I think this goes far beyond complaining about getting fired, and delves into the pernicious attitudes of the department's faculty. For example:
"Given the success I am having with students, one might think that the Mathematics Department leadership would be expressing curiosity about how I am achieving that success. Instead, Craig Evans [the interim chair of the department] in early 2014 asked me 'If you had a job at McDonalds and came along with all these new ideas, how long do you think you'd carry on working there?' The fact that the now Interim Chair of the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department should compare undergraduate education to fast food reveals everything you need to know about how students are regarded by the leading clique of men at the helm of the Mathematics Department of the number one public university in the world."
Should faculty be punished for having new ideas about teaching (which happen to be successful[1], and well-liked by students)?
[1] "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."
Should departments have standards they expect their lecturers to enforce?
People would actively welcome new approaches to teaching math. It's fucking frustrating not getting through to your students or having them dislike the course. Most of the faculty has tenure and the focus is largely (but not entirely) on research. THE IDEA THAT PEOPLE ARE THREATENED BY HIS SUCCESS IS ABSURD.
He is succeeding in the truly obvious way. Lowering standards and making it easy for students to ace his class without the skills the university has deemed necessary.
If he was really so deeply gifted at teaching he could have just used the same final exam as another faculty member and taught his students that material. Why doesn't he?
I'm not sure you read the article correctly. He was asked to make his tests easier, and his students performed better in subsequent classes taught by different professors.
I would like to see the Department's response too. Hopefully, they reply with their reasons rather than attack the argument that Coward has written here.
As a former CAL student, I am saddened to read about this.
I didn't have to take Math 1A or any math course for that matter, but I did have to take an AC course per University requirements. I wasn't looking forward to it.
I ended up taking the Southern Border with Professor Shaiken. That was by far one of the most educational and interesting courses I had taken at CAL.
I too would like to see the University's side, but I am inclined to believe they can't respond for legal reasons, and if they could their response would be far more vanilla then Prof. Coward's side.
Indeed. It actually puts UC Berkeley in a pretty horrible position by going public like this. It does not look good for employers to have the same kind of public litany of complaints against an employee.
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.
"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)"
Apparently, learning the material better is more important to future success than consistency: the students in his classes did better in the following classes by .17 grade points than students from other (presumably more consistent) classes.
As a UC Berkeley student who's never taken one of Coward's classes, I've heard great things from every single friend of mine whose taken his class ("I love Coward" is heard a lot). I know students are already rallying to keep him at Cal. However, I think that perhaps the Math Department at Cal doesn't deserve such a great professor if the system is as decrepit as described.
More rotten news from Berkeley. Just this week, it was revealed that the university administration decided a warning was sufficient punishment after a Title IX investigation revealed Prof. Geoff Marcy participated in a decade of abusive and harassing behavior.
> In June, the university concluded that Dr. Marcy had engaged in inappropriate behavior with students, including groping them, kissing them and touching or massaging them.
Keep in mind how you would handle this situation if you managed a large and well-established dev team with procedures and policies you worked hard on and are proud of.
It is not enough for a team member to be fantastic in a solo role. I'd be more interested in hearing from other faculty than I would from the students, who don't much experience actually working with Coward.
Right. I was skeptical in first few paragraphs, since students' teaching assessments do have their flaws. But if there was a statistically significant improvement in his students performance in later classes, then the man's doing his job.
Yes, there could still be confounding factors. He is seen as an enjoyable lecturer, and students who care about their classes enough to select the better lecturer might be better students. But still.
If you want to continue the analogy to software engineering, the modules he's producing are students, and they are meeting their specifications (later performance) quite well.
A software dev team requires far more one-on-one interaction between "faculty members" than teaching does (where faculty are the ones producing the software and the students are the users).
And in any case, if someone on a dev team got significantly better numbers by bucking the trends, I would be obligated to try and understand their methods and help them gain greater acceptance. It doesn't make sense to remove someone who gets results. It makes sense to integrate them.
If your procedures and policies within a well established team cause poor performance, then I think your pride is probable unjustified.
Mathematics is actually fascinating, but teaching and listening to math lectures is generally not interesting at all. Anyone who can teach it and keep
Students interested and have them understand the material is a gem and should be kept at all costs!
It's not really comparable between a dev team and the teaching position. At the very least, there are argument to be made that superstar but annoying dev can have detrimental effect on other devs. There are approximately 0 chance that an amazing professor can have negative effect on other professor's teaching ability (yes, they can, but you know what I meant and please don't get into pedantry here).
The closer comparison would be a Big 4 accounting partner (or law firm partner) that bring in revenue, is well loved by his clients. You know what would happen if the firm fires them? The clients leave with the partner. Luckily for Berkeley their clients can't leave nilly wily here.
Edit: On second reading, this was mentioned: "Further, the current Interim Chair, Craig Evans, explained that I am causing problems because students are not signing up for other Professors' classes on account of me. This is to be observed this semester, Fall 2015."
