September 20, 2017

"Yet... it is you who have pressured me, who has taught and researched for 41 years in university and is a Nobel Prize recipient, to do that which I will not do..."

"... advantage a single [Disability Resources and Educational Services] student over the 100-plus non-DRES students in my course by providing that student with my lectures electronically."

Writes Michael Schlesinger, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (who is "a Nobel Prize recipient" in the sense that he worked on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore).

As Inside Higher Ed reports, Schlesinger has been put on paid leave for refusing to share his lecture slides with a disabled student, as instructed by the disability accommodation administrators at his school.

He's very antagonistic toward them and their expertise: "Although you have a doctorate, I doubt that you teach. Although you have a doctorate, I doubt that you do research... I think the university needs to rethink having people such as you. Nonetheless, I look forward to spending the remainder of my life in Kona, Hawaii."

I can't help wanting to say that climate scientists expect us to bow to their expertise and take dictation about what must be done as a consequence of their findings, but here's the climate scientist resisting the expertise of people in the disability-accommodation field.

It's kind of ironic. Does he think this one student is scamming to get an advantage over the other students? The idea behind disability accommodations is to put the affected student on the same level as the other students, but he's objecting to giving that student an "advantage." Is he a disability doubter?

103 comments:

Sebastian said...

"The idea behind disability accommodations is to put the affected student on the same level as the other students," No: the idea behind disability accommodations is to avoid lawsuits. It's CYA. This is America, after all.

Patrick said...

Just a skeptic.

buwaya said...

He is being a, well, ba d word of several sorts.
Why not release lecture slides?
Thats normal in business, unless the material actually is in-house-only, confidential. I cant imagine a public university professor lecturing to hundreds of young people with confidential material.
The ADA aspect of this is questionable, but so be it.

sparrow said...

The claim to be a Nobel Prize recipient when he was really just part of large group that politicized science predisposes me against him. The rest of the put down unusually pompous, even for the academy. Big egos are pretty common among scientists in my experience.

Nihimon said...

"I can't help wanting to say that climate scientists expect us to bow to their expertise and take dictation about what must be done as a consequence of their findings, but here's the climate scientist resisting the expertise of people in the disability-accommodation field."

Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

http://www.isegoria.net/2008/07/robert-conquests-three-laws-of-politics/

Ignorance is Bliss said...

I can't help wanting to say that climate scientists expect us to bow to their expertise and take dictation about what must be done as a consequence of their findings, but here's the climate scientist resisting the expertise of people in the disability-accommodation field.

I'd prefer treating individuals as individuals. Do you know if this particular climate scientist expects us to bow to his expertise?

Abdul Abulbul Amir said...

Actually, it is the administration declaring that the student cannot perform on the same level. That and to provide employment to so called disability experts.

Bay Area Guy said...

Calm down dude. You're playing the Nobel Prize card to avoid sharing slides with a handicapped student?

Yes, I'm fully aware of ADA abuses and bogus lawsuits and all that silliness, but this seems so.......small.

Handicapped Student 1, Pretentious overwrought professor 0

buwaya said...

As for the justification where he says that releasing slides lowers attendance at lectures-

That is rooted I think in the extremely paternalistic US university system. Traditionally in Europe lectures, class attendance were optional. Its up to the student to pass the examinations and submit the papers, and if he can do that without ever seeing the professor, without a teachers in-person efforts, then good for him.

mccullough said...

Get off my lawn (in Kona)

Hagar said...

What did the "disability" consist of?
It sounds like an excuse not to attend classes.

As for myself, I never have understood this American thing about taking notes in class.
I was like Jerry Ford, I could listen to the lecture or take notes, but not both at the same time.

BarrySanders20 said...

The law requires reasonable accommodation.

He thinks he should decide what is reasonable, but he's wrong. It is the university's responsibility to ensure its conduct meets that standard, so it gets to decide.

He's too stubborn to accept that, so a hui hou. Go live near the volcano and tell the world about how man is the driving force behind climate change.

buwaya said...

I passed a few university classes while playing billiards or futzing about in the library.

Virgil Hilts said...

Ann, curious if any of your students came to you with a concentration (ADD) or nervousness type disability and argued that, as a consequence of their disability, they needed say twice as long as your other students to do an in-class or take-home exam. This is happening all over. Outside of college, there is rampant abuse of disability laws throughout our country and the courts are pouring gas on the fire. Disability claims are the new food stamps for the unproductive people in our society.

