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Office-Hour Habits of the North American Professor
An anonymous reader writes "For those of you who wonder just exactly what it is that your advisor is up to when you try to find him and meet with him, The Chronicle of Higher Education has a study on the
Office-Hour Habits of the North American Professor."
Tenure seems far more detrimental to the North American University than it is useful.
To this day I can't understand why professors think that I should give a crap because they are a prof. It has been my experience so far that professors don't think that they need to follow the rules. I'm not sure where this attitude comes from, but I don't see it in any other profession except for politicians, and professors are usually too anti-social for politics (or too left-wing radical).
I just took a class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the prof decided not to lecture for the last month of the course.....and the school let him get away with it!
I thought that professors were supposed to be at a school to teach. Most of the ones that I have dealt with have done everything in their power to avoid as much as possible of their teaching responsiblility.
Why do we tolerate that?
"No Comm, No Bomb"
How did this get modded up?
While I joke about being in liberal arts as much as the next person - as I say i'm in the collegs of Arts and Crafts - liberal arts includes many disciples. Economics, History, Political Science, etc, etc. Not "hurl crap at a canvas"
I could just as easily make fun of the CS deparatment at most colleges consiting mainly of smelly professors who can't teach and have no social skills.
But please, continue your ignorance and prejudice it does make you look oh so smart.
I graded exams for a couple of *large* freshman classes taught by a "Dr. Absent" last semester ... the Absent is not only missing from his office, but he seems to be missing from most of his life. Worse, he appears to have absolutely no control over this, and doesn't notice it happening unless someone points it out. At that time he'll sincerely apologize (and he means it!), but it's not something that bothers him.
He usually has 3 or 4 phone numbers, at least 2 of which are answered by a secretary of some sort (or wife/kid, who are just as clueless as to his whereabouts), 3 or 4 email addresses, at least 2 of which forward to the other two, sometimes in circles, and 1 random one is always unavailable each week, for no apparent reason.
This person rarely checks their mailbox in the department office, and the department secretary hasn't seen him for *at least* a week.
If you ever get into Dr. Absent's office, you'll think it's been hit by a tornado or something. He doesn't seem to notice this. He has no idea what's in there, but it's all in a large heap. There are precious few books on the bookshelves -- if any at all. If books exist in this man's office, they're on the floor (read: trash heap) under a few lunch trays, t-shirts, and the "lost finals" from two years ago that suddenly "popped up" last time Dr. Absent lost his cell phone and dug through the heap hoping to find it. Sometimes there's a computer in one of these heaps (maybe on the one that's kind of desk-shaped?), and sometimes there's a file cabinet. If there is a computer or file cabinet, Dr. Absent has no keys or password to use it, and has no idea what's stored there.
If you *do* manage to catch this person, NEVER GIVE HIM ANYTHING, FOR HE WILL IMMEDIATELY LOSE IT. He will be more than happy to help students with any class work, but they usually have to take a number since at least 10 of them will be piled up in the hallway at any given time (office hours or not) hoping to catch a glimpse of Dr. Absent. This tends to happen a LOT near midterms and finals since Dr. Absent never returns old homework/tests/quizzes, regardless of whether they're graded: he lost them or forgot whether they were graded.
If you think you might be faced with working for (or worse, taking a class with!) a Dr. Absent, my advice to you is to pretend you're doing correspondence work, because you will never find this guy. He simply isn't around. He's not on campus, he's not in his private lab, he's not at home, he's not at the bar you *know* he frequents (though never for more than an hour), he's not out with his wife, girlfriend, kids, colleagues, business partners, or anyone else. Just give up, because this man is unavailable for contact, and probably doesn't know/care that everyone is looking for him.
-=[You cannot consistently judge this statement to be true.]=-
Imagine the following difference in job offers: hey, you're pretty good, stick around for 3 years, and we'll see if we still want you, or we believe in you, here's a job for life.
The reason you don't want such a model of employment is because is does not encourage achievement. In fact, history has shown that in most cases, it breeds corruption and neglect. It's why most modern governments don't have lifetime positions for their leaders. Okay, the Supreme Court is an exception. However, the reasoning behind keeping justices for life doesn't apply to professors. At least, they don't anymore. Tenure was meant to keep professors with non-conformists ideas from getting fired. Now thanks to terrorism and political correctness, no professor is safe from firing due to perceived misconduct. Tenure only remains to keep the lazy employed. Sad, but true.