Yeah, if this was some consulting professional firm, the firm would be in big trouble already.
"Further, the current Interim Chair, Craig Evans, explained that I am causing problems because students are not signing up for other Professors' classes on account of me."
Perhaps it's the other professors who are causing the problem by not putting any effort into teaching well?
But it is a solo role. There is no team, no procedures, no policies.
I taught math as an adjunct at a Big Ten university with a prestigious math department several years ago. I never once met with any member of the faculty, even my supervisor, and nobody ever observed my teaching. All of the sections of the course that I taught had the same syllabus and exams. I had students from other sections sitting in on my lectures.
As for hearing from faculty, oddly enough I was on the other side of the issue as well, since I also taught the 3rd year "weeder" course in electrical engineering. My students were woefully unprepared in math despite N semesters of calculus in the math department. Once during a break in the activity, I asked my engineering students how the university could improve engineering education. Their consensus: Better math teaching.
I'm a bit puzzled by the statement that he is asking "campus authorities" to "overrule" his firing. Why would he want to continue working there, or, how could he expect to be able to work in a department after indicting it in this fashion? With this document hasn't he pretty thoroughly burned his bridges?
Because the student body, even those who haven't had him as a lecturer, adore him. He may be burning bridges with others in the department, but he has an incredibly strong bridge with the rest of campus.
for most employment stuff you go through the company's internal grievance procedures first (and if those procedures are inadequate it helps you) before going to courts.
although if he was going to take this to court I'm surprised he created the webpage.
> I'm a bit puzzled by the statement that he is asking "campus authorities" to "overrule" his firing. Why would he want to continue working there, or, how could he expect to be able to work in a department after indicting it in this fashion? With this document hasn't he pretty thoroughly burned his bridges?
He probably doesn't expect to keep working there. However, the department can't quietly give him bad references to torpedo his attempts to get a job elsewhere.
His capability is now acknowledged and in the public record such that they can't deny it.
So, he now doesn't have to explain the lack of a reference when he applies for a new job. Fairly smart maneuver actually.
Instead of teaching at a large research school which cares more about professors obtaining grants, he should teach at a small liberal-artsy school where the professors are expected to spend more of their time actually teaching students.
He'll have more students (and therefore more total impact) at a large public school.
Also, maybe the goal is to change the expectation that research universities lack good teachers? Public colleges educate many times more students than private ones, let alone small liberal arts schools.
Sometimes I ask the question, "What would I want if I were God of Everything?"
It makes sense to have elite universities, where the people who society will shove millions of dollars in grant money all go to get educated. And if I were God of Everything, I'd want them taught by excellent, dedicated educators. Right?
Most mathematicians prefer research to teaching. Some absolutely detest teaching and hate the fact that they're forced to do it, while some rather like teaching and just wish it didn't take up so much time, but pretty much all of them would rather be doing research.
So the idea of employing a full-time lecturer seems quite appealing -- let the lecturers take care of all the boring crap like teaching freshmen how to integrate, and leave the research to the professors.
But wait! What if the university starts to figure out that they can get all their teaching done waaay more cheaply just by employing full-time lecturers? Professors have been doing well for the past few centuries by selling the idea that only a researcher is qualified to teach at the highest levels, and hence that they should be allowed to spend most of their time thinking about mathematics and only be obliged to teach a couple of classes a year. Full-time lecturers threaten not just the jobs of mathematics professors, but the entire future of global mathematics
Having done one part of undergrad at a "liberal-artsy school" and another part at a larger tech school, I couldn't agree more.
If you were a lecturer at a research-focused institution, in which the quality of your teaching is a minor factor in your "success", and the social norm is mediocre teaching, would you teach at a high level?
If you care deeply about educating students, and you are able to do a good job of that with large lecture groups, then choosing to move to a position that slashes your class size by 75%+ would be shooting yourself in the foot, wouldn't it?
> The Mathematics Department uses its privileged role in providing service teaching for undergraduates in all the sciences and social sciences to justify its size and all the trappings that go with that like funding and office space.
The above is a very important point and deserves attention in its own right. What it means is that because the requirements for graduation in a particular liberal arts major include several math courses, this gets the math department lots of headcount which translates to budget.
The key lesson for students is to try to avoid those "cattle car" classes with tons of students competing to meet a requirement that they are not interested in learning about.
What a great and inspiring letter from someone who is clearly under significant public and private pressure; I'm sure he was repeatedly advised not to go public in any way by friends, enemies and lawyers on both sides.
My favorite part is where he imagines the Math department is "jolly cross".
No, he's saying the other departments (engineering and physical science) who are supposed to be "served" by the math dept. are "jolly cross" at the mathematicians for shirking their duties. This situation is by no means limited to Berkeley. UCSB did an excellent job but other universities I have worked at I have heard exactly the same complaints.