Bob Boyd said...

Sounds like he expects the climate in Kona to remain quite pleasant for many years.

MikeR said...

'he was “too bruised emotionally” to talk about the case'
Okayyy

Infinite Monkeys said...

he was “too bruised emotionally” to talk about the case

Bless his heart.

David said...

"Is he a disability doubter?"

He is a grade A+ asshole.

He's going to move to Hawaii, where everybody has an increased carbon footprint because of the energy expended to import stuff to the islands.

John Nowak said...

I'm baffled too. Why would a professor balk at sharing his slides with any student, let alone one with a handicap?

No idea what the handicap is, so I'm assuming it's reasonable. Say, the student is very nearsighted, can't read the screen in class, but can read them on their own computer.

Virgil Hilts said...

Re my disability rant - read this case http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2017/05/09/14-35164.pdf
As before, Dr. Richardson concluded that “[d]espite medications and treatment, she continues to have impairment of function which is likely to prevent her from being able to maintain attention span, complete tasks, and function in a gainful employment setting.” . . . [the subject] “is plagued by Obsessive Compulsive patterns which severely delay her
ability to leave the house and frequently [is] unable to do so without the assistance of her partner.” The same doctors that churn out prescriptions for ritalin and pain pills are now starting to churn out disability opinions based on the types of subjective claims and symptoms that anyone looking for a free ride can make up. It's the new welfare scam.

MacMacConnell said...

Who is surprised? Climate scientists don't reveal their class slides or their raw climate data and methods for review.

Jupiter said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
madAsHell said...

When I was playing college professor, I was amazed to learn that cheating, closed book, open book, and everything in between would not change the curve. I could give them all the questions ahead of time, and the curve would be the same as for students without the questions.

Of course, the college has now closed, and it never really attracted the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Yancey Ward said...

The joke is on him- Kona is due to be under water due to global warming by the end of last year.

Original Mike said...

I wrote up extensive notes (including all slides,etc) and distributed them to the entire class. I did not require attendance. Learn the material, demonstrate that you had done so, and we're good.

Jupiter said...

I think it's fairly clear that what really got this guy pissed off was having some idiot in an administrative office jacking him around about how to do the job he has been doing for decades, and threatening him with dire sanctions if he fails to to pull his forelock to said idiot's supposed expertise.

Let's consider the information before us; "Although you have a doctorate, I doubt that you teach. Although you have a doctorate, I doubt that you do research,” Schlesinger wrote to a disabilities services specialist at the university, announcing his departure last week. He accused the staff member of writing him “coercive emails” about the accommodation..."

What do you suppose this "services specialist" has a doctorate in? Mathematics? Physics? Chemistry? Literature? Hmmm.... how about, Applied Subsidized Nothingology?

Oh, well. The price of Diversity. Maybe they should change the name to Diversity of Illinois". Truth in labeling, so you know you're getting the watered-down product. Education Lite.

Qwinn said...

I think Mac is on to something. Providing lecture notes to this student would create written documents that could be fact checked. It might even necessitate links to the raw climate data. And we all know that the progressive scientific method cannot abide access to raw data by those outside the Party.

Michael said...

I always revert to the idea I had when I taught college all those years ago: Give every student a diploma their first day on campus. From there they can decide what they want to learn. Or not learn.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

"I passed a few university classes while playing billiards or futzing about in the library."

Yep, I aced two quarters of Business Law while eating Clark bars and reading through the collection of Kipling short stories the university library had. Many a pleasant rainy afternoon. Interestingly, they hadn't been checked out since the '40's.

RMc said...

Is he a disability doubter?

Worse...he's a disability denier, which, as we all know, is equivalent to being a Holocaust denier. Clearly, he wants to chuck disabled people into ovens! Where is the outrage?

Psota said...

Most of my professors in law school made their slides freely available to everyone. Their rationale was they wanted everyone to focus on the lecture, not focus on writing everything down from the slides!

Earnest Prole said...

They say it becomes obvious when it's time to retire. Professor, I agree with you: it's time to retire.

Scott Gustafson said...

Original Mike - my philosophy as well. I have one question for the professor, if giving your students copies of your slides ahead of time decreases their performance in your class, what is wrong with your slides?

Birkel said...

The university should assert its intellectual property rights over slides generated under his contract to teach and post the slides directly.

James K said...

There must be some reason he didn't want his slides to be accessible to everyone (which they would be, inevitably). Still, it seems like a reasonable accommodation, and the guy seems like a jerk.

