Usually students miss more lectures than their professors, but in week five of the spring 2010 term, Eric Hudson, popular instructor of 8.02: Electricity & Magnetism, would have given chronic class-skippers competition.
“I think I’ve been gone five of the last seven weeks or something,” he said with a light chuckle, seeming awed at that fraction himself. “It’s really been terrible,” he said.
Hudson found out this past December that he did not receive tenure. In those weeks away from MIT, he had been in England, Sweden, and the country of Georgia interviewing for a new post as professor…
June 12th, 2010 at 10:47AM
Don’t forget that faculty members are most often *rewarded* for missing classes.
June 12th, 2010 at 2:09PM
What are they gonna do, fire him?
June 12th, 2010 at 8:42PM
On the curriculum committee, we were baffled by a proposed syllabus that listed “OOT” on a number of dates in the term. We eventually determined that this stood for “out of town”.
June 13th, 2010 at 12:04AM
Everyone knows that OOT should be called “reading day” on the syllabus! Or “library day.”
June 13th, 2010 at 9:37AM
The really embarrassing thing is that when you go out of town and get your grad student or post-doc to cover, then in the evaluations it is always noted how much better a job than you the substitute did…
June 13th, 2010 at 1:51PM
I wonder why he bothered to show up the other two weeks.