My bad; I was just so into reading 'jolly cross' in his letter, I forgot just who was cross.
I have a mathematics degree, and I can say that most mathematicians I have known consider the math needed for most physics and engineering undergraduate degrees to be deadly boring. It's a rare math professor who enjoys teaching calculus year after year.
My university did not have this budget-grabbing approach from the theoretical math department; I think I can understand both the appeal of it, and the perils from the perspective of the department. 20 years after the choice is made to grab budget with large freshman calculus seminars, it makes sense to me you'd have a bunch of bad behavior and culture embedded.
I agree. He really knows how to substantiate his grievances with choice words and data.
I don't know any of the players involved in this drama but the letter was so damning that I could not help but look up profiles of Stark, Ogus, Christ, and Evans just to get a picture of their faces.
Politically, this was an excellent play - with his popularity among students, the Math department (and in particular, named faculty) will have a really tough time getting students in their classes.
I don't know the full story and obviously his perspective is biased, but all the same, I pity the fool who has to battle his wits.
I tried to be a skeptic reading his commentary, but I definitely drank his kool aid. That being said... as a healthy dose of realism, nobody will care next year. The administration can easily just ignore this.
I hope they can work it out. It would be a shame to lose someone who loves teaching and who students appreciate. My 1A prof at Cal said openly (and with a dash of humor) that he was being forced to lecture and would rather do his research but that he periodically had to teach a class. I wonder if that was the accepted culture in the department and Coward broke a bit against the status quo.
Mine too!!!! Harbir Lamba at George Mason University called us all spoiled brat's, and said he hated teaching, and would much rather be doing research. There was no humor in his voice whatsoever. He really hated being forced to teach.
Unpopular opinion, but I think he's being overly dramatic.
"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.
He isn't employed as a research professor. He's employed as a lecturer. Berkeley does have a lecturer position with security of employment (commonly called lecturer SOE or teaching professor). These positions are evaluated on teaching rather than research. I don't know how common it is in other departments, but I know the EECS department employs several teaching professors (which means many classes, especially 61A and 61B, are taught by professors whose primary job is teaching).
If you read the whole article you'll see that he's actually lower paid. One of the reasons the department doesn't like him is that he demonstrates that it's possible to teach more students better (even if just slightly) at a lower salary, and that scares them because they're so focused on increasing their budget.
His salary is $67,886. Are you really going to hire somebody to do his job for less money than that?
In regards to your points about research, maybe the math department should consider establishing a "teaching professor" role like the EECS department has done. Most of the lower division introductory CS courses are taught by teaching professors like Paul Hilfinger, John Denero, Dan Garcia, and Josh Hug. Given that math is so important to a variety of majors on campus, why shouldn't we demand that large, lower division math courses be taught by people who are experts in teaching?
$67K is on the high end of the spectrum for a newly seasoned non-tenured faculty member. Anyway, teaching salaries are required to increase incrementally, so his original starting salary was most likely lower than that salary.
Most universities, particularly public ones, will engage in the practice of recycling lower-division teaching faculty every so often in order to avoid the wage jump from non-tenure status to tenure status.
Yeah, established teaching positions are a thing in other industrialized countries like Canada. The public higher-education system in the state of California has many flaws, and the absence of established teaching positions is one of them ... because the system is financially crippled.
And that's the point I'm trying to make here. Coward should not be mad at UC Berkeley's Math Department. He thinks the buck starts and stops with the Math Department. The department is the way it is because of the greater UC system's financial insolvency molded by factors out of the control of UC Berkeley's Math Department and UC Berkeley as a whole. The UC system sucks because of inappropriate state economic policies over the past decade or so that include egregious spending on unnecessary things.
It seems pretty clear that it is immensely difficult to score at least a 6 average on these evaluations. Based on the article, it sounds sufficiently difficult that almost no one else managed to score above a 6 in two decades.
Student evaluations are heavily influenced by perception of the professor's personality. Look on Ninja Courses and you'll see what I'm talking about. Coward has a cult of influence that makes him seem like a close friend to his students, and this no doubt skews his ratings and potentially distorts students' perception of the professor's performance as a teacher (rather than his personality).
There are professors whose teaching quality is actually proficient and sometimes excellent, but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc. Student evaluations are flawed in the same way intelligence tests are flawed; student evaluations favor professors who speak and communicate most closely to the popular consciousness of students at the time in the same way intelligence tests are biased against non-native test-takers (some questions posed on intelligence tests may use culturally native objects).
> There are professors whose teaching quality is actually proficient and sometimes excellent, but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc
And those teachers deserve to have lower student ratings, because the quality of the experience for the students is drastically lower even if they learn the material at relatively the same level of competence. I myself have social deficiencies, and I don't expect people to give me sympathy points if I ended up lecturing a large class.
I fail to see how anything you've written about Coward's "cult of personality" is bad at all.
