Paul Musgrave  🎄 🎁 ☃️Varmennettu tili

26. We actually need “reading across the curriculum” instruction

27. Completion rates are an absolute scandal and administrators should have the power to force faculty to teach courses to keep students on a 4-year course

28. Yes I’ve heard about places where degree requirements couldn’t be fulfilled in 4 years because of faculty unavailability

29. The cultural divide between largely ex nerd faculties and largely non nerd students is more important than any partisan divide

30. IR specific: the paradigm debates are uninteresting and only make sense after students get to know the world—teach real theory before meta theory

31. For students anything that has a publication date of more than two years ago is impossibly old—consider just churning these

32. There’s a huge unmet need for 5-page literature reviews written at an undergrad level for American politics—we don’t need more “Monkey Cage” pieces but more Foreign Affairs-length pieces

33. It’s actually bad that political science undergrads are not consistently trained to read research in their field

34. But whaddaya going to do when the first few years of a degree have to cover the very basics?

35. Cheating is bad, but really it is

36. We could design courses that would be all but impossible to cheat in and actually there’s some blame on institutions there

37. If I were paying $60,000 a year in tuition, I’d also expect professors to respond to weekend emails

38. Students have very weird ideas about how much faculty earn

39. It’s okay to assign your own work

40. It’s not okay to assign your own $400 self published textbook

41. Hogwarts had crap teaching

42. No seriously though, just the worst

43. Departments need to actually explain how major requirements are supposed to work and why

44. Administrators seem to have next to no sense that their data points are grossly misleading about on the ground realities

45. Tests should count less than papers

46. Multiple choice tests are okay actually but just use them for low stakes assignments

47. Shocker: it’s easier to have a VP for diversity than to have diversity in a syllabus

48. Some critics of university hiring practices need to familiarize themselves with employment law

49. Yeah actually the faculty are the core employees of the institution but also their function is special not themselves as people—be nice

50. Colleges should be talking openly with faculty about the shrinking enrollments of the 2020s in many parts of the US

51. Community colleges are heroes

52. Foundations could counter disinformation by funding open textbooks and videos

53. The George Mason Econ videos are great for non-Econ major expositions of core Econ topics

54. Students confuse partisan slant with ideological stance

55. Faculty are crap at time management