The real scam is all the students getting "extra time." It's become an epidemic, and even extends to the SATs. So all these students are going to overachieve until they get somewhere and discover that they no longer get extra time. Then what?

Birkel said...

Althouse's assertion of expertise in the administrative offices of any university is unsupported. There is little evidence for this opinion, if any.

Michael K said...

As for the justification where he says that releasing slides lowers attendance at lectures-

That is rooted I think in the extremely paternalistic US university system.


I was shocked to learn that SC medical students routinely ignore class lectures as the course material is now all on line.

In this case, the student in question is probably white, Therefore no disability.

TheThinMan said...

"Climate scientist," "Nobel Prize winner": this guy has all the markings of a fraud and is afraid of being found out. I'm sure his slides are a rehash of hysterical drivel that's long been debunked and so putting them out on the internet would put him to shame.

walter said...

"based on my experience of providing all my students my lecture slides after each lecture for most if not all of the 16 times I have taught this course, I knew that one-third of my class would cease coming to my lectures if I provided them my lecture slides electronically. And their ceasing to attend my lectures would lower their course grades.”
--
He's done it before.
So..he's concerned about their performance due to not being there in person? Or is this a strict attendance point system?
If some college level classes have attendance tracking, it's not across the board by any means..i.e. not a systemic US education education issue at the higher Ed. level.

rhhardin said...

If he doesn't want to then he doesn't want to.

Even climate scientists ought to be able to say that against an intrusive law.

rhhardin said...

Next they'll be telling him to bake a gay wedding cake.

walter said...

Wait..another read of that suggests he holds the slides hostage for attendance, delivering as hard copy after class. How he knows 1/3 of the class wouldn't show up if he delivered electronically is about as dubious as CAGW predictions.

Ray - SoCal said...

This shows how the power of professors in universities has been decreased in favor of the administration.

JPS said...

Oh gawd, the "Nobel Prize Winner" again.

The Nobel Committee has weighed in already on this. The many, many individuals who contributed to the IPCC are not entitled to go around calling themselves Nobel Prize winners / recipients. The Nobel Committee does not split half the prize among 9,000 people. It might be worth asking these people where their gold Nobel medal is, or whether they received a check for 555 kroner.

There's a subtler point to be made. If a scientist is referred to as a Nobel Prize winner, it is assumed to mean one of the prizes in science. One might expect a really outstanding climate scientist to win a Nobel in Physics, or in Chemistry. (The Chemistry prize has been awarded for atmospheric chemistry in the past.) The Peace Prize is awarded on much softer, and inevitably political, criteria: Barack Obama for "extraordinary efforts"; the IPCC "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge".

Your work has to be indisputably successful for a hard science prize. For the peace prize, not so much.

Gabriel said...

Couple of things from my experience:

It's not very hard for students to get disability accomodation, because they have been defined so broadly. The intent is to make you think of blind people, people in wheelchairs, etc, but it is far from limited to them.

another read of that suggests he holds the slides hostage for attendance, delivering as hard copy after class. How he knows 1/3 of the class wouldn't show up if he delivered electronically is about as dubious as CAGW predictions.

I can assure you anyone who teaches a large lecture over a period of years knows exactly what affects attendance, and they would prove it to you if that did not violate Federal law (FERPA).

Lots of students think that having the slides means they got everything they needed from a lecture. In very few lectures is that true. If you are reading off your slides, then you add no value to your lecture, why even have class? And of course we can all think of instructors who did that.

When I would lecture, my slides, if I had any, would be diagrams with a line or two of text, to save time drawing the diagram and remind me what I'm talking about. But mostly I am showing them how to do something, using the slide as pre-drawn illustration.

chuck said...

Guess he missed that massive climate change that is sweeping the universities.

buwaya said...

"he holds the slides hostage for attendance"

Exactly. Why bother to maximize attendance?
This is a strangely frequent bugaboo of US schools, and even of university professors.
Perhaps there is some sort of internal class or program rating metric that makes it valuable for budget reasons?

Ray - SoCal said...

The movie real genius had a scene of a class being played on a tape recorder and taped by the class. Nobody in the class.

I could not find a snippet of it.

Gabriel said...

@walter:So..he's concerned about their performance due to not being there in person? Or is this a strict attendance point system?
If some college level classes have attendance tracking, it's not across the board by any means..i.e. not a systemic US education education issue at the higher Ed. level.