>are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well
How can your teaching quality be proficient if you can't speak English well? Sure there are teachers who get unfair evaluations because they have a bit of an accent, but if you actually can't speak English well, how are you effectively teaching in English?
Though I think most of VanillaSwirls comments are generally confused, there are some biases that show up in this space.
In particular, people rate the intelligibility/clarity of Caucasian speakers higher than that of East Asians even when the audio is the same.[0]
Key quote from page 444:
In a typical study in this paradigm, participants listened to 4 minutes of a tape-recorded lecture produced by a native speaker of standard American English. Some participants were lad[sic] to believe that they were listening to a North American NS[native speaker] instructor, whereas others were lead to believe that the instructor was an international NNS[non-native speaker].
[...]
[I]ndeed, listeners who were exposed to the Chinese/NNS guise perceived more of a foreign accent and scored lower on a recall test than those who were exposed to the Caucasian/NS guise even though the audiotape they heard was exactly identical (standard American English).
Yeah, that's definitely true. My brother is an applied linguistics grad student, so I've heard this before.
I've had instructors who had accents but could still speak English very well, and many people just dismissed them outright as unintelligible without even trying.
But I've also had instructors who just weren't fluent in English (mostly grad student instructors). When VanillaSwirls said they didn't speak English well, that's what I was thinking of.
>but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc. Student evaluations are flawed in the same way intelligence tests are flawed; student evaluations favor professors who speak and communicate most closely to the popular consciousness of students at the time in the same way intelligence tests are biased against non-native test-takers (some questions posed on intelligence tests may use culturally native objects).
Teaching is intrinsically tied to communication. Failure to communicate, failure to speak english well, is a failure in performing the art of teaching.
Who do you think the primary beneficiary of rating systems are, students or teachers?
Any benefit the teachers see from knowing their ratings is purely so that they can improve the experience for their students. If a professor can't speak english well or have social deficiencies preventing from communicating clearly, they aren't excellent teachers.
Have a Berkeley math degree. Two observations. Student ratings are whack. I had a professor I thought was really good but had an average rating. I had one fellow student state that he hated the professor. I am pretty sure the professor did nothing to him that deserved that hatred. People don't like it when they don't do as well as they expect. Second, it appears that the math department hires based on research because I had a newly minted professor who was just plain indecipherable.
Conventional wisdom among teachers is that ratings are mainly a function of the grades that students expect to receive in the course. I was in the room when two profs were discussing their grading policies, and one of them flat-out wanted to give easy grades because he was coming up on tenure.
I found this snippet from an open letter he wrote to the Mathematics Department in the past:
> you instructed me to show a draft of my final to another very eminent member of faculty and former winner of
the distinguished teaching award. His comment on a draft that contained 8 questions was that it was already too long
and too hard, and should be no longer. I had originally been planning on asking 15 or so questions, including some
difficult ones, but I was not allowed to do so. In the end we settled on 12 questions. The result of this intervention by
you and other faculty was that the median score was over 90%, and in order to keep to departmental grade
distributions I had to set the A- cutoff at 93%
The implication here seems to be that his final exam was notably harder than is typical and yet he was forced to throttle the cutoff for an A- to enforce regulated grade distributions (which in and of itself is a horrendous policy).
Too many universities fail to teach and only use unreasonably challenging tests to filter students.
You know you have an exemplary teacher when his students start owning these crazy tests. This is what every educational institution should strive for. Teaching is an art, and this man represents the epitome of the art.
I have a triple major from Cal with math among them. All I can say is that Berkeley math classes were the most brutal, boring, and demotivating classes that I've ever encountered. For the longest time I tried to suck it up and blame myself. Luckily, since then I've had enough great classes and mentors to realize it really was the department and its professors that made me miserable, and I overcame the massive GPA drop and near-suicidal tendencies that Berkeley Math drove me to.
Student ratings for undergrad math in particular are problematic because courses like 1* and 16* are mostly taken by students majoring in non-math subjects who are only taking the course because they are required to pass it.
That's the case at every university; students are, for the most part, whiny entitled drunk and high children -- especially in intro classes. Giving their opinions influence over an adult's career is absolutely insane.
The skillset required to really get through to kids like that is entirely divorced from teaching more advanced classes or research: it's half nannying and half high-school football coach with a splash of the subject material.
And every department hires almost entirely based on research they have to more and more as budgets are slashed since research is their only opportunity to bring in more funding.
Except that this isn't just petty political infighting among the faculty over office space and such. It affects students' educations, which are pretty high stakes (the main purpose of the university, some might even say).
A skillful writer can make any job sound indispensable. Money is a better indicator than words when it comes to what society really values beneath all the soundbites.
Money also flows freer from where it is more available, though. Your statement would imply that rich people's proclivities reflect general values, regardless of the source of their wealth, which doesn't seem right.
I think the stakes are quite high. If he is truly a superior lecturer, at stake is the calculus education of over 800 students per year at one of the top schools in the nation, many of whom will be future scientists and engineers.
