A media studies professor, business professor, and philosophy professor walk into a bar… sounds like the beginning of a joke, right? Wrong. Everyone knows professors aren’t funny. In fact, they have no idea what we go through—that we have other classes, that our credits didn’t transfer, that we’re stuck here an extra semester. Oh, and we really don’t appreciate it when they call on us when clearly ours hands weren’t raised. Wouldn’t it be easier if our professors knew what we go through? Joke’s on us. They do. And they have a couple of things they want us to know about them, too. And unlike those “walk into a bar”…
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Sexism runs rampant on Ratemyprofessors.com
Using an interactive tool with data derived from ratemyprofessors.com, the reviews describing male and female professors showed gender bias depending on the word searched. Benjamin Schmidt, assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, aggregated 14 million reviews from ratemyprofessors.com and created a search engine to see how words compared between professors depending on field and gender, concluding that certain positive words were descriptive of males more than females. One of the most surprising results was the “spectrum from smart to brilliant to genius, where each one of those is more strongly gendered male than the previous one was,” Schmidt told the New York Times. Schmidt provided a list of words overrepresented in gender bias on his…
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Students Voice out Opinion on Professors
Queens College students have mixed feelings about lectures given by untenured and tenured faculty members. “I’ve enjoyed the classes I’ve had taught by graduate students because the structure of their syllabus seems more relevant and they are more relatable. They are not intimidating to approach,” Jessica Powell, a senior, said. Powell’s statement supports a recent study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research that states that students in introductory classes learned more from outside instructors than from tenured or tenure-track professors. The study also states that students taught by untenured faculty were more likely to take a second course in the discipline and more likely to earn a better…
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Merit Pay: A look from all the angles
Within the CUNY system, professors do not always get what they give, but annually, critical decisions are made at Queens College’s college-wide Tenure and Promotion meeting, which took place between Nov. 5 and Nov. 9. Instead of receiving merit pay — compensation designed to reward professors based on their professional performance and encourage teachers to excel in their teaching habits — CUNY staff receive “step increases” in their salary, designed to keep pace with the cost of living. The Professional Staff Congress, CUNY’s staff union that has — according to the PSC — more than 25,000 members, has been and intends to continue to stand in opposition of merit pay.…