The good professor

Journal of Academic Ethics

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 27-54

  Corlett, J Angelo ^a  

^a SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Academic; Academic freedom; Collegiality; Ethics; Professor; Research; Service; Socrates; Teaching; Tenure

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846950017     PISSN: 15701727     EISSN: 15728544     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10805-005-9003-z     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Indeed, I have known faculty who actually select (male) candidates for hire on the sole grounds that they are "clever" or "highly intelligent," as if that somehow set those candidates apart from many others, especially those who have published well and widely. It is hard to know just what would justify this tremendously subjective standard, though a hint might lie in the fact that, so far as my over 20 years of experience in higher education is concerned, I have only witnessed this kind of descriptor used of white males by other white males who are their admirers, no matter how poorly published the former may be. Perhaps legitimate and reasonable standards have been cast aside in favor of nepotism, a disease that threatens the very core of higher education today.
2. I assume throughout that under discussion are faculty who are not experiencing serious life crises, or some other condition, cognitive or otherwise, that would significantly impair their performance as faculty. In such cases, what is typically required, I believe, is compassionate and sometimes creative ways in which to deal with such circumstances. So while I believe that universities and colleges are institutions that ought always to strive for excellence in the ways I discuss below, I am also committed to the position that excellence does not preclude genuine compassion for those who are unable, for certain understandable reasons, to perform at their best. On the contrary, excellence involves moral virtues that would entail the active assistance to those in need, including our colleagues who are experiencing some of life's most challenging moments. We would, I hope, think the same way of those in other chosen professions outside of the academy.
3. It is noteworthy that the good administration of a college or university will be one that seeks to do all that it can to achieve and maintain support services for its faculty to become and remain good professors. So while it may well be a legitimate role for administrators to evaluate faculty in terms of the good professor standard, it is an equally legitimate role for faculty and others to evaluate administrators in terms of how well they performed in securing and maintaining (indeed, increasing!) the needs of excellent faculty. When faculty are not good ones in the requisite sense indicated throughout this paper, then it is either because the faculty themselves are to blame for a variety of possible reasons (some exculpatory, others not), or their administrations are to blame in some instances because they simply lack sufficient resources to support faculty research, teaching and services, or perhaps because they are poor administrators, or for some other reason(s). In still other cases, both some faculty and administrators are to blame, and even some politicians and the voters who installed them by irresponsible decision-making.
4. For purposes of this discussion, I do not count departmental chairpersons as fulltime faculty in the requisite sense.
5. While the basic requirements of a good professor ought to be (ideally) implementable in every higher educational context (including community colleges), practically speaking it seems unfair to hold community college faculty to the same standards as others due to the past, present, and future disparities of resources when compared to four-year colleges and universities. However, community college faculty have a duty to engage in research as much as their teaching loads permit, and good administrators must understand this and not place such stringent course loads on community college faculty that the quality of education therein is severely delimited due to the inability of such faculty to engage themselves in research. Of course, part-time faculty in any higher educational context are exempted from this analysis, as their employment status hardly affords them ample opportunity to satisfy the three categories of contribution. Perhaps, then, the main difference between community college faculty and other higher educational faculty is the extent of their course loads, which then affects the extent to which they are expected, in order to become and remain good professors, to engage in research and service.
6. "Perpetuating the artificial animosity between teaching and scholarship is perhaps the least imaginative and least useful thing we could do" [James Axtell, "Twenty-Five Reasons to Publish," Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 29 (1997), pp. 16].
7. nd Edition (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000).
8. A. D. Nuttall, "Why Scholarship Matters," Wilson Quarterly, (Autumn, 2003), p. 60.
