Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t

The main point which hit home for me was that the students are running the asylum now and there is no respect for the professors or faculty attempting to teach them.

From the comments:

The key to this article is the explicit statement that administrators are aligned with students against faculty. I work at a major university, and my department head has often sided with students without even contacting me to hear my take on the incident. I get an angry email from him saying that a student complained that I say hello (Really! I didn’t say hello!), or that I must give a student the opportunity to do an assignment after the deadline, because she said it was impossible to do it for technical problems. In fact, though, 21 students had completed it successfully, despite the alleged technical problems. Still, I was ordered to allow the student to complete the assignment late, for full credit. I was never consulted, or I would have mentioned that the student spends most of class on facebook, among other things. Another time, a student sent him an email saying that I “diminished her” in class. The head sent her a passage from the student handbook saying that students are to take it up with the professor. She refused, saying that made her “uncomfortable.” Instead, the department head insisted on visiting my class to observe my teaching. At the time, I said that he was spineless -- that she had told him to jump, and he did. That may or may not have been correct, but I’ve since realized that backbone had nothing to do with it. Instead, the head was actively searching for opportunities to baby students. It explains, for example why I was told to teach a student to use a calculator that I do not even require in my class.

I feel like this professors experience is fairly consistent with what I know. I had six friends who all went into academia and education. Within a year nearly all had exited the profession and only two remained. They all cited the same thing - the over coddling of students by administration or faculty. The stories they told were eye opening to say the least. The crazy part? This was going on in the early aughts, nearly two decades earlier.

A great contrast to another article currently trending on HN, with no discussion yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10815072

I read "Gettin’ bodied by Classics: the joys and challenges of public scholarship" (to whose HN discussion I linked above) and thought, wow, cool, who is Hermes Trismegistus and what's the reference? Hey, those articles on exclusion, inclusion, and the ideas of citizenship from antiquity to today sound really interesting. Wow, a Princeton classicist doing something I can understand! I'm going to look at buying his book, this guy is rad. (Halfway through morning coffee, so excuse the shallowness of the thoughts.)

I read this OP and started rolling my eyes again. Right, right, kids these days, telling kids to think about their Halloween costumes is so PC (telling kids to think! can't have that! wait, next paragraph he wants kids to think, just about something else). As I continued to read, I realized why we have such different experiences in part: I teach math. I can see that my students did learn something this semester. Now most of them can discuss geometric Brownian motion. That's cool. As the author here says,

Many of the engineers who were painted purple during frosh week are now running the institutions where we teach. And they weren’t kidding when they were pissing on our guitars in the quad. It was a promissory note on the future — a future they could feel in their bones belonged to them, not us.

I'm one of them -- the heathen, uneducated STEM people! If I call his thoughts about Camus "fluff" he no longer has any defense! Needing to be polite in his response renders him... gosh, impotent? in the face of such trenchant criticism. Hm.

Things are different on the STEM side of campus than the classics side. Many on that side say that they're terrified of their students (http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid) but it seems to me that these folks are terrified of discussion -- and the other thing to note is that every single one of them brings up the fear of losing their job over a discussion. It's curious, in one of the only professions in the world with tenure. Why are all these guys afraid of losing their job for challenging the PC SJW orthodoxy or whatever? For professors with tenure, this is a fear entirely unsupported by statistics. The only case even marginally close is when Salaita had a job offer withdrawn because of his views on Israel and Palestine, and I think he was on what would be stereotyped as the PC side at the moment. So, tenure gives golden handcuffs -- you can't move institutions -- but you'll still have your job even if you're a grump.

Ok, so why are these profs on the liberal arts side scared? Because of the adjunctivization of higher ed -- no tenure for most (including me). One great discussion here: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/5/8736591/liberal-professor-identi... Because of the corporatization of higher ed: more discussion here. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/05/college... Because the STEM and business profs are "winning," as the OP said. Because he can't see his own relevance anymore, unlike Dan-el Padilla Peralta. Because he can't connect with his students anymore.

It's hilarious that these problems are so acutely felt when more American kids than ever feel required to go to college. The audience is bigger than ever. That means the message can't be as niche, but this is still an opportunity. Hate online education? Why, and what are you going to do about it? Hate telling students they should be thoughtful when considering cultural appropriation? Have the cojones to join the discussion in a more substantive way than "overcoddled kids these days!"

That was my impression as well. I love how, in one anecdote, he talks about how students "don't read" and puts the example that given they know they can get a B without the book, don't bother; some how this is the students' fault. Just the selective blindness to it all, how can anyone be surprised that given no external nor internal motivation any human being is going to be arsed to go out of their way to do things.

He is constantly complaining about "declining academic standards" but provides no quantitative evidence to back his claim. Grade inflation is likely a problem, simply because if one institution does it all are forced to inflate along with it or risk devaluing their degrees, but it's incredibly difficult to quantify. Incoming students have the higher standardized test scores, a huge belt of tools between the internet and computers, and an unprecedented network of peers for when the tools are sufficient. Should we surprised scores tend to rise, is it the university's responsibility to crank up the difficulty and keep averages as they were in the 80s? These are the questions dinosaurs like the OP can't and won't answer.

Not just any piece of paper, one thats slightly thicker than your average A4 sheet. But don't worry, with new advancements in academic technology, you will undoubtedly see that certificates thinner and lighter than ever before.

In all seriousness though, this is not a liberal problem. Its just that universities just don't provide the cost to benefit ratio that they once did over alternate mediums of learning.

Seems the main problem here is the high tuition fees, which to some degree give the students the impression that they deserve good service for which they have paid. Coming from a country where most of university is state funded (minus a nominal fee of about 300€ per semester), I can see that I might have had other expectations of my professors had I paid ten thousands of dollars per year.