I graduated from Cal in 2013 in Physics and CS. I had a full time lecturer (not a professor) for a course in Analytic Mechanics and the teacher (Charman) was in a similar situation. Despite having ratings well above average and being immensely popular, he was let go. It seems like lecturers are treated as second class citizens, much like contract workers or outsourced positions.
That's definitely not true in the CS department, at the very least. Lecturers in the CS department can get "security of employment" which is tenure in everything but name and, while I was there, most of the intro courses and some advanced undergraduate courses were taught by lecturers like that.
Of course, the CS department is in a different college (Engineering), has a different culture and, probably, way more funding than the math or physics departments, so there's plenty of reasons for it to be different.
Now that may be the problem. Perhaps the mathematics department should be moved to Engineering. Stanford did that with computer science back in the 1980s. It used to be part of Arts and Sciences, run by a rotating committee, and was graduate-only. The education side was disorganized, with schedules and staffing not matching up with admissions. The entire department was transferred to Engineering, was better organized, and got much better on the educational side.
The research side was dominated by logicians to and through the "AI Winter". Then they brought in machine learning people for the DARPA Grand Challenge, and that turned the research side around. Now the machine learning people are in charge, and most of the logicians and expert systems people have retired.
While EECS treats its lecturers well, they are still essentially adjuncts. Lecturer SOE is very different from just lecturer, because as you pointed out they have tenure. From what I can tell of my time there, the EECS department very much appreciates good/great Lecturers SOE teaching the lower div classes. Apparently the math departmnet does not.
In addition there are further mischaracterizations of my teaching in my personnel file that I am prevented from sharing because the University claims it is their property.
That's worth confirming with a lawyer. AFAIK most states require employers to let you copy your personnel file.
My guess would be that you're allowed to copy, but they probably don't want you to publicly share what you've copied. Whether that desire for you not to disclose is legally enforceable should be confirmed with a lawyer, of course.
I had Ogus at Berkeley! He still looks like a lemming. :)
Keep in mind this is only one side of the story.
Also, if you are going to come out against Berkeley, Klein Perkins, or someone else equally powerful then please make sure you can easily prove every allegation. It's the best way to avoid defamation lawsuits.
My lawyer said "It's not slander if it's true." ;)
Curious. Was it ever considered that this may be fallout from the decision to hold classes during the campus AFSCME strike back in late November 2013, justification outlined in an impassioned e-mail sent to students? see: http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2014-... and the collection of heated pro/con responses which followed. Absolutely bizarre. Reminds me of the dismissal of the physicist David Bohm from Princeton in early 1950s orchestrated by then president Harold Dodds, a rabid anticommunist with close ties to the McCarthy era State Department who viewed Bohm as a Marxist unionist. May be what goes around comes around. Does Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks and a majority in the Math department happen to have close ties to Sacramento and AFSCME? If so the real rationale for proposed dismissal may be that the professor is deemed insufficiently Marxist unionist by the powers that be. Just glad I had the financial resources to eschew that institutional quagmire.
Doubtful. I was a student during that time and I can't recall any math or CS (or STEM) classes that cancelled a class session because of the strike. The most that happened was some teaching assistants cancelled their section for one day.
Started reading Peat's 'Infinite Potential - The Life and Times of David Bohm' yesterday and came across this post on HN. Knowing of the stir created by the 2013 e-mail, the possible parallels with events associated with Bohm's dismissal from Princeton (although for seemingly opposite political reasons) were striking. As an irrelevant aside, Bohm's 3-world intentionality/stochastic/objectified space hypothesis is interesting because it reduces the Schrödinger cat metaphor to a useful fiction.
If what he Dr. Coward says is true, and I have no reason to doubt him, this makes me sad as a Berkeley alum. I remember taking Math 53 with an awful professor who could barely speak English and refused to cover the material, asking us to just read the material ourselves and ask him questions. This professor had been there for many years despite repeatedly getting in trouble for failing too many students (that he neglected to teach). This is unfortunately the state of universities now, teaching is nothing, research is everything. Lecturers are treated like crap and barely scraping by. I wonder when the devaluation of teaching will catch up to us; maybe another country that values teachers will be able to attract more of the best students in the world.
I wish I knew some good fix to split up research and lecturing. The teaching should be done by people who are good at it and the research by people who are good at that. I suppose there might be some areas where there are just too few people qualified to teach something at the proper level, but I somehow doubt that's true at the undergraduate level.
I remember distinctly which professors of mine were effective at conveying the material and an understanding of it vs. those who were not.
I would hope there would be funding from somewhere, at least at the state/federal level. Mathematical research has proven very important to a number of advances in the sciences, even research that was once thought to have no practical use.
I think a pretty overwhelming majority of math research funding comes from the fact that math departments are service departments for engineering, physics, etc.