In my experience this is an "and" issue. You give points for attendance typically to encourage attendance and you want attendance because you think that will help the students learn.

What I did, is I did not give points for attendance, but I tracked it unobtrusively. So when a delicate snowflake would complain that his bad grades were due to my poor teaching, I would rebut with his attendance record, and that generally ended the administrator's interest in the snowflake's complaint.

Sad that we've got to such a pass in higher education, but we're not educating the clergy or the sons of gentlemen of leisure, or future scholars, anymore.

Gabriel said...

@buwaya:Perhaps there is some sort of internal class or program rating metric that makes it valuable for budget reasons?

It's because students want the power to skip class with no consequence, but they wish to dodge the responsibility for their consequent poor grade, and university systems exist that help them do this.

After a few years' teaching I had figured out how to defensively document, and the realization of how thorough I'd had to be, prompted me to find another career.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

Most of my professors in law school made their slides freely available to everyone. Their rationale was they wanted everyone to focus on the lecture, not focus on writing everything down from the slides!

This seems to be the most reasonable way to teach. The slides are basically bullet points upon which the professor or presenter will be expanding content.

I often did presentations to groups of people on investments and held classes to educate people on stocks, bonds, economic concepts. I always just made copies of my powerpoint presentations to give out so they could make additional notes if they wanted. AND so they would be less likely to ask questions about things that I was going to cover later. Time wasting and distracting questions.

It isn't like anything is top secret right? Or..maybe it is because climate change is a big hoax and he doesn't want his 'theories' to be memorialized in writing?

buwaya said...

"but we're not educating the clergy or the sons of gentlemen of leisure, or future scholars, anymore."

This is a very important point, thank you.
Still, it is so (attendance tracking) even at elite universities, those that do get the serious kids.

Gabriel said...

@Dust Bunny Queen:It isn't like anything is top secret right?

Not at all. He has decided not to lead his students into temptation. When I made slides available, students cut class more, to their own detriment, and then they'd blame me for it.

James K said...

Althouse's assertion of expertise in the administrative offices of any university is unsupported.

"Expertise" nowadays means the ability to protect the university from legal problems and the threat of loss of federal funding for failure to adhere to all the regulations (Title IX etc.). Nothing to do with education.

Gabriel said...

@buwaya:Still, it is so (attendance tracking) even at elite universities, those that do get the serious kids.

The serious kids at the good schools have had high grades all their lives and expect them. They will tell you, "I am an A student". I would always reply, "As are what you do, not what you are, and what you do or do not do is the basis of your grade."

Consequently, they will make the case that if they checked all the boxes they deserve an A. You offer attendance, or not, depending on how you choose to approach this problem.

The only reason grades of any kind are based on anything other than the final, is to incent the students to study the material. You might say, why would they not study, aren't they paying to learn? Actually, frequently they are in your class to check off a box on the way to graduation.

James K said...

The issue with attendance is that students skip class, then when they don't understand something they either clog up your office hours asking questions that were answered in class, or waste class time when they do come by asking questions that would be unnecessary had they been attending regularly. Then the students who do attend get frustrated. I tell students that if they miss class they are on their own in terms of catching up, but that's hard to enforce in a larger class.

Gabriel said...

@James K:When when they don't understand something they either clog up your office hours asking questions that were answered in class, or waste class time when they do come by asking questions

I wish to God they did this. Instead, they'd cram the night before, fail, and complain to their program directors and the deans, because they can't check off the box that lets them graduate in spring and they don't to have to tell their parents what really happened.

Or even worse, they complain to their parents, who call the deans, or the university president.

Seriously it's bad out there.

buwaya said...

"Actually, frequently they are in your class to check off a box on the way to graduation."

They almost always are.
In most cases you are not a teacher so much as a filter.

MadisonMan said...

The Professor is 74. High time he retired.

Like others, I make my PowerPoint slides freely available (as pdf) to students. But if you want to know what might be tested on? That's not necessarily revealed in the slides.

Gabriel said...

In this particular case, the student with the accommodation is going to email those slides to all the other students who don't have one, and that, in the lecturer's estimation, will cause a drop in attendance.

Students get together on stuff like that.

Gospace said...

The idea behind disability accommodations is to put the affected student on the same level as the other students, but he's objecting to giving that student an "advantage."

That right there is the disconnect. They ARE on the same level if they get the same information. If they can't function and compete, well, they fall behind.

