Cornell men's assistant basketball coaches named

[Ken711]

http://cornellbigred.com/index.aspx?path=mbball&

[shasta1]

What is up with all the assistant head coach crap?? oh, that's right cornell pays staff shit and give titles instead.

[Swampy]

What is up with all the assistant head coach crap?? oh, that's right cornell pays staff shit and give titles instead.

I think it's much like ranks for professors. Assistant < Associate < Head

[billhoward]

What is up with all the assistant head coach crap?? oh, that's right cornell pays staff shit and give titles instead.

I think it's much like ranks for professors. Assistant < Associate < Head

Plus lecturers / courtesy lecturers. That may mean "good prof despite no Ph.D"

[Ken711]

What is up with all the assistant head coach crap?? oh, that's right cornell pays staff shit and give titles instead.

All the schools do that in all sports...it's really nothing new.

[Swampy]

What is up with all the assistant head coach crap?? oh, that's right cornell pays staff shit and give titles instead.

I think it's much like ranks for professors. Assistant < Associate < Head

Plus lecturers / courtesy lecturers. That may mean "good prof despite no Ph.D"

Plenty of lecturers, etc. have PhD's. They just can't find permanent jobs as schools have cut back on permanent positions.

For example, I've seen estimates that more than half of all classes in the California state university system are taught by lecturers. I also have several friends living in regions like the San Francisco Bay Area, where there is a large, regularly replenished pool of under-employed academic laborers. Many of these friends are now old enough for mandatory Medicare and spent most of their careers working as lecturers. They continued working well into their 70's, both because they liked their work and because their lifetime earnings were too little for a comfortable retirement. While working, they often needing to hold (and commute to) 2-3 jobs at a time just to make ends meet. (The commuting is a killer. You may live in Oakland, but if you're teaching at Davis and San Jose, going to your next class is not exactly the same as walking across campus.)

To expand on your point about being a "good prof," lecturers are not tenure-track and are employed at will, with contracts renewed semester-to-semester. So they aren't rehired if they're not good teachers. (Which usually comes down to how students grade them on teaching evaluations, something that often has nothing to do with how well the teacher actually teaches or how much the students actually learn -- but this is a different conversation.) In addition, lecturers may also be excellent researchers. One of my friends, a Cornellian BTW, just won an award for a book published last year. Yet despite having been steadily having her teaching contracts renewed steadily and being a productive scholar, she never landed a tenure-track job.

I suspect work life is better for assistant coaches.

[marty]

What is up with all the assistant head coach crap?? oh, that's right cornell pays staff shit and give titles instead.

I think it's much like ranks for professors. Assistant < Associate < Head

Plus lecturers / courtesy lecturers. That may mean "good prof despite no Ph.D"

Plenty of lecturers, etc. have PhD's. They just can't find permanent jobs as schools have cut back on permanent positions.

For example, I've seen estimates that more than half of all classes in the California state university system are taught by lecturers. I also have several friends living in regions like the San Francisco Bay Area, where there is a large, regularly replenished pool of under-employed academic laborers. Many of these friends are now old enough for mandatory Medicare and spent most of their careers working as lecturers. They continued working well into their 70's, both because they liked their work and because their lifetime earnings were too little for a comfortable retirement. While working, they often needing to hold (and commute to) 2-3 jobs at a time just to make ends meet. (The commuting is a killer. You may live in Oakland, but if you're teaching at Davis and San Jose, going to your next class is not exactly the same as walking across campus.)

To expand on your point about being a "good prof," lecturers are not tenure-track and are employed at will, with contracts renewed semester-to-semester. So they aren't rehired if they're not good teachers. (Which usually comes down to how students grade them on teaching evaluations, something that often has nothing to do with how well the teacher actually teaches or how much the students actually learn -- but this is a different conversation.) In addition, lecturers may also be excellent researchers. One of my friends, a Cornellian BTW, just won an award for a book published last year. Yet despite having been steadily having her teaching contracts renewed steadily and being a productive scholar, she never landed a tenure-track job.

I suspect work life is better for assistant coaches.

Assistant coaches hopefully don't have to worry about this.

[KeithK]

Assistant coaches hopefully don't have to worry about this.

A rather foreseeable consequence of government mandates.

[Al DeFlorio]

Assistant coaches hopefully don't have to worry about this.

A rather foreseeable consequence of government mandates.

It would be nice, Keith, if you would keep your right-wing politics off eLynah.  It adds nothing.

[2]

This is not a political issue.  The cut in non-tenure track (generally adjunct) faculty is directly related to federal government mandates, primarily the health insurance law.  Whether you call it Obamacare or ACA, it has been named by the schools as the reason they cut the ranks and/or hours of non-tenure track instructors.  This isn't politics.  It is fact, no matter which party or politician you support.

Cornell is one of the better schools when it comes to the percentage of instructors who are tenure track.  It is estimated that over 76% of faculty at Cornell is tenure track.  This is likely mostly due to Ithaca's remote geographic location, away from a large enough supply of highly trained PhD experts.  However, that still leaves almost 24% of the instructors a non-tenure track.  That includes visiting professors on one year gigs that generally pay very little with almost no chance of long-term employment.  It is not easy to move to Ithaca for a low-paying one year job.  It also includes adjuncts, only a small portion of whom are brought in from industry/practice, and most of whom are PhDs with excellent qualifications who work for just a couple thousand dollars per course per semester.

