DON'T WRITE A DISSERTATION, EARN A SPECIAL EDUCATION CERTIFICATE.

I have long maintained that higher education has a retention and completion problem because high schools don't properly prepare students, and I've proposed a way of obtaining accountability from those high schools that some states are moving toward.

Perhaps, after everything else has failed (yes, that's a post title up there) they'll do the right thing.

Truckee Meadows Community College wants to terminate a tenured instructor of math for “insubordination.” The professor, Lars Jensen, says the college wants to get rid of him because he’s telling inconvenient truths about how the college is lowering math standards.

“Let it be clear that this hearing is not about deliberation of two unsatisfactory annual performance ratings that I have earned, but rather about two unsatisfactory annual performance ratings that have been pinned on me in retaliation for speaking out on academic matters,” Jensen said in his opening statement for his termination hearing before a faculty panel last week. “This case is about whether a faculty member at TMCC is permitted to use his or her academic freedom to speak on academic matters and matters of public concern. We will show today that the insubordination charges against me are unsubstantiated and incompatible with an open and free academic environment.”

If only the high schools were doing their job, the community college wouldn't have to reprise high school.

Jensen says that math standards have been eroding nationwide for some time, but that things took a turn for the worse at Truckee Meadows after the Nevada System of Higher Education’s Board of Regents voted in 2019 to ditch traditional remedial math and English courses in favor of a new, “corequisite support” program.

“By redesigning first-year math and English classes, adding additional instruction time to these college-level courses, and requiring mandatory tutoring for students who need the support, we have seen very promising data across the nation that students are more successful,” Thom Reilly, system chancellor, said at the time. “This approach allows students to kill two birds with one stone by completing the college-level work while also receiving needed remedial support designed to ensure greater success.”

Jensen said there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, and many student success advocates say that forcing students to take remedial noncollege courses before they begin actual college coursework only hurts their chances of ever getting a degree. But Jensen said that in adopting the corequisite support program at TMCC, the college aggressively pressured the math department to remove content from its required courses, specifically the core algebra content that had always been included in the college’s math requirement for liberal arts-oriented students. (Jensen says that math requirements for students who wish to pursue math and the natural sciences have been less affected.)

You get more retention and completion, but in so doing, do you perpetuate the community college stigma of "high school with ashtrays" or give U.S. News more reason to sell those guides?

Jensen was born in Denmark and lived there for 25 years before moving to Philadelphia in 1979 to attend the University of Pennsylvania for a doctorate in physics, which he received in 1984.

“The hard handed methods of President Hilgersom’s administration has caused four members of my department to retire early, last June,” Jensen told The Fix. “These were all faculty who originally had no plans to retire. Many faculty from other departments have retired too. The atmosphere at the college is poisonous — one of fear.”

“Faculty free speech and academic freedom is in grave danger at TMCC,” he said.

More to the point, retention and completion efforts are poisonous to the aspirations of strivers at the community colleges and regional comprehensive universities.  Apparently, though, nobody has suggested that Professor Jensen buy a train set.

Jensen, in turn, alleges that Ellsworth, Flesher and his president, Karin Hilgersom, retaliated against him for criticizing how the college chose to adopt the corequisite program, by unjustly scrutinizing him and rejecting his applications for a phased retirement program while approving colleagues seeking the same agreement. (In emails to Jensen, the college said it couldn't accept his four- and five-year phased retirement requests to teach only in the fall because this would require finding too many replacement instructors for other terms.)

Jensen, who is 67, also alleges age and sex discrimination on the part of the college in a related complaint under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972; he says the college is more hospitable to younger faculty members than to older ones and to women over men. He’s also filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and says that the commission has scheduled a mediation date between him and the college for later this year.

Perhaps that's a fight worth having, or perhaps staying on is a self-made purgatory.