IVY-COVERED PROFESSORS IN IVY-COVERED HALLS.

Tom Lehrer might have gone to Harvard, but the bad teaching is everywhere, and another cohort of critics tills soil that has been plowed repeatedly, probably antedating ProfScam, which shook up the deanlets and provostniks thirty years ago.

The arguments never seem to change.  Teaching is basically acting, and if thespians can learn how to act, the extension to teaching is immediate.  It might be that educational institutions are not developing human capital, they are selling credentials (signals, in Econ-speak.)  "One gets the impression that colleges figured out early on that they were selling credentials and whether the students learned much or little didn’t really matter."  It might be that there's a conflict of interest between teaching and scholarship.  "Many of the faculty who have gone through those education classes are still lousy in the classroom. That has a lot to do with their incentives. To advance, they need to focus on their research. Time devoted to the classroom and students is largely seen as time wasted."  Nothing new there, either, and given the creativity-destroying innovations the colleges of deaducation have attempted to impose on the arts, sciences, and professional disciplines (rubrics, objectives, assessment) that doesn't surprise, either.

That article misses a recent development that you might soon be hearing more about.  With the corona tyranny and more online classes, what happens to departmental divisions of labor?  Apparently "productivity" (which might mean grants and publications) has not suffered over the past two years; but are the work-from-home faculty throwing more of the advising and committee work on the faculty who are present on campus?