Some university students aren't getting what they're paying for, and there's virtually nothing they can do about it.
It's amazing how things go on in universities that wouldn't be tolerated for a minute in the business world, and I'm not talking about big issues like academic freedom or tenure. I'm talking about incompetence or unwillingness to do the job one's being paid for.
A friend, Lawrie McFarlane, recently researched and wrote an article on student assessments of their professors at the "ratemyprofessors" web site. He was appalled at what he learned, but though it depressed me, I wasn't surprised.
Unlike course-evaluations which are done in class by all students, the postings on the site are mostly by relatively few students who are moved to post about particular professors because the students did well in one of the prof's course or did poorly and are going for a little "pay back." These sorts of postings are pretty obvious and aren't of much interest to anyone except the profs and the students doing the posting. But there's another sort of posting that is definitely worrying.
Most profs get ten or a dozen postings as a kind of rough average, but there are a significant number of profs who get quite a lot more, and when they do, the postings are about basic matters.
Many, many entries complain about not understanding the professor. And where a particular prof gets these complaints, he or she gets a lot of them. This makes the postings more credible and also worrying.
Sometimes it's a problem with delivery; sometimes it's a problem with convoluted thinking and presentation; sometimes it's lack of preparation or organization of material; and sometimes it's simply language. But the long and short of it is that there are obviously a good number of people out there getting paid to teach who aren't teaching effectively or maybe can't teach effectively.
Why are ineffective or plain bad teachers tolerated in universities? The answer has to do with money and with image. Nothing makes department heads and deans more prone to overlook student complaints about professors than those profs getting big grants and publishing a lot.
So, what's the ethical problem here? First, have a look at university tuitions. Next, check out tax-based government support to higher education. Finally, ask where dissatisfied students can go for some satisfaction other than to web-sites and blogs. Doctors pay horrendous amounts for malpractice insurance. Maybe the idea of malpractice should apply to those other doctors: the Ph.Ds.