Tough. If it weren't for modern technology, they'd mostly be dead before adulthood. Even with modern technology, real world disasters leave them dead. https://reunifygally.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/the-forgotten-victims-of-september-11-people-with-disabilities/

Dude1394 said...

He probably doesn't want his intellectual property to be stolen.

walter said...

Gabriel said...I tracked it unobtrusively. So when a delicate snowflake would complain that his bad grades were due to my poor teaching, I would rebut with his attendance record, and that generally ended the administrator's interest in the snowflake's complaint.
--
Well..students having this sort of power/entitlement may indeed be a recent development. Back in the late 80's at U-Mad, I think the only time I felt any compulsion to question a grade was when I received a different grade than my partner for a joint project. My Korean TA (who suddenly had better diction than during classes) explained my partner was an older female student, therefore..

Michael said...

I think it is a simple matter of him not wanting to be told what to do. He has a point.

walter said...

Blogger Gospace said...
Tough. If it weren't for modern technology, they'd mostly be dead before adulthood. Even with modern technology, real world disasters leave them dead.
--
Wow..

James K said...

He has a point.

I don't know. He is an employee. Professors are given a lot of latitude, but they still have to follow a bunch of rules set by their superiors.

Birches said...

The student who needs accommodations could film the lecture and then they'd have the slides to go back over the material at a pace that is a better fit.

Is this not an option?

readering said...

An advantage? It's not like the student is asking for a golf cart.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

The prof could just be in a pissy mood because of this:

"The world has warmed more slowly than had been forecast by computer models, which were “on the hot side” and overstated the impact of emissions, a new study has found. Its projections suggest that the world has a better chance than previously claimed of meeting the goal set by the Paris agreement on climate change to limit warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Pierre Friedlingstein, another author of the study and a professor at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, added at the news briefing that “the models end up with a warming which is larger than the observed warming for the current emissions. … So, therefore, they derive a budget which is much lower.”

The new research, thus, seems to potentially empower a critique of climate science that has often been leveled by skeptics, doubters and “lukewarmers” who argue that warming is shaping up to be less than climate models have predicted…"

https://hotair.com/archives/2017/09/19/climate-scientists-previous-warming-estimates-hot-side/




walter said...

I smell a bit of NIMBY here. He's probably a big supporter of regulations so long as they don't involve him.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

Gabriel said: When I made slides available, students cut class more, to their own detriment, and then they'd blame me for it.

That sounds like a problem of their own making. Tuff on them :-D

As I said. The slides are just bullet points...or should be. An outline of the lecture. The important information (things that will be ON the test) should only be disclosed during the class presentation so that those students who made the effort to actually show up, would have the full information.

How you can accommodate this for a disabled student who may not be able to attend the lecture for physical reasons is probably more the issue. Many of the classes that I took for my CFP designation were on line, remote, conference call plus slides since most of us were unable to psychically attend a class due to distance and geography.....plus most of us were already working at careers and couldn't just leave for a semester. This would work for the disabled who could be certified as being disabled and allowed to sign up for this service.

We could download the "slides" and probably if motivated enough record the audio portion of the presentation. You can't stop all cheating /shrug.

Rabel said...

I take it that Professor Schlesinger is not a big fan of Affirmative Action.

Gabriel said...

@Walter:Back in the late 80's at U-Mad, I think the only time I felt any compulsion to question a grade was when I received a different grade than my partner for a joint project...

There you go, that was a quarter-century ago, been some changes in the campus environment since then.

@DBQ:That sounds like a problem of their own making. Tuff on them.

When they bring the administration in, tuff on me. There's no presumption of innocence, or anything like that.

One of my colleagues was warned by a student of a conspiracy of his students to defame him to his chair. Because he had advance warning he was able to defuse that, but if he hadn't things would have got very bad for him.

Jupiter said...

Gabriel said...
"When I made slides available, students cut class more, to their own detriment, and then they'd blame me for it."

I suppose it depends on the class. When I took physics classes, it was usually understood that there were certain types of problems you would be expected to solve on the exams, and if you could solve every one of them correctly in the time allowed, you would get an A. As the methods for solving those problems were explained in the text, the reason for going to class was to get clarification on points you didn't understand from the reading, to get an experienced person's insights, and perhaps to discuss the meaning of the physics behind those problems. But I felt no compunction about skipping class. Well, little compunction. By the time I got to grad school, I had begun to understand how hard some Profs worked on their teaching, and they did it well, so it was sort of like going to the game to cheer for your team.

Gabriel said...

