Don't go to UMA. I am currently living this particular nightmare and feel compelled to warn others of the substandard education they will receive at this school.
Here are a few things that you can expect as a student at this school. Expect to have absolutely no idea where you stand in most of your classes. I have been at UMA for two semesters, taking a total of 8 classes. By three weeks post-midterm, I had not received any graded work in half of my classes, even though we were turning in assignments. When I asked about this, the typical instructor response was something along the lines of “I don't grade students for their opinions.” I'm still not exactly sure what that means. If you don't want to grade students on their opinions – don't ask them for their opinions. Seems pretty simple to me, but what do I know?
If you do happen to have a class where you get graded work returned in some sort of timely fashion, be wary of who may actually be grading your work. I am currently taking a literature criticism class. This is an online class being taught by an instructor that I had heard very good things about prior to signing up. In fact, it was the high esteem in which she was held that inspired me to take this class. As it turns out, she has a teaching assistant teaching this class. I am not necessarily opposed to TA's teaching classes. In this case, however, I have a huge problem with it. The TA for this class is a work study student. She is not a graduate student; in fact, she doesn't even have her bachelors degree. This would technically make her a peer. I asked the instructor about this and expressed that I was not particularly happy with this arrangement. Her response was that this student was “Really good at this – she did really well in the class.” She also stated that she was “Really busy this semester” because she is working on her book. Apparently she's too busy to teach her classes. I'm currently beginning a slug-fest with administration over this one. I'll keep you readers posted as to the result, if any.
Why do I say “if any?” Because administration is unresponsive. Administration seems to subscribe to the “Ignore it and it will go away” philosophy of management. I suspect that with most students, this probably works for them. I suspect that this school is not unique in this respect.
I am still waiting to resolve an issue with an East Asian philosophy class that I took last semester. I've been trying to resolve this for 5 months. This particular instructor is a religious fanatic who was pushing his personal flavor of faith. Each class was started with 5 minutes of meditation, complete with gongs and bells. I expressed my objection to this behavior and was promptly blown off. I then asked the dean to please explain the difference between this man performing meditation (with gongs and bells), and that of a professor teaching religious studies starting class with the lord's prayer. The dean said it was a question of interpretation. Again, I'm not entirely sure what that means. It seems to me that if there is a question of interpretation, that is a problem in and of itself. After all, this is a public, tax dollar supported school. In addition to his praying in class, he also owns his very own Ashram, which is a non profit (read: tax exempt)501(c)3 corporation. Maybe it's just me, but that seems like a conflict of interest that flies in the face of academic instruction. But what do I know?
These are just a couple of examples of life at UMA. I could go on to tell about how UMA Augusta treats UMA Bangor like a red-headed stepchild, or how I tutor students who cannot write a complete, cohesive sentence. I could speak to the inordinate percentage of students who are methadone dosed, recovering addicts earning degrees in social services or the disjointed, typo strewn, syllabus presented to a class by Dr. so-and-so, but I'm sure that would border on the tedious.
So why did I choose to attend this misguided school? Simple. Their price, and they took all of my credits that I earned at EMCC, unlike UMO. The transfer college billing that EMCC is currently pushing is profoundly misleading. But this is a topic for another missive.
This is for week 10 - finally.
ReplyDeleteI know why it took so long--you had to cool off before you could even try dealing with this material dispassionately!
ReplyDeleteThis is what is known in the wordsmith trade as: A DAMNING INDICTMENT! A SCATHING CRITIQUE! THE EXPOSE THAT LIFTED THE LID ON ACADEMIA!
Alright, enough with the headline caps!
It's nicely done: just enough emotion to power it, not so much that it sinks under the exploding rhetorical bombs; a personal stake but a larger institutional problem; potent little examples.
Nothing critical to say about this one--hell, I wouldn't dare, lest you get me in your crosshairs!
The litcrit class taught by a student seems utterly beyond rationalizing away--to me, it is serious ethical malpractice, whatever oversight the actual prof my provide her teaching stooge. That's not what you signed up for or pay for.
The gongs and bells is a little more of a gray area but not much. I certainly want the academic freedom to proceed in class in ways that seem sensible to me, and if your prof had presented the gongs as a demo of religious practice, I'd be fine with it. But if he's burning through five minutes of class time every time with frippin meditation, at forty-five 50 minute classes per semester, he's blowing off nearly a full class with it.
And, no, I don't see any difference between starting the class with the Lord's Prayer and starting with meditation, except that the Lord's Prayer has huge long chains of religious, poetic, hermeneutic, historical, and ethical associations worth any one's time to consider, while meditation for this old atheist would simply be a chance to work up a grocery list....
The dean who said it was a matter of "interpretation" was full of shit--prayer stops at the schoolhouse door in a publicly supported institution, thank god.
;)
I will say a word of support for the fellow with a disjointed syllabus. I keep adding to mine, without ever doing much subtracting (I did subtract a section on the uselessness of saving data on computer disks, but it was long long after flash drives became ubiquitous, and it nearly killed me to take that material down.) Syllabuses can get a little lumpy! And AFAIC, typos are okay for most everyone ecxept English teachers.