I am not an academic, but there is no profession that has felt the negatives of economic upheaval in the last 10 years like young academics.  We still value higher education and throw money at it, largely because of the unlimited student loan system (which is also due to government statute that practically prohibits default on student loans).  Schools build more and hire more and more administrators for higher and higher salaries.  Yet schools find new ways to hire fewer faculty and pay less.

I love Cornell and root for its teams, but Cornell is quite guilty of this too.  When I get a call from some Cornell student asking for money, I tell them no.  Even with our poor investing performance recently, Cornell's endowment is about $2 billion, right?  Cornell builds and builds.  Cornell hires more and more administrators.  Cornell raises tuition, now to $50,000/year before room and board.  Yet the one thing they do not value is teaching and who teaches the students.

One more thing.  While I agree with Swampy mostly, I have seen significant evidence that neither teaching evaluations nor teaching observations are valued at all at major universities.  They generally don't care about teaching ability at all.  For tenure track faculty, departments care about research and (for sciences) grant receipts.  For non-tenure track, departments generally care that they can argue that the hire has the expertise to teach the class(es) and can teach in the right schedule.  Teaching ability is almost never considered at real universities.

[Scersk '97]

One more thing.  While I agree with Swampy mostly, I have seen significant evidence that neither teaching evaluations nor teaching observations are valued at all at major universities.  They generally don't care about teaching ability at all.  For tenure track faculty, departments care about research and (for sciences) grant receipts.  For non-tenure track, departments generally care that they can argue that the hire has the expertise to teach the class(es) and can teach in the right schedule.  Teaching ability is almost never considered at real universities.

But not every institution is a "major university." Many doctoral graduates of major universities go on to teach at "minor universities" in non-tenure track positions, never mind the doctoral graduates of minor universities who are virtually destined for that track. These minor universities care not at all, generally, about research dollars or expertise. They want satisfied "customers" who will keep coming back and filling their coffers with tuition dollars. Something for all the (lazy) deans and deanlets to use in order to justify themselves, teaching evaluations are the chief metric this class of institution uses to make sure their customers are satisfied. Who gets the best evaluations? Generally, instructors who are entertainers rather than educators, who happen to teach courses with light, non-challenging material, and who bribe their students, whether with inflated grades or donuts.

Eventually these practices will "trickle up" to even the elite universities, if they haven't already. Then all the deans and deanlets will have another weapon to wield against higher faculty salaries and faculty self-governance. Meanwhile, educational standards will sink beneath the waves.

You are quite right that young academics have been hit extremely hard in the last ten years, but it's really just a version of what's been going on the rest of society. Even in the STEM professions, I'm sure the wages of average workers have not kept pace in any way with the gains of the 1%. And yet no one seeks to unionize; indeed, unions have become more and more demonized at the second they might be the most useful, particularly to the so-called "white collar professions." (Professions? Not really anymore. We're all just labor units. Why do you think they want to get rid of tenure for educators?)

It's quickly becoming a question of "us vs. them," and "us" keeps growing, even though many of "us" aren't quite perceiving it. One of the great ways for "them" to keep "us" down? Keep 'em poor, uneducated, arguing with each other, and chasing after a golden reward that's ever further out of reach. As far as "they" are concerned, we can continue to congratulate ourselves on social progress 'til the cows come home, whether it's underwhelming health care reform or the still all-too-slow recognition of basic human dignities for all citizens. Meanwhile, they're winning the bigger battle: eviscerating education, particularly public education, under the guise of "reform" in order to plop us right back in the 19th century—now with system of societal hierarchies based on caste rather than on race.

[imafrshmn]

One more thing.  While I agree with Swampy mostly, I have seen significant evidence that neither teaching evaluations nor teaching observations are valued at all at major universities.  They generally don't care about teaching ability at all.  For tenure track faculty, departments care about research and (for sciences) grant receipts.  For non-tenure track, departments generally care that they can argue that the hire has the expertise to teach the class(es) and can teach in the right schedule.  Teaching ability is almost never considered at real universities.

But not every institution is a "major university." Many doctoral graduates of major universities go on to teach at "minor universities" in non-tenure track positions, never mind the doctoral graduates of minor universities who are virtually destined for that track. These minor universities care not at all, generally, about research dollars or expertise. They want satisfied "customers" who will keep coming back and filling their coffers with tuition dollars. Something for all the (lazy) deans and deanlets to use in order to justify themselves, teaching evaluations are the chief metric this class of institution uses to make sure their customers are satisfied. Who gets the best evaluations? Generally, instructors who are entertainers rather than educators, who happen to teach courses with light, non-challenging material, and who bribe their students, whether with inflated grades or donuts.

Eventually these practices will "trickle up" to even the elite universities, if they haven't already. Then all the deans and deanlets will have another weapon to wield against higher faculty salaries and faculty self-governance. Meanwhile, educational standards will sink beneath the waves.