@DBQ:The important information (things that will be ON the test) should only be disclosed during the class presentation so that those students who made the effort to actually show up, would have the full information.

Then in that case, the student needing the accommodation is being disadvantaged. Whatever the sekret information is, he needs to get it without coming to class.

And if he gets it, it will go to all the other students who DON'T need the accommodation, and attendance will drop.

I think the solution is, meet the accommodation and mandate attendance for those not accommodated. You can't make the students pay attention or study but you can ding them for not showing up at all... and it's sad that with legal adults in a higher education setting we have to resort to this grade-school stuff.

Gabriel said...

@Jupiter: I taught physics classes. They were required to graduate, but my university did not offer a physics major, and so everyone was there only to check off a box on graduation.

Since their math skills, as a rule, were very weak, they were only getting the math prerequisites in two year late, and by the time they come to me they are seniors who don't really know algebra or calculus yet are required to pass a calculus-based physics course, or else not graduate in the spring and have to break Gramma's heart.

So, a very high stress situation all around. Some lecturers taught essentially fake classes and passed everybody; I did not, and changed careers.

JAORE said...

"I think the only time I felt any compulsion to question a grade was when I received a different grade than my partner for a joint project. My Korean TA (who suddenly had better diction than during classes) explained my partner was an older female student, therefore.. "

I had a Chinese lab partner in Soil Mechanics. Nice kid. The Lab's TA was the son of our Professor.

He made fun of my lab partner's accent unmercifully and in front of the entire class. It hurt the kid badly. I tried the,"C'mon, man, give it a rest" a few times. It just got worse.

Eventually, I took the TA to the side and suggested he really need to lay off. Something about ripping off his head and shitting down his neck..... He stopped making fun of my partner. [I worked my way through school as a construction laborer and looked a LOT tougher than I really was.]

I got an F on the last team assignment. The rest of the team got an A.

I didn't care. Had enough points for a guaranteed "C". The only C I got in Civil Engineering. But I already had received and accepted a job offer.

Michael K said...

Still, it is so (attendance tracking) even at elite universities, those that do get the serious kids.

Nobody is more serious than medical students but maybe the course info that was put online was enough to get the grades they needed.

Medical school grades are more than a checkoff. They need good grades to get good postgrad residencies.

Undergrad education is a place I don't want to go anymore. My youngest daughter had really wrong information being taught in her general ed classes. I saw her review material for the final.

Appalling,

Michael K said...

"I had a Chinese lab partner in Soil Mechanics. Nice kid. "

I had a Chinese guy in my medical school class. Those were the days when we took lecture notes verbatim if possible.

He took his lecture notes in Chinese characters. He said it was faster.

MadisonMan said...

The prof could just be in a pissy mood because of this:

When I'm shown to be wrong in something related to my own science field, I am usually curious: curious to know how the evidence was created. Anger never enters into it.

I don't think my viewpoint is unusual.

Gabriel said...

@Michael K:Medical school grades are more than a checkoff. They need good grades to get good postgrad residencies.

Most get their good grades by studying hard, and a few by grade-grubbing, complaining to deans, or cheating. The stakes, as you point out, are very high.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

Aaaack. This guy is claiming the Nobel exactly as Michael Mann did. Leave it. It isn't yours.

Gabriel said...

@Michelle Dulak Thomson:Aaaack. This guy is claiming the Nobel exactly as Michael Mann did. Leave it. It isn't yours.

I know, right? It's like saying you were the "recipient" of $100 million last quarter, because you work for an organization that did.

JaimeRoberto said...

If it is true, as he claims, that students who get his slides in advance perform worse, then wouldn't giving this one student the slides in advance give him a disadvantage rather than advantage?

Freeman Hunt said...

"While he gave all of his students hard copies of his lecture notes before class, he said, he didn’t provide electronic copies because “based on my experience of providing all my students my lecture slides after each lecture for most if not all of the 16 times I have taught this course, I knew that one-third of my class would cease coming to my lectures if I provided them my lecture slides electronically. And their ceasing to attend my lectures would lower their course grades.”"

So he already gives out hard copies, and the administration wants him to give electronic copies to the disabled student.

What a molehill to die on.

MacMacConnell said...

In this day and age why wouldn't he provide electronic copies. When I attended university in the early 70s, profs would supply copies of their lectures and reading list. The thing was attendance was mandatory and for every two times missed you would lose one grade. Miss eight time and ace everything you get an F. I miss twice in an econ class, ace everything and got a B. I appealed it to the university because I miss the classes due to football team travel, they denied the appeal.

