Orders from on high

Must be great bein’ the king.

Gary Robbins reports that Chapman U’s ubiquitous (and annoying) President James Doti has “asked his faculty to make their classes tougher after alumni said in a survey that they wished that some of their course work had been more challenging.” (Chapman president: Make courses tougher.)

This happened at a faculty retreat last month. Or so said the student newspaper.

Chapman routinely surveys its alumni (reports Gary). Graduates rate how challenging their courses have been, and the score has slid from 3.98 (out of 5) in 2001 to 3.9 in 2007.

Doti notes that Chapman is more selective than it used to be, student-wise, and these new and improved students want tougher classes.

The President was asked what faculty might do:

Doti said faculty could do such things as “assign more papers and expect better work in those papers.” In areas like economics, a teacher might “go from general questions about how the Federal Reserve works to asking how the fed would react in a specific setting if certain things happened. The students would have to do a lot more digging for information.”

No word on how Chapman’s faculty feel about all this.

I don’t know about Chapman, but, in general, standards have been sliding in higher ed for a long time. Recently, I noted recent reports on grade inflation and the curious factoid that, at many colleges (including those of the SOCCCD), Bs are more commonly awarded than C’s.

At our colleges, by far the most common grade awarded is an A.

Saddleback College’s PE division seems to give away A’s like M&Ms. I think a student in a Saddleback PE class has to show up to classes with a six-pack of Bud and then go sleep in the grass to get a C. If they just show up with the six-pack, that’s a B.

I’m just guessin’.

I’m all in favor of faculty recognizing the Great A Giveaway issue and then developing solutions. But it would piss me off if, suddenly, the college president (or, say, some old guy from the alumni association with a stack of survey forms) showed up and said, “Faculty, you need to get tougher. Go do that.”

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do these things. Orders from on high are almost always a bad idea.

I remember the spring of 2003, here at IVC. We learned that, according to the college’s Vice President of Instruction (a very wealthy fellow these days, it seems), faculty were to cease discussing the war in Iraq.

Just like that.

Later, we asked the VPI for clarification of the administration’s policy concerning discussion of the war. The VPI paused. He then advised us not to pursue clarification, for we might not like what we’d get.

He couldn't have given a worse answer.

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "call it our life"

Here's a poem for the change in season and for other things too. The Santa Anas came back today, rising quickly this morning as if someone had simply found the switch and turned the wind on, hot and high. Leaves are falling from the trees that have held them all year, branches too. Summer's over. The Fire Watch folks are out in force in the canyons, with their orange vests and radios, binoculars slung about their necks. After all, the arsonist of October 2007 is still at large.

Here's a poem by Philip Levine, who lives and works in Fresno. Rebel Girl addressed an envelope to him the other day. He should be receiving it right about now.


Our Valley

We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.


You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you're thrilled and terrified.


You have to remember this isn't your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

We're going to hell in a handbasket

Tom DeLay is the world’s biggest a**hole


Homosexuality is inflicted on people!