Good point on how the pay problem for adjunct faculty is intertwined with the "everyone gets a trophy" problem for students:
> “I knew the instructor was an adjunct, and that she taught at several places to cobble together a living. I told the students that she was an adjunct, and that the class was easy because she was afraid of losing her job.” Adjuncts are often evaluated solely based on student evaluations. As Rebecca Schuman put it in her Slate article “Confessions of a Grade Inflator,” “popularity is the only thing keeping them employed.”
Adjunct instructors went out of their way to be friendly, and non-confrontational. They would let stuff slide, exam do-overs, class meetings held at coffee shops etc etc.
Tenured professor not giving a damn about teaching, or being at least socially cordial. Some are just complete assholes.
Even saw the the behavior change when a professor got tenure. It was a pretty sharp switch to "don't give a fuck about anything" in a matter of a semester.
I am saying this as an average pattern I noticed, at one particular place, there are exceptions of course...
Interestingly, I saw more than one fantastic teacher get denied tenure in my graduate department (a top research university), and there was always a rumor floating around that it was because they spent effort on teaching that could have instead gone to research. (One of them had written a textbook, and was told pretty explicitly that doing so had been a major mistake.) I've never heard of anyone getting denied tenure there or in any similar program for mediocre teaching evaluations.
Meanwhile, at the private liberal arts college where I teach, most of my senior colleagues are just as committed to good teaching as my junior colleagues are. (The younger folks may be more innovative, but by and large they don't care more.) I've never seen someone's teaching go downhill when they get tenure; if anything, the research pressure eases up a bit at that point and they feel free to focus a bit more on the classroom.
So maybe what you've observed about tenure is accurate in some places, but it's at odds with the places I've been.
Students may pay for the privilege to receive a higher education, but the real customer is society. The product is competent graduates that will keep society moving forwards.
Once you start asking the opinion of the raw materials in your assembly line, everything goes downhill.
Your third paragraph implies a model of education and preparation for leadership that will actively work against the goal articulated in the last sentence of your second paragraph.
PS: what meaning are you attaching to the word 'society' here?
Ok, let me please elaborate, I know "assembly line" and "raw materials" sound awful, and I appreciate that you did not simply down-voted, btw.
The way I see it, Education (at any level) is a process of self transformation. You cannot really purchase Education, you just pay for the opportunity to be part of that process. In this sense, your self at the time of admission is the raw material, your actualized self at the time of graduation is the final product, while the body of students can be considered the total inventory of product in process.
Second, every process of self actualization is Hard with capital H. It requires lots of work, and can be stressful (or even painful) at times. There are no shortcuts. It requires diligence to push through all that work, and perseverance in times when you feel like crap because it seems that you are never going to make it. Professors are guides and mentors, but ultimately you educate yourself. And because of this, no outcomes can be guaranteed.
Traditionally, Universities were modeled after medieval guilds. Professors, as guild masters before them, accepted candidates and teach them the art of the guild. They did not do so because they were not nice guys, but for a profit motive (Universities nowadays directly in the fees they charge, Guilds in the past indirectly through apprentices' free labor).
If the apprentice/student persevered for a fixed number of years, they received the social recognition of being competent in the art of the guild. In the Guild, apprentices became journey-man which gave them the right to practice their art in the territory controlled by the Guild and to receive a salary for it. In University, the undergraduate is considered a knowledgeable person in their major and (though we like to pretend that higher education is not job training) eligible for jobs that require specialized qualifications. In neither case does this imply that the student is now considered equals with the teacher.
For the undergraduate/journeyman to be considered equals with their professor/master, they have to pursue more self directed, advanced education for an undefined number of years. In both cases, the candidate must present a proof of competence in the art beyond what is expected from mere practitioners: For the journeyman it's called "master piece", for the graduate student "PhD thesis". This proof is presented to a group of masters including but not limited to your mentor, and they measure, debate and maybe approve it. If that last is the case, you are considered now to be a peer of them.
None of this fact seem to be common knowledge among undergraduate students, and Universities make no effort to disabuse them of their ignorance. Instead, they are now following a service industry model where every customer receives a standardized, repeatable service, and customer satisfaction is paramount. Until the day that we invent machines such as those in the first "Matrix" movie - where specific information and skills can be downloaded to your brain by direct manipulation of your neuronal patterns using electromagnetic impulses inside your skull - this model will only mess up with the older model of apprentice/master transfer of knowledge through the hard but proven self actualization process.
"It requires diligence to push through all that work, and perseverance in times when you feel like crap because it seems that you are never going to make it. Professors are guides and mentors, but ultimately you educate yourself."
This is a much richer view than the original comment, but I'll need to work through your later paragraphs. Thanks for taking the time needed to formulate the response.
> “I knew the instructor was an adjunct, and that she taught at several places to cobble together a living. I told the students that she was an adjunct, and that the class was easy because she was afraid of losing her job.” Adjuncts are often evaluated solely based on student evaluations. As Rebecca Schuman put it in her Slate article “Confessions of a Grade Inflator,” “popularity is the only thing keeping them employed.”