The NSF spends a total of just under 250 million per year on math research. The DoD and DoE also have around 100 million each. Some mathematicians estimate [1] about 30k mathematicians in the US, which at a conservative salary of 50k per year (!) is already 1.5 billion.
In other words, either gov't agencies would have to roughly triple their funding (just for math), or about a third of mathematicians would lose their jobs. These are, of course, very rough estimates.
I wonder if we had the same guy, Russian, with his own formalism and his own textbook published online? I remember thinking it may well have had merit but since most of us in there were applying the subject matter in our respective fields which stuck to the traditional formalism. .. it was a challenge.
I think it was a special form of multi variable, forget what he called it. Lecture was in mining. Honestly I went to lecture too rarely to give fair judgement
Perelman? He's brilliant, but certainly put off a lot of engineering and other students who were just there to fill recs and expected to be handheld through the course.
No, the prof I was referring to was Chinese. It's pretty hard to identify that one prof who can't speak English and can't teach, when there are so many to choose from.
That said, I've also had great profs at Berkeley as well, though I suspect they do it out of the love of their profession the subject matter, rather than career advancement.
Professors are never required to have a single teaching class. They themselves are not taught how to actually teach students. This is why so many professors are just smart but can't teach to save their lives.
They are ill prepared by their degree and can have huge communication or social issues that stand between them and their students.
Administrators usually push to give good grades for colleges with open enrollment. So the classes are easy and the test are easy. Make me sad and is part fo the reason I left working at a University.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadI'm not necessarily inclined to take this guy's side of the dispute just because I read it first.
"Given the success I am having with students, one might think that the Mathematics Department leadership would be expressing curiosity about how I am achieving that success. Instead, Craig Evans [the interim chair of the department] in early 2014 asked me 'If you had a job at McDonalds and came along with all these new ideas, how long do you think you'd carry on working there?' The fact that the now Interim Chair of the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department should compare undergraduate education to fast food reveals everything you need to know about how students are regarded by the leading clique of men at the helm of the Mathematics Department of the number one public university in the world."
Should faculty be punished for having new ideas about teaching (which happen to be successful[1], and well-liked by students)?
[1] "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."
People would actively welcome new approaches to teaching math. It's fucking frustrating not getting through to your students or having them dislike the course. Most of the faculty has tenure and the focus is largely (but not entirely) on research. THE IDEA THAT PEOPLE ARE THREATENED BY HIS SUCCESS IS ABSURD.
He is succeeding in the truly obvious way. Lowering standards and making it easy for students to ace his class without the skills the university has deemed necessary.
If he was really so deeply gifted at teaching he could have just used the same final exam as another faculty member and taught his students that material. Why doesn't he?
I didn't have to take Math 1A or any math course for that matter, but I did have to take an AC course per University requirements. I wasn't looking forward to it.
I ended up taking the Southern Border with Professor Shaiken. That was by far one of the most educational and interesting courses I had taken at CAL.
I too would like to see the University's side, but I am inclined to believe they can't respond for legal reasons, and if they could their response would be far more vanilla then Prof. Coward's side.
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.
Apparently, learning the material better is more important to future success than consistency: the students in his classes did better in the following classes by .17 grade points than students from other (presumably more consistent) classes.
At the very least, Coward does not deserve them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/science/astronomer-apologi...
Very gross.
It is not enough for a team member to be fantastic in a solo role. I'd be more interested in hearing from other faculty than I would from the students, who don't much experience actually working with Coward.
Yes, there could still be confounding factors. He is seen as an enjoyable lecturer, and students who care about their classes enough to select the better lecturer might be better students. But still.
If you want to continue the analogy to software engineering, the modules he's producing are students, and they are meeting their specifications (later performance) quite well.
And in any case, if someone on a dev team got significantly better numbers by bucking the trends, I would be obligated to try and understand their methods and help them gain greater acceptance. It doesn't make sense to remove someone who gets results. It makes sense to integrate them.
Did that turn out bad for the team? Not really. Life goes on. And sometimes its just a good learning experience for both parties.
Mathematics is actually fascinating, but teaching and listening to math lectures is generally not interesting at all. Anyone who can teach it and keep Students interested and have them understand the material is a gem and should be kept at all costs!
The closer comparison would be a Big 4 accounting partner (or law firm partner) that bring in revenue, is well loved by his clients. You know what would happen if the firm fires them? The clients leave with the partner. Luckily for Berkeley their clients can't leave nilly wily here.
Edit: On second reading, this was mentioned: "Further, the current Interim Chair, Craig Evans, explained that I am causing problems because students are not signing up for other Professors' classes on account of me. This is to be observed this semester, Fall 2015."
Yeah, if this was some consulting professional firm, the firm would be in big trouble already.
Perhaps it's the other professors who are causing the problem by not putting any effort into teaching well?