9. Deborah C. Poff, "The Duty to Protect: Privacy and the Public University," Journal of Academic Ethics, 1 (2003), pp. 5-6.
10. I mean this term globally, rather than locally, in this context.
11. J. Angelo Corlett, "Epistemic Responsibility," unpublished manuscript.
12. For some ideas on how academic journal peer review processes ought to operate, see J. Angelo Corlett, "Letter to the Editor," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, forthcoming;
13. Leigh Turner, "Doffing the Mask: Why Manuscript Reviewers Ought to Be Identifiable," Journal of Academic Ethics, 1 (2003), pp. 41-48;
14. Leigh Turner, "Promoting F.A.I.T.H. in Peer Review: Five Core Attributes in Effective Peer Review," Journal of Academic Ethics, 1 (2003), pp. 181-188;
15. J. Angelo Corlett, "Ethical Issues in Journal Peer-Review," Journal of Academic Ethics, 3 (2005), forthcoming.
16. John Cooper, Editor-in-Chief, Plato: The Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998).
17. For a guide to how to approach Plato's works, see J. Angelo Corlett, Interpreting Plato's Dialogues (Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing, 2005).
18. Richard T. De George, "Ethics, Academic Freedom, and Academic Tenure," Journal of Academic Ethics, 1 (2003), p. 18.
19. For more on the life and death of Socrates, see Thomas Brickhouse and Nicholas Smith, Plato's Socrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
20. For a comparison and contrast of the deaths of Socrates and Jesus, see Gareth B. Matthews, "The Death of Socrates and the Death of Christ," in Jorge J. E. Gracia, Editor, Mel Gibson's The Passion and Philosophy (LaSalle: Open Court, 2004), pp. 179-189.
21. This assumes, for the sake of the "argument" under consideration, that the historical records of Socrates and Jesus are accurate and tell all that we need to know about their lives and thoughts. A rather dubious assumption, indeed.
22. Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (London; Routledge, 1999).
23. For a discussion of how knowledge is acquired in social contexts, see J. Angelo Corlett, Analyzing Social Knowledge (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1996);
24. Steve Fuller, Social Epistemology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988);
25. Alvin Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
26. Pathways to Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
27. Joel Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), Chapters.
28. Assuming, of course, that colleges and universities are interested in employing as faculty those who are good professors, as opposed to mere researchers, for instance, whose task is never meant to involve the mentoring or teaching of students. In this way, such researchers might be contracted out by colleges or universities to perform useful functions, such as to perform checks on current faculty research, or to perform scientific research in areas that might bring fiscal reward to the institution and/or the community.
29. Assumed here is a traditional grading scale of 0-4.0, where a grade of "A" = 4.0.
30. Or standards that are as objective as humanly possible, at any rate.
31. 1 know of faculty who actually deny that grade inflation can lead to better student evaluation scores! Thin is precisely how severe the problem of grade inflation has become: outright denial.
32. Contrast this with the non-comparative approach to grading, which simply sets out a general and reasonably high standard to be achieved for the various grades, and holds all students to it without prejudice.
33. Indeed, I enjoy implementing a long standing practice of awarding students whose grades I have miscalculated an extra point or two for their troubles, both to encourage them to approach faculty about such errors (as opposed to complaining about their grades), and to serve as an incentive to me to not make such errors in the future as it constitutes a form of grade inflation. I am sorry to report that my grade calculation skills remain imperfect, though I continually strive to not make grading errors.
34. Joel Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), Chapters.
35. But the good professor will constantly work on devising ways of perfecting the quality of assignments, and the evaluation thereof. Of course, it hardly follows from the fact that students' assignments are not graded with perfection by even the most conscientious faculty that grade inflation by comparative means of assessment is justified.
36. For philosophical discussions of non-violent protest, see J. Angelo Corlett, Terrorism: A Philosophical Analysis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), Philosophical Studies Series, Volume 101, Chapter 2;
37. Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, Chapter 6;
38. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 363-391;
39. James W. Washington, Editor, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1986).
40. This holds despite former U.S. Olympian Jesse Owens' truism that "People don't like hearing the low down about themselves."
41. For a philosophical discussion of anti-bad Samaritan law, see Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, Chapter 7.
42. De George, "Ethics, Academic Freedom, and Academic Tenure," p. 14.