You are quite right that young academics have been hit extremely hard in the last ten years, but it's really just a version of what's been going on the rest of society. Even in the STEM professions, I'm sure the wages of average workers have not kept pace in any way with the gains of the 1%. And yet no one seeks to unionize; indeed, unions have become more and more demonized at the second they might be the most useful, particularly to the so-called "white collar professions." (Professions? Not really anymore. We're all just labor units. Why do you think they want to get rid of tenure for educators?)

It's quickly becoming a question of "us vs. them," and "us" keeps growing, even though many of "us" aren't quite perceiving it. One of the great ways for "them" to keep "us" down? Keep 'em poor, uneducated, arguing with each other, and chasing after a golden reward that's ever further out of reach. As far as "they" are concerned, we can continue to congratulate ourselves on social progress 'til the cows come home, whether it's underwhelming health care reform or the still all-too-slow recognition of basic human dignities for all citizens. Meanwhile, they're winning the bigger battle: eviscerating education, particularly public education, under the guise of "reform" in order to plop us right back in the 19th century—now with system of societal hierarchies based on caste rather than on race.

Thread drift be damned. It's intelligent discussions like this that keep me coming to ELF in the off season.

[2]

Sorry if I used imprecise terms, Scersk, but what I should have written is that almost no schools outside of the community college and junior college systems care about teaching.  I have multiple examples of early career academics at different types of institutions who ask the department for copies of their own course evaluations months later, only to find the original envelopes are still sealed because no one in the department ever looked at the reviews.  And yet the department decided to bring back/not bring back those academics without ever considering the evaluations.  Similarly, when a department does decide to send in a more senior faculty member to observe a lecture, it generally comes at the end of the year after future hiring decisions have been made for non-tenure track, and the observer is generally an academic with no training in education.

Schools don't care about instruction quality.  They just don't, because it does not matter to their business model.  Good teaching does not increase donations or grants.  Good teaching does not increase application numbers or quality of applicants.  Good teaching does not really increase prestige in US News or Times Higher Ed rankings.  When parents or students pay tuition, they are not paying for instruction.  Tuition is paid for the credential that comes at the end and all related career advancement opportunities.  Very few people--parents and students included--care about instruction quality in the end.

As for the economic reality of academics being similar to other professions: this is untrue.  Very few professions work this way.  Academics go to school after college for about 4-7 years and then often have postdocs, fellowships, etc.  The universities try to increase the number of grad students, because that provides them with cheap labor for teaching and research, but they don't care that these grad students can't get jobs when they graduate.  

Unlike doctors, lawyers, nurses, academics do not have their value increased by government regulations requiring that all instructors meet certain standards of competency.  Therefore, sometimes unqualified or immoral people take jobs from the well-trained.  (I could name names of famous "professors" who are former terrorists, famous criminals, or just people who once wrote a book but lack real expertise, but if I did so I'd risk insulting political sensibilities on both sides).  

Tenure has also done great harm to the younger generation of academics.  Many older academics see no reason to retire, because they make the top salary they can, they teach jsut a few classes they have taught for many years, and they often work with the assistance of TAs.  Many older tenured professors, especially at the mid-range schools, are actually surpassed in accomplishment by the much younger non-tenure track academics at the same schools.  The older professors just benefited from better much job markets in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.  Eventually these older professors will die, but it will be too late for the current younger generation.  Moreover, the movement away from tenure and even toward more adjuncts, means many fewer overall opportunities for new academics despite the fact that more undergrads are in college than ever before.

The craziest part is the lack of value the schools put on the new instructors.  Here's a true story about an SEC flagship state school humanities department from just a couple years ago.  Someone I know well was hired right out of a PhD program to be a visiting assistant professor for one year.  She was tasked with creating and teaching 2 brand new courses per semester and expected to do research and publish though she had no research/travel stipend.  She was paid $40,000 and expected to move 1,000 miles with her family, but the school did not pay her moving expenses.  She was willing and eager to take the position as a step in her career.  She knew what she was getting into, and it was her choice to enter into this relationship.  She did not blame them.  But then she got to the department of about 2 dozen faculty members and found out that there was an administrative office with 5 administrative all making more money than she did.  One administrator had only two jobs: she scanned documents and xeroxed documents for the department.  Even the photocopy lady made more money than the young academic who had spent 6 years in graduate school, was one of only a handful of experts in the world in her very relevant field, and who was being tasked with teaching some of the more well-attend classes in the department.  Teaching is supposed to be the main role of a university, but teaching is not valued.  Making photocopies is more valued.

[2]

Let me just add to me very long post above that I agree, Scersk, that a lot of STEM professionals are getting a bad deal these days.  We have laws about H1B visas.  If these laws are not being broken, they are being bent.  Salaries for engineers must increase more.  Also, older engineers who get laid off have a very hard time finding new employers who sufficiently value their experiences.

Nevertheless, the situation in even the most distressed STEM fields is better than that for the vast majority of young academics.

[CAS]

The Cornell endowment is about $6 billion.