I taught math as an adjunct at a Big Ten university with a prestigious math department several years ago. I never once met with any member of the faculty, even my supervisor, and nobody ever observed my teaching. All of the sections of the course that I taught had the same syllabus and exams. I had students from other sections sitting in on my lectures.
As for hearing from faculty, oddly enough I was on the other side of the issue as well, since I also taught the 3rd year "weeder" course in electrical engineering. My students were woefully unprepared in math despite N semesters of calculus in the math department. Once during a break in the activity, I asked my engineering students how the university could improve engineering education. Their consensus: Better math teaching.
for most employment stuff you go through the company's internal grievance procedures first (and if those procedures are inadequate it helps you) before going to courts.
although if he was going to take this to court I'm surprised he created the webpage.
He probably doesn't expect to keep working there. However, the department can't quietly give him bad references to torpedo his attempts to get a job elsewhere.
His capability is now acknowledged and in the public record such that they can't deny it.
So, he now doesn't have to explain the lack of a reference when he applies for a new job. Fairly smart maneuver actually.
Also, maybe the goal is to change the expectation that research universities lack good teachers? Public colleges educate many times more students than private ones, let alone small liberal arts schools.
Sometimes I ask the question, "What would I want if I were God of Everything?"
It makes sense to have elite universities, where the people who society will shove millions of dollars in grant money all go to get educated. And if I were God of Everything, I'd want them taught by excellent, dedicated educators. Right?
> "We explained to you before you accepted the position that the idea of employing a full-time lecturer is controversial in our department."
So the idea of employing a full-time lecturer seems quite appealing -- let the lecturers take care of all the boring crap like teaching freshmen how to integrate, and leave the research to the professors.
But wait! What if the university starts to figure out that they can get all their teaching done waaay more cheaply just by employing full-time lecturers? Professors have been doing well for the past few centuries by selling the idea that only a researcher is qualified to teach at the highest levels, and hence that they should be allowed to spend most of their time thinking about mathematics and only be obliged to teach a couple of classes a year. Full-time lecturers threaten not just the jobs of mathematics professors, but the entire future of global mathematics
So I can definitely sympathise with this view.
If you were a lecturer at a research-focused institution, in which the quality of your teaching is a minor factor in your "success", and the social norm is mediocre teaching, would you teach at a high level?
The above is a very important point and deserves attention in its own right. What it means is that because the requirements for graduation in a particular liberal arts major include several math courses, this gets the math department lots of headcount which translates to budget.
The key lesson for students is to try to avoid those "cattle car" classes with tons of students competing to meet a requirement that they are not interested in learning about.
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 favorite part is where he imagines the Math department is "jolly cross".
I have a mathematics degree, and I can say that most mathematicians I have known consider the math needed for most physics and engineering undergraduate degrees to be deadly boring. It's a rare math professor who enjoys teaching calculus year after year.
My university did not have this budget-grabbing approach from the theoretical math department; I think I can understand both the appeal of it, and the perils from the perspective of the department. 20 years after the choice is made to grab budget with large freshman calculus seminars, it makes sense to me you'd have a bunch of bad behavior and culture embedded.
Politically, this was an excellent play - with his popularity among students, the Math department (and in particular, named faculty) will have a really tough time getting students in their classes.
I don't know the full story and obviously his perspective is biased, but all the same, I pity the fool who has to battle his wits.
"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.
In regards to your points about research, maybe the math department should consider establishing a "teaching professor" role like the EECS department has done. Most of the lower division introductory CS courses are taught by teaching professors like Paul Hilfinger, John Denero, Dan Garcia, and Josh Hug. Given that math is so important to a variety of majors on campus, why shouldn't we demand that large, lower division math courses be taught by people who are experts in teaching?
Most universities, particularly public ones, will engage in the practice of recycling lower-division teaching faculty every so often in order to avoid the wage jump from non-tenure status to tenure status.
Yeah, established teaching positions are a thing in other industrialized countries like Canada. The public higher-education system in the state of California has many flaws, and the absence of established teaching positions is one of them ... because the system is financially crippled.
And that's the point I'm trying to make here. Coward should not be mad at UC Berkeley's Math Department. He thinks the buck starts and stops with the Math Department. The department is the way it is because of the greater UC system's financial insolvency molded by factors out of the control of UC Berkeley's Math Department and UC Berkeley as a whole. The UC system sucks because of inappropriate state economic policies over the past decade or so that include egregious spending on unnecessary things.
The post suggests that he's "full-time lecturer". The grievance says that his job title is "Lecturer". Why would that require him to publish research?
There are professors whose teaching quality is actually proficient and sometimes excellent, but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc. Student evaluations are flawed in the same way intelligence tests are flawed; student evaluations favor professors who speak and communicate most closely to the popular consciousness of students at the time in the same way intelligence tests are biased against non-native test-takers (some questions posed on intelligence tests may use culturally native objects).