Ann Althouse said...

"Ann, curious if any of your students came to you with a concentration (ADD) or nervousness type disability and argued that, as a consequence of their disability, they needed say twice as long as your other students to do an in-class or take-home exam...."

It absolutely never happened because at the UW–Madison, the accommodation of disability is handled in a completely professionalized manner by the McBurney Center.

If any student had come directly to me with a request for extra time based on a claim of disability, it would have presented no problem at all for me because the obvious and only response would have been for me to refer the student to the McBurney Center. If the official process led to accommodations — and sometimes it did — I would not know which exams were involved and they would be blind-graded and curved along with everyone else. It would simply be outside of my purview, and I wouldn't have considered intruding into the process.

I never heard any complaints about the professionalism of the McBurney Center, even though I gave proctored, time-pressure exams and everyone's grade was affected by how well everyone else performed. I never heard any student say they were worried about unfairness because somebody else got extra time on an exam. I believe the disability requirements are, in fact, handled by people who are properly professional.

Gabriel said...

@Mac MAcConnell:I appealed it to the university because I miss the classes due to football team travel, they denied the appeal.

Yeah, and they were right to, because football is extracurricular...

Ann Althouse said...

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is as large as the University of Wisconsin–Madison (about 45,000 students). I assume they handle disability accommodations in a similar, professionalized way. The professor's rejection of the university's handling of disability therefore strikes me as bizarre.

James K said...

I never heard any student say they were worried about unfairness because somebody else got extra time on an exam.

Perhaps because it is under the radar screen, so to speak?

Do practicing lawyers get extra time to prepare their cases? I don't mean to sound harsh toward those with legitimate issues (like dyslexia), but when do they learn that the world doesn't always accommodate them? And then there are those who abuse the system with more subjective "learning issues."

Ann Althouse said...

"""While he gave all of his students hard copies of his lecture notes before class, he said, he didn’t provide electronic copies because “based on my experience of providing all my students my lecture slides after each lecture for most if not all of the 16 times I have taught this course, I knew that one-third of my class would cease coming to my lectures if I provided them my lecture slides electronically. And their ceasing to attend my lectures would lower their course grades.”" So he already gives out hard copies, and the administration wants him to give electronic copies to the disabled student."

Are the "lecture notes" and the "lecture slides" different? I couldn't figure that out.

It's possible that a teacher wants to give a presentation of slides in some sort of fashion that reveals points sequentially with some sort of drama so that slides in advance would spoil the show. There's a control-freak quality all of this (including caring so much about people showing up in person), but the professor might have an academic freedom argument that really matters to him. Maybe a slide presents a puzzling question that he teases through before displaying a slide with an impressive answer and he wants to make that happen in the moment.

Ann Althouse said...

Maybe the professor works on the slides right up to the time of the class and needing to provide them in advance would force a different class prep method on him.

I never used projected slides in any of my classes, but I always prepared my class right before I taught, in the last few hours, changing things and rearranging it. If I did that with slides, I would have been tweaking them right up to the end. It would have been very intrusive to be told you have to get them done ahead of time (how MUCH ahead of time?) just for ONE student. I could see getting powerfully angry at bureaucrats dictating that to me without first asking if it would be acceptable and giving me at least a chance to explain why. So, what I'm thinking is that he has a problem with the highhandedness of his university's professionals and their lack of real-world understanding of what it's like to teach.

By the way, I was never asked to give my notes to a student. The accommodation here for students with the kind of disability he's talking about was to hire another student (someone already in the class) to be a note-taker for him or her. But then, as I said, I didn't use Power Point.

Ann Althouse said...

"Perhaps because it is under the radar screen, so to speak?"

Sure. I think our students would tend to think that it's socially unacceptable to complain about disability accommodations.

"Do practicing lawyers get extra time to prepare their cases?"

They just take more time, don't they? Last I heard, lawyers bill by the hour. Personally, I tend to work fast and value efficiency, and I always thought that put me in a worse position, since I couldn't claim more hours. That's one reason I liked teaching. If I got something done fast, the saved time belonged to me.

"I don't mean to sound harsh toward those with legitimate issues (like dyslexia), but when do they learn that the world doesn't always accommodate them? And then there are those who abuse the system with more subjective "learning issues.""

