… you’ve produced a species of cheap irony: A management professor who cannot manage his management class.
Whatever the back story, UD would argue that a professor who sends his students a long rant denouncing them and puffing himself up, and who announces in the same email that he’s failing every last one of them and deserting the class (he seems to have handed it off to someone else on the faculty) is un p’tit peu out of control. Texas A&M Galveston has a strategic management problem on its hands.
Sure, some professors occasionally walk out of their classes in the middle of a lecture or discussion. Scott Jaschik reviews a few such cases here. In these examples, however, it’s about something very specific — students texting, or watching films on their laptops. In the Galveston case, the professor’s email (assuming the paper covering the story has published the correct email) shades off into the paranoid, with talk of whisper campaigns against him and his wife, and of needing police protection to teach the class.
UD doesn’t doubt that this guy’s got some shitskies in his class. You’re not supposed to deal with them by going nuclear.
April 25th, 2015 at 9:34PM
This sounds less like an educational issue and more like an incipient mental condition. Here’s more of the email:
April 26th, 2015 at 2:15AM
Dom: Yes.
April 26th, 2015 at 4:55AM
I defer to profs and teachers on this. But, I somehow feel for the guy.
April 26th, 2015 at 6:52AM
This takes me back to my undergraduate and graduate programs in business.
In an undergraduate stat class we were all having problems understanding the instructor. He would later in the year be arrested for getting into a fist fight at his son’s high school basketball game.
I questioned my instructors teaching style, having the students do all the work, in my first graduate class. The instructor marked me down as payback. Later he would admit he was not prepared to teach at this level despite having a sterling resume. This was also his first job after a business failure.
The ultimate was a graduate level marketing class taught by a go, go guy whose job hopping and performance promises had caught up with him. He was a drunk who was failing at his job and marriage. He did not show for class and when he did the material was wrong. I had had a number of marketing classes as an undergraduate and this stuff was not even close. Ultimately we were graded by a fellow classmate who I did not get along with and the Dean’s only comment was I had a problem.
Dean’s are not quick to look at instructors since they are “their guys.”
Steve Lucas
April 26th, 2015 at 9:26AM
I wonder how much support the guy was getting from the Administration if he needed to remove troublemakers or blatant cheaters. My guess would be, not much.
Nonetheless, obviously no excuse for the way he handled it. More proof, if more was needed, that understanding “management” at a theoretical level does not automatically make someone an effective manager in practice.