A bit of a rejoinder on universities here, Neo...
I don't know of any university that automatically grants sabbatical leaves. The general policy is that faculty are eligible to apply for leave every seven years. "Applying" means submitting a comprehensive proposal as to the proposed project, which is then reviewed at several committee levels, from department to college to university. A negative response at any level ends the process. In U-Mass, ultimate approval following the various committee recommendations is by the university president. I don't have a statistic, but my guess would be that about 15 percent of requests are approved in a given year. Many college faculty go through an entire career without ever getting a sabbatical, because they don't have the research skills to qualify for one.
I don't think most people appreciate the importance of productive research in a university, as opposed to the teaching mission. In various ways, a university encourages research by freeing up classroom time for the productive faculty, which shifts the heavier teaching burden to faculty who are not interested or qualified to perform the research function.
As to mass lectures in lower-level core courses, this is one practical way to expose students to the more prominent members of the faculty (who have achieved prominence because of their publication record, not their teaching ability). It would be the students and parents who would complain the most if the more celebrated faculty names never appeared before students, especially at the lower level courses where students taking, say, Economics 101 number in the many hundreds if not thousands. The blending in of discussion sections taught by grad assistants is a logical method to assure a closer interaction experience for students.
Overseers of higher education from the legislative branch tend to have the simple-minded view that university faculty should spend 40 hours a week in the classroom like any other working stiff. This is an example of confusing quantity with quality. Teaching needs to be measured by not just how much is taught, but by what is taught. University faculty, in the aggregate, create the knowledge that is to be taught through a continual process of research ... without which, the quality of our world-renowned university system would soon wither. |
