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A few years ago, a book named Academically Adrift<\/a> pointed out the results everyone working in higher ed already knew: many college courses have no content. The book showed nearly half of students gain no measurable skill after years<\/em> of college.<\/p>\n How could this be? I mean, our colleges charge plenty, and any look at the syllabus and course requirements shows that our students must be reading fairly advanced content as well as writing about all the heady concepts they\u2019re reading about.Academically Adrift <\/u>found that despite what it says on the syllabus most students barely have to read, barely have to write, in their college courses, and can spend their years on campus without ever having to do as much reading as a single one of my blog posts, much less writing so much.<\/p>\n In other words, many of our campuses practice fraud. The worst offenders are community colleges, which studies have found to be unhinged<\/a>\u2014literally what you find on the syllabus and textbooks for the course has nothing to do with what actually happens in the course. Fraud.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy don\u2019t faculty stop the fraud?\u201d is a natural question, but the answer is simple: we\u2019ve tried. Any faculty who attempts to have standards is removed. At the universities, tenure has slowed down this process, but it takes little effort to see tenure is dying as an institution. Even without tenure, an entire department could form a unified front, though I\u2019ve seen multiple faculty fired for trying this.<\/p>\n The community colleges don\u2019t generally have tenure, and don\u2019t have departments, either. Instead, they\u2019re run from a top-down design, with most faculty utterly powerless. So, there\u2019s nothing to slow the fraud of community college.<\/p>\n Every few months we learn of new sex scandals on campus that went on for years, decades even. The only reason these scandals are eventually discovered is because the crimes are so horrible, the victims so numerous, that they can\u2019t be covered up forever.<\/p>\n On the other hand, the academic fraud, though vile, I concede isn\u2019t nearly as horrific as what went on in the Penn State showers. We also don\u2019t have nearly so many victims complaining\u2014not many kids will complain about a free \u2018A,\u2019 after all. I assure the gentle reader long running academic frauds are definitely in progress on many campuses. They\u2019ve been going on so long that faculty being fired for having integrity is something of a rare event nowadays, so I feel the need to highlight an example, to show that it still goes on:<\/p>\n College Prof Says he was Fired for not Dumbing Down his Course<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Now, obviously, admin doesn\u2019t tell faculty directly to \u201cdumb it down.\u201d What do they say?<\/p>\n Nathaniel Bork, a philosophy teacher, was fired after questioning the Community College of Aurora’s new “student success initiative.”<\/em><\/p>\n Doesn\u2019t \u201cstudent success initiative\u201d sound better than \u201cremove a few more chapters and writing assignments\u201d? It sure does, but the latter is more honest. On the surface you do get \u201cstudent success\u201d this way, but year after year of removing content leads to students now spending years on campus without having to do anything at all\u2026besides pay that tuition. \u201cSuck up all the student loan money\u201d is a success in administration\u2019s eyes, I assure the gentle reader.<\/em><\/p>\n The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) recently released a report about a community college professor who was terminated for maintaining high academic standards for his students. The higher ed institution was the Community College of Aurora (CCA), Colorado, and the professor was Nathaniel Bork, a teacher of philosophy.<\/p>\n I cite the link above; honest, there are scholars trying to keep academic standards, but it does no good. Admin holds all the cards. The largest sex scandals are probably going on at the universities (mostly because of sportsball), but the biggest academic scandals are at the community colleges. The gentle reader might recall the huge UNC scandal<\/a>, but that was revealed, after 18 years, because there were some protocols for revealing fraud that slowly did their job; the community college frauds are essentially immortal because they have no such protocols.<\/p>\n So what happened when this professor said he would continue to have academic standards?<\/p>\n [I]n September, Bork received a call from his department chair and dean at Aurora, who told him that he was done teaching there — effective immediately. The college eventually blamed the decision on what it called Bork\u2019s \u2018lack of effectiveness in implementing the philosophy curriculum redesign.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n Seriously, that\u2019s how quick it is. Complain, and you\u2019re gone, overnight. Oh, they\u2019ll use long words like \u201ccurriculum redesign\u201d but \u201cfraud\u201d really is all we\u2019re talking about here.<\/p>\n What exactly was the \u201credesign\u201d?<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026he\u2019d been asked to cut 20 percent of his introductory philosophy course content; require fewer writing assignments, with a new maximum of eight pages per semester; offer small-group activities every other class session; and make works by women and minority thinkers about 30 percent of the course\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Please understand, this course likely had already taken 20% cuts to content multiple times in previous years. Just as the \u201cCollege Algebra\u201d course I taught in community college now holds less than half the material than the algebra course I took in the 10th grade, so too are other courses finding their content reduced by admin to insignificance.<\/p>\n Administrative department head: \u201cWelcome to our new college algebra course. It\u2019s algebra without the algebra.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n –the above is from a state university I worked at.<\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019ve mentioned many times how the math classes have been gutted. The philosophy courses are being dumbed down for the same reason:<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026he was told to keep teaching this way until 80 percent of all student demographic groups were passing the course\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Again, this \u201c80% pass rate\u201d is the goal. Most faculty today get this memo, and simply pass everyone, even students who might not even have come to class or done even a single assignment (assuming the course has even a single assignment). Is education supposed to be about learning, or about just making it into the \u201cat least 80%\u201d category?<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026violated the spirit of Colorado law on guaranteed transfer courses to a four-year institution.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The above ultimately is the problem. Community colleges suck in students with promises of \u201cwe\u2019ll prepare you for university, and we\u2019re cheaper\u201d while the reality is very little of community college is worthwhile. It\u2019s why 80% of community college students get nothing from community college<\/a>. Imagine if the reality of my previous and documented sentence were well known\u2026would we still waste tax dollars on those pits?<\/p>\n Alas, that knowledge will likely never be known outside of this blog, any more than the fact that most community colleges have \u201ccleaned\u201d out the few remaining faculty who think there should be standards. For all I know, this will be the last faculty member that needed removal.<\/p>\n www.professorconfess.blogspot.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"