And those teachers deserve to have lower student ratings, because the quality of the experience for the students is drastically lower even if they learn the material at relatively the same level of competence. I myself have social deficiencies, and I don't expect people to give me sympathy points if I ended up lecturing a large class.
I fail to see how anything you've written about Coward's "cult of personality" is bad at all.
How can your teaching quality be proficient if you can't speak English well? Sure there are teachers who get unfair evaluations because they have a bit of an accent, but if you actually can't speak English well, how are you effectively teaching in English?
[0]: http://www.academia.edu/6126025/Expectations_on_Speech_Evalu...
Key quote from page 444: In a typical study in this paradigm, participants listened to 4 minutes of a tape-recorded lecture produced by a native speaker of standard American English. Some participants were lad[sic] to believe that they were listening to a North American NS[native speaker] instructor, whereas others were lead to believe that the instructor was an international NNS[non-native speaker].
[...]
[I]ndeed, listeners who were exposed to the Chinese/NNS guise perceived more of a foreign accent and scored lower on a recall test than those who were exposed to the Caucasian/NS guise even though the audiotape they heard was exactly identical (standard American English).
I've had instructors who had accents but could still speak English very well, and many people just dismissed them outright as unintelligible without even trying.
But I've also had instructors who just weren't fluent in English (mostly grad student instructors). When VanillaSwirls said they didn't speak English well, that's what I was thinking of.
Teaching is intrinsically tied to communication. Failure to communicate, failure to speak english well, is a failure in performing the art of teaching.
Any benefit the teachers see from knowing their ratings is purely so that they can improve the experience for their students. If a professor can't speak english well or have social deficiencies preventing from communicating clearly, they aren't excellent teachers.
> you instructed me to show a draft of my final to another very eminent member of faculty and former winner of the distinguished teaching award. His comment on a draft that contained 8 questions was that it was already too long and too hard, and should be no longer. I had originally been planning on asking 15 or so questions, including some difficult ones, but I was not allowed to do so. In the end we settled on 12 questions. The result of this intervention by you and other faculty was that the median score was over 90%, and in order to keep to departmental grade distributions I had to set the A- cutoff at 93%
The implication here seems to be that his final exam was notably harder than is typical and yet he was forced to throttle the cutoff for an A- to enforce regulated grade distributions (which in and of itself is a horrendous policy).
The letter is here:
http://alexandercoward.com/OpenLetter.pdf
I think it's hard to ignore this in combination with the highest teaching scores anyone in the department has received in apparently 18 years.
You know you have an exemplary teacher when his students start owning these crazy tests. This is what every educational institution should strive for. Teaching is an art, and this man represents the epitome of the art.
The skillset required to really get through to kids like that is entirely divorced from teaching more advanced classes or research: it's half nannying and half high-school football coach with a splash of the subject material.
And every department hires almost entirely based on research they have to more and more as budgets are slashed since research is their only opportunity to bring in more funding.
"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law
Of course, the CS department is in a different college (Engineering), has a different culture and, probably, way more funding than the math or physics departments, so there's plenty of reasons for it to be different.
The research side was dominated by logicians to and through the "AI Winter". Then they brought in machine learning people for the DARPA Grand Challenge, and that turned the research side around. Now the machine learning people are in charge, and most of the logicians and expert systems people have retired.
Science progresses one funeral at a time.
That's worth confirming with a lawyer. AFAIK most states require employers to let you copy your personnel file.
Keep in mind this is only one side of the story.
Also, if you are going to come out against Berkeley, Klein Perkins, or someone else equally powerful then please make sure you can easily prove every allegation. It's the best way to avoid defamation lawsuits.
My lawyer said "It's not slander if it's true." ;)
Teaching is nothing, research is nothing; grants, tuition, and donations are everything.
I don't know what's sadder, how far universities have fallen, or the fact that there's no sign that these trends are slowing.
I remember distinctly which professors of mine were effective at conveying the material and an understanding of it vs. those who were not.
The NSF spends a total of just under 250 million per year on math research. The DoD and DoE also have around 100 million each. Some mathematicians estimate [1] about 30k mathematicians in the US, which at a conservative salary of 50k per year (!) is already 1.5 billion.
In other words, either gov't agencies would have to roughly triple their funding (just for math), or about a third of mathematicians would lose their jobs. These are, of course, very rough estimates.
[1]: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/5485/how-many-mathematicia...
And yes, I don't know where the funding would come from if math education was commoditized, as perhaps it should be.
I think it was a special form of multi variable, forget what he called it. Lecture was in mining. Honestly I went to lecture too rarely to give fair judgement
That said, I've also had great profs at Berkeley as well, though I suspect they do it out of the love of their profession the subject matter, rather than career advancement.
They are ill prepared by their degree and can have huge communication or social issues that stand between them and their students.
Administrators usually push to give good grades for colleges with open enrollment. So the classes are easy and the test are easy. Make me sad and is part fo the reason I left working at a University.