1. principles
  2. The Perverse Incentives of Tenure

The Perverse Incentives of Tenure

By drorzel on June 28, 2006.

From America's Finest News Source:

Professor Pressured To Sleep With Student For Good Course Evaluation

FAYETTEVILLE, AR--Alan Gilchrist, an associate professor of English literature at the University of Arkansas infamous for his tough grading standards and dry lecturing style, was coerced into sleeping with an undergraduate on Monday in order to earn a good course evaluation. "My tenure's on the line here, so I allowed a student to take advantage of me," said an emotional Gilchrist of the experience, which he hopes will earn him at least six "very much enjoyed" responses on the eight-item evaluation form. "I told myself it would be just this once, and that it would be over soon, and that it wouldn't be that bad, but I was used. And I can't stop showering." Sources said that the unidentified student is one of the most popular and charismatic on campus, raising questions about possible abuse of power.

The fact that they got the rank wrong (an "associate professor" usually has tenure-- those of us who are untenured are "assistant professors") just makes it funnier.

Tags
Academia

More like this

The Myth of Post-Tenure Collapse
Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake Young has an anti-tenure post that repeats one of the classic mistaken arguments: 1) Tenure supports bad teachers as much as it supports unproductive researchers. I can't tell you the number of bad lecturers that I have had over the years. It has to be like 90%. Science…
A better way to calculate GPA?
In education school, I was taught that the purpose of grading was to rank-order students -- to create a system whereby the highest-achieving students were ranked at the top and the lowest-achieving students were at the bottom. But recently there have been worries that grade inflation is making it…
My First UK Job Interview
Compared to the Swedish system, academic recruitment is extremely swift in the UK. In Scandyland, it's typically 7 months from the application deadline to the rejection letter, mainly because of slow external referees. The worst I've seen was 14 months. But in the UK, it's all done in a matter of…
Second-Hand Second-Rate Culture War Hackery
Dave Munger on Twitter drew my attention to this blog post on college costs, and I really wish he hadn't. The post in question is really just a recap-with-links of an editorial by John Zmirak, blaming the high cost of college on an unlikely source: [W]hat if universities began to neglect this basic…

For once, I think The Onion may have made a misstep. There's an actual member of the English department named Ellen Gilchrist--not a lit teacher, but a creative writing teacher, and one of the best short story writers working today. Flip some of the other details which do fit her, and it comes off as a nasty slam on her.