We all have our limitations, and the challenge is to figure out how to do something that's worthwhile. Is it a good idea to be a lawyer if you have dyslexia? Maybe not. I don't know that much about how people with disabilities decide which vocation to pursue, but when you're the professor, the students are the people the admissions process has brought it, and once there, they are entitled to reasonable accommodations. They may have a continual struggle to succeed in their chosen field, but they've decided they're up for it and the admissions committee brought them in, and they've got whatever accommodations are deemed appropriate, and it's on from there. If they can get a job offer, they'll get reasonable accommodations again. That's the law. It's a very popular law too.

Original Mike said...

"Maybe the professor works on the slides right up to the time of the class and needing to provide them in advance would force a different class prep method on him."

I worked on my notes & slides every year, and as a result what I handed out sometimes wasn't 100% current. I didn't lose sleep over it.

George said...

Of course this pompous fake Nobel laureate does not want his lecture notes made available to anyone - makes it too easy to expose the poor and phone science in his climate models

tolkein said...

He's not a Nobel Laureate. Michael Mann made the same claim in his suit against Mark Steyn and had to amend it after the Nobel Committee pointed out that he had not been awarded the Nobel Prize. He should be sacked for passing himself off as having qualifications he doesn't actually have.,

Michael K said...

Most get their good grades by studying hard, and a few by grade-grubbing, complaining to deans, or cheating. The stakes, as you point out, are very high.

We had a guy in my class who cheated. Everybody knew but we never turned him in.

He went into Radiology so we figured he couldn't do much harm. A lot of us knew and thought we would never refer a patient to him but Radiology was pretty harmless. That was in the days before interventional Radiology came along.

ccscientist said...

I've encountered this guy in person. One of the most arrogant people I have ever met. He is probably 75 so he can just retire.
However, I have to ask 1) why he doesn't give all students his slides and 2) why it is not possible to object to the disability staff decisions.

Big Mike said...

I'm the father of a young man who lost the use of his dominant hand to an aneurysm. His ability to take notes is nil. The people who evaluated him and other handicapped students are professionals, and they are trained to spot phonies. I find Michael Schlesinger's appeal to authority to be ridiculous -- in the field of evaluating the accommodations necessary to provide the legally-mandated level of support required for a student it is he who is the person with no expertise.

Ken B said...

He has a point about providing the notes to only one student. But not about refusing then to make them available to all students. That seems like the solution doesn't it?

Molly said...

I am interested in this subject from a personal level. And I will use an example from real life. I am teaching a course at large state university.

I have a student who qualifies for disability related dispensation. This student is allowed double time during exams because he has a documented learning disability. (In my experience this is by a huge margin, the most commonly used/allowed disability dispensation. I have had other dispensations allowed for students with hearing disabilities -- an in-lecture translator or a requirement of subtitles on videos; and I can imagine similar dispensations for blind students.)

The student I refer to in the last paragraph (with ADD and bipolar disorders) comes to see me during office hours, and has obvious problems following the way I look at a problem. I see the homework as requiring addressing sequentially points 1, 2, 3, and 4. and in order to address problem 1, we need to follow steps 1a, 1b, and 1c. As I get to the point 1b, the student jumps in with a question about how this is related to point 3. My reaction is: "I can go ahead and talk about point 3, if you wish, but that will leave point 1 incomplete, or unaddressed. I recommend we stay with point 1b, and then move on to point 1c, etc., until we have completed point 1, and then we can -- assuming point 2 is not a problem -- move on the point 3."

I can't really say that my approach is "right" in the sense that it is the only way to arrive at an appropriate conclusion. But I can say that (after graduation from university) the student will be exposed over and over again to people who think like and are trained like me. For example, if the student became a lawyer, he would be exposed over and over to judges who want him to stay focussed on question 1 until it is resolved and not move on to question 3 because the issues of question 1 have become difficult or confusing.

So at what point do "we" as a university decide: "This person does not have the abilities to complete a degree"? compared to the decision "This person needs accomadation for learning disabilities to complete a degree?" That decision gets made by the admissions office (for undergrads -- completely outside the administrative apparatus of undergraduate teaching). And the disability accommodations are required by federal law for students, once they have been admitted (though, as far as I can see, not as a factor to be taken into account in admissions decisions -- a student who performs badly on SATs can be rejected if that the poor performance results from learning disability.)

Zach said...

"Nobel Prize Recipient."

New rule: If your name is not on the certificate, and you didn't get any money, you did not win the Nobel Prize.

tim in vermont said...

How is this person going to keep a job and pay off his loans?