The flava:Southern New Hampshire University has fired a professor for a glaring mistake, the school has confirmed to HuffPost.
The educator, whose name has been kept private, almost gave a student a failing grade on an assignment because she refused to believe that Australia is a country, despite the student’s insistence that it is. . . .
The article:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/professor-fired-australia-country_us_5a7ddf58e4b0c6726e1305ad
via GIPHY
But of course, an academic being unwilling to subject an idea to even a simple observation (for example, whether or not two objects of unequal mass that are simultaneously dropped hit a level floor at the same time, or whether or not men have more teeth than women) is nothing new.
ReplyDeleteMy (only-just) Victorian grandfather (b.1899) would almost certainly have agreed with the instructor on this one.
ReplyDeleteAs, I suppose, would all four of my grandparents, at least in their early years. All, however, lived long enough to recognize Australia as a nation (and a WWII ally).
DeleteHey, I like Australia. Every time I go, I have a great time. The first time was after I'd been living in England for a couple years. I expected it to be more like England than it was: it felt like, somewhere over the Pacific, I'd flown through a wrinkle in the space-time continuum and had come down in California, except everything was...different. Car culture was once again important, but they were driving on the left side of the road. The guy who helped me at the observatory looked and dressed like a surfer dude, but sure didn't talk like one. And they had these large animals that would give you the deer-in-the-headlights look, but they sure weren't deer.
DeleteKangaroos are even worse with cars than deer: they hide invisibly in the tall grass at the side of the road, and then when you drive by, they leap out, seemingly aimed directly for your radiator. The first time I dodged one, I thought, "Life sure must be hard in the outback!"
Note that this problem occurred in an online master's program (aka a cash cow) in a university that is growing primarily due to an aggressive move toward online classes (I thought I recognized the name; wikipedia confirms).
ReplyDeleteMy first thought was to wonder whether this course "instructor" is in fact a "professor," i.e. fully qualified to teach the course(though I'd guess that I knew Australia is a country by 5th grade at the latest, and knew how to get basic information about a place, using the entry-level research technology of the day -- the WorldBook encyclopedia -- before then, so I'm not sure education level matters). But the Buzzfeed article from which Huffpo takes its information says the professor has a Ph.D. (in philosophy, so that may or may not fully answer the qualifications question). The student's hypothesis was that the professor might be old enough to remember when Australia was part of the British Empire, but conceded to the Buzzfeed reporter that the professor probably isn't quite 117 years old, which nixes that hypothesis.
Since I (who may very well be older than this apparently very old-appearing professor) don't want to speculate about age-related reasons for her confusion, I think I'm going to fall back on my original hypothesis: online programs often have less-than-stringent hiring standards for the people they're careful to call "instructors" (but who students paying full tuition reasonably enough expect to meet their expectations for a "professor," which I have to agree were not met in this case).