Job Discussion Forums

[holbrook]

I'm not so sure about the k-12 world, but certainly the "committee craze" here is a reflection of what is going on in higher education in North America. The glory days of the chilled-out university lecturer job are gone back home. Universities are no longer fountains of knowledge with a higher mission. They are constantly striving for increased enrolments, increased profits, increased faculty productivity values. �If you�re not tenured then you should be working 60 hours a week�, is now the norm. The way they accomplish this is through committee work and other additional duties such as editing a journal, running an center of some sort, writing grant proposals until they drop, etc.

As universities have gotten more professional rather than more academic, this fever for things other than teaching and learning has spread. It was manic in the HCT. Everyone was scrambling for the next big thing, the new PPDV course, WebCT courses juiced up by TATA, a masters degree in entrepreneurship (in conjunction with Harvard and MIT no less!), etc. Now apparently, each school is going to be a �Center for Excellence�. Forget about teaching and learning. After all, just because 75% of the students who enroll don't graduate, that doesn't mean our educational model isn't working for them or that we aren�t excellent. They constantly try to raise the standard despite the fact that the majority of students can't meet the existing standard. The solution: raise the rhetoric and make the standards higher, at least on paper. It looks good on the website. It also gives good ol� T.K. an opportunity to get some good photos taken and to have some nice trips abroad to research new opportunities. That and he can go to sleep knowing that no teacher under his control is getting off easy or enjoying a free ride. After all that is what is really important.

[holbrook]

sorry all. posted in the wrong place. This was supposed to be in the ECAE topic thread.