some form, and the object-level claims could be easily exaggerated.
But he claims that he and the department differ on a fairly simple statistical claim—how to estimate the effect of his courses on students’ future performance. The related email correspondence is here, and well worth reading, both to judge that specific matter yourself, and get a sense of how defensive Coward can seem. (He’s definitely escalating emotionally, but justifiably is harder to know.)
My summary: In a report, Stark, a statistician, makes a three-way comparison between the three 1A classes (two of which were taught by Coward), and finds that they are not statistically significantly different. Coward asks why a three-way comparison is done, instead of comparing the Coward group to the non-Coward group. Stark replies that since the students were assigned non-randomly, we can’t separate the direct effect of instruction from any confounding variables.
Which is, of course, correct—it’s very likely that the students who got into the class with the instructor widely believed to be superior by students are more competent than the students who didn’t, and so should be expected to do better in future classes—but an equally valid point against the three-way comparison.
What I expect: even if we find a naturally randomized subset of students (maybe they are forced into certain sections only due to scheduling conflicts), or even if we find things to adjust for, we will find no significant effect. It’s nothing about Coward himself, it’s just hard to find effects.
But I don’t know if UC uses that sort of reasoning anyways to figure out which contracts to renew, I think adjuncts are super mistreated in general. I often defend academia on LW, but I think the tenure-track/adjunct system is super dysfunctional and awful.
Schools comparable to Berkeley have one of three common organizations of math teachers. One, Berkeley’s old structure, is to employ no lecturers. Another is to employ a lot of lecturers, whose job is simply to teach as well as possible.
But I think the most common organization is to employ a small number of lecturers who do a small amount of teaching, but whose real job is to handle the administrative details of teaching, such as placement of freshmen, curriculum design, and instructing graduate students in teaching. I think the complaints make most sense in the context of the department expecting him to grow into such a job.
“Align more with department standards” sounds like shorthand for some more specific concerns. Coward doesn’t spell out what those concerns are.