Watch the video. Before the professor explodes, note the conditions under which Ivy League students are learning. Lights low, an enormous lecture class, the professor – his back to the room – straining his neck to read off of a huge, ceiling-high PowerPoint slide about kilobytes.
When American students in classes like these finally realize how thoroughly they’re being ripped off, we’ll start to see massive, coordinated yawns. One hopes.
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
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November 17th, 2010 at 8:10AM
The video was obviously not from cell phones, but (probably) from classroom cameras. I am wondering whether this is a set-up, prank video made by the prof.
November 17th, 2010 at 8:18AM
I don’t think so, tp. One of the Rate My Professors comments says that he lost it once before — when no one said Bless You after he sneezed.
November 17th, 2010 at 8:34AM
My thoughts were similar when I saw the classroom environment – this is what Ivy League students pay for? It looked no better, and the professor acted far worse, than what we usually see on a state university campus. 200 students? It LOOKED boring and condescending and not worth the money that any student was spending. Shame on Cornell for 1) enabling such an awful classroom experience and 2) for hiring such an ass.
November 17th, 2010 at 8:48AM
If I were the guy’s Dean, I’d assign him to read The Caine Mutiny and write an essay on the character of Captain Queeg.
November 17th, 2010 at 9:08AM
Great video.
It could be used as an instructional teaching video all the way down to grade school level. There is a right way and a wrong way to do classroom management. And this guy is, obviously, not a rookie. You are allowed ONE incident like this in your career.
Assignment: List (at least) ten mistakes this guy has made.
And this he is in the hospitality industry?
My guess is that this exposure will lead to behavior modification at Cornell School of Hotel Management – one way or the other.
November 18th, 2010 at 6:21AM
DF, fantastic idea. I know you’re being tongue-in-cheek, but it highlights part of the problem. At least where I work, no dean, associate dean, or department chair can “assign” a professor to do anything, especially as a remedial action. Professors do what they want, especially when it comes to teaching, and they know they can get away with it. (OK, cynical mode off now.)
November 18th, 2010 at 6:36AM
[…] comment so far about the yawn heard ’round the world (background here) comes from an Inside Higher Ed comment thread: Treated like cattle, students will occasionally […]
November 18th, 2010 at 9:25AM
In my experience, Ivy League and the high-end state flagship classrooms are often terrible. My grad department’s facilities were positively embarrassing even by 1950s standards, let alone the 1980s when I was there. A student at Tierfour State would walk out in disgust. Then again, Tierfour has a library that mostly consists of coloring books and high school level encyclopedias. I suppose it partly depends on where you want to spend your money.
November 18th, 2010 at 11:05AM
theprof makes a good point.
When I interviewed for a job at Carleton in 1973, their chemistry laboratories were worse than about 95% of the high school labs in the state of Minnesota.
It’s the people, stupid..
Of course Carleton did eventually get a brand new spanking lab, but I’d be surprised if the students are actually learning any more chemistry than they used to in the old labs.
November 18th, 2010 at 7:20PM
Are we talking this professor ?
http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/facultybios/faculty.html?id=83
When you mentioned kilobytes, I thought it was a computer science class. It seems, rather, to be about business computing in hotel settings. Phew, the computer scientists’ honor is safe,
November 18th, 2010 at 8:07PM
That’s the guy, DM.