Let's back up a moment.
We started this back with Glenn Reynolds' problem with the lack of fellow conservatives on the faculty at Tennessee. I think he's in the law school there. He remarks, somewhat over the top, that university faculty's have a lot of folk who hate Bush. Which is a standard right wing comment about anyone, faculty or not, who is critical of Bush policies. So, most likely what he sees, are faculty members critical of Bush. That's hardly surprising or alarming.
Nothing troubling there then save Reynolds comment. And that one was so common as not to be remarkable.
You have now taken that issue into a discussion of the lack of behavioral control of faculty members who are "not professional."
And, I gather, whether there are filters to catch that before tenure.
In my experience, the few faculty members who evangelized in classrooms did so because they considered it a moral duty to do so. And the heighth of some sort of professionalism beyond mere careerism. That they were wrong is beside the point of this discussion. It certainly, however, wasn't the case that they agreed with the generally accepted professional standards and then couldn't control impulses.
As for filters to catch such with those convictions, they are there but it's a fairly long discussion to get at the issue of just how effective they are. I'm not going there because it's really a discussion about the promotion and tenuring process per se.
Suffice to say universities, in my experience, don't do a very good job with the teaching evaluation portion of the tenure and promotion process. |
