Indeed it does.
Thank goodness we have so many different people commenting here!
That’s the only kind of diversity that really matters.

physicsguy is a retired professor but he doesn’t lecture. Yah!

Takes all kinds.

Academic staff can be “full time”, that’s just a measure of how much they are teaching, and the teaching load of a “full time” academic staff is different from the teaching load of a “full time” professor (usually double) because professors are considered to have other responsibilities besides teaching. Academic staff, even those teaching “full time”, usually work semester to semester.

You’re telling me you won’t do banal things (in-class tests and short quizzes) because the department head / instructional dean / provost will reprimand you and see to it your contract is not renewed.

No, because this is not a hypothetical. What I’m telling you is that instructors ARE doing these very obvious things–I did all those things and many more it would be boring to relate, I never cut standards–and WHEN these things cut significantly into passing rates for students, or fail too many of the protected classes of students, or if too many students complain, THEN they are reprimanded, and if they don’t get with the program, they are not renewed and more pliable staff is brought in to replace them.

Because I’m very good at documentation, and because the administrators could not say on the record what they really wanted me to do, and because my course was required for so many programs and not many could teach it, I was able to change careers at the time of my choosing without sacrificing the integrity of my courses. Those were stressful years and most people don’t want to put themselves through that kind of noise.

Tenure-track professors are filtered out by the tenure-award process, which takes several years. If a tenure-track professor starts to enforce standards that materially cut into pass rates, or if too many students complain–and they don’t bring in big research grants–they will be denied tenure and they will not be back next year, and they have the risk of sinking into the academic staff pool. They all know that; either they do bring in big research grants and so don’t care much about teaching anyway, or they don’t and don’t want to destroy their career, either way they conform.

Most of the people who teach at the university level love their field and want to teach it right and don’t want to pass students who cannot possibly do the work Most of the people who administer the universities care primarily about keeping butts in seats so the budget stays up. That has to do with how universities are funded and governed; reform has to start there. I’ve heard some promising things out of Florida in dismantling the academic DEI bureaucracies but that’s the easy thing.

Wisconsin Democrats are terrified a radical outsider will catapult Donald Trump into the White House.

The swing state party members fear Green Party candidate Jill Stein will steal votes from them and hamper Kamala Harris’ chances of election victory.

The far-left Stein is often considered a spoiler candidate who swung votes away from Hillary Clinton 2016. She is back on the ballot in 2024 and determined to make a statement.

Stein believes that anti-Israel sentiment – along with rhetoric about the Jewish state committing ‘genocide’ – from Muslims and Arab Americans in swing states like Michigan will ultimately deny Harris the presidency this November.

However, it’s in Wisconsin where Stein’s Green Party seems to be causing liberals the most anxiety, after Joe Biden won the state by just 21,000 votes in 2020.

If by “patronage” you include DEI, sure. But the problem is not limited to Ivy League; it is least bad in the Ivy League and at small state universities and liberal arts colleges it is catastrophic.

Stop giving take home examinations and the problem goes away.

Assign them the book and quiz them on the contents.

If a university administration cared to enforce standards, especially against the chronically underprepared DEI admissions, these obvious suggestions would be all that is needed–not that cheating can’t be done in class, of course it can and is.

The things you suggest are of course the first thing anyone thinks of. I assume that you have teaching experience and are already aware that if you implement those ideas, and too many of your students fail, or too many of the wrong protected class fail, or too many complain in your evaluations, you get a stern talking to from your chair, your dean, the Dean of Students, or maybe even the chancellor.

And if you don’t accept that feedback and do things their way, you won’t be teaching the next semester. Because only a small minority of instructional staff are professors with tenure. (Even tenure doesn’t protect someone like Amy Wax at Penn who really torques the administration.) The majority are “academic staff”, many of whom are paid by the course hour and don’t know from one semester to the next what courses they will be teaching at what institution or how many.

I’m not sure if you have any institutional teaching experience yourself, but even if you don’t, I’ll be interested to hear your suggestions for how the lowest-ranking people who can be dismissed at will can reform their institution’s administrative corruption singlehandedly. You may think of something in the few minutes you give to the problem that thousands of academics over twenty years haven’t, and an outsider’s perspective is often useful.

In my case I butted heads with administration as long as I could, and then changed careers.

I do, based on my experience teaching seniors at a four-year state university a little over ten years ago. Maybe your experience teaching was more recent than mine, but I doubt it’s improved much. I used to pretest my seniors on basic math and you would be stunned what percentage of them could not add fractions.

You can read a recent article in the Atlantic about the difficulty in getting students in the Ivy League to read a whole book, but at least they CAN read.

The Atlantic’s core audience doesn’t think so much about fractions, but remedial math courses–what my colleagues and I used to call Math 0 and Math -1–are increasingly assigned in the Ivy League.

Cheating is increasingly rampant and students having passed college math courses is no longer indicative of their having any mastery of the material. I used to see in transcripts 3 attempts at calculus with D or F, followed by summer calculus with an A or B, and a complete inability to do calculus in my class the next fall.