Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

Alexander, if your students are giving you a 6.4-6.5 out of 7, for calc 1a and 1b, you're a beast.

"My Fall 2013 Math 1A students were tracked into the next course in the sequence, Math 1B, and it was found that their average grade in Math 1B was 0.17 grade points higher than that of those students who took Math 1A with another instructor."

0.17. Not even a whole point.

Student evaluations don't really count since those are highly subjective. Students tend to hastily mark whatever they want on them because they want to get the evaluations over with as soon as possible. If a professor is somewhat amicable and invests a moderate level of effort into his/her teaching, then it's not hard to score at least a 6 on average on these evaluations (as students would mark either 6 or 7 in such a case).

Anyway, his performance as a lecturer is irrelevant to his argument. There are three criteria that junior faculty are assessed against in order to become tenured at UC Berkeley (or, otherwise, dismissed): teaching quality, reputation and research. Funny how he left out the last bit. He hasn't published anything since 2013.

And the university is probably firing him to hire another professor at a cheaper salary in order to save money, contrary to his belief that the university is firing him because of disagreements with his teaching philosophy. Universities tend to do this to professors who don't have much research potential and don't teach specialized, upper division courses. The UC system is crippled financially, so departments are more inclined to carry out dismissals of non-tenured professors who don't publish much and who solely teach lower division courses. Non-tenured professors can be fired at will. That's just another day in the life of academia.

The part about the micro-managing harasser and treatment of women, staff and lecturers is definitely worrisome, though. But we need to be careful about believing in these implications absolutely because of Coward's state of mind at the moment. He has already blown the quality of his teaching out of proportion.

Some things stand out from a quick skim of the personnel file/included complaint. Among these: he did not practically assign homework or have regular quizzes. This was noted as not being consistent with department norms. It actually _is_ of value to have consistency between multiple sections of introductory classes and as preparation for follow on classes in the same sequences (e.g Calc 1, 2 3 having similar structures in class organization) he seems to have disagreed philosophically with his boss (department chair) on this front. There are some other parts of the files posted that suggest he apparently did not work well with his graduate student instructors (teaching assistants). In my mind those are big enough reasons to let someone go.

He might be a great instructor. It might be a huge mistake for them to let him go, but it certainly doesn't seem like the only available explanations are completely specious or wrongly-motivated reasons. Also missing from submitted link is some info in the complaint that this was attempted to be worked out with a new incoming department chair, as evidenced by this being posted it seems like that didn't work out.