Ryan ChartrandAs a faculty member and former department chair, I have several comments concerning Allison Ramsey’s opinion column on the difficulty of getting classes.
First of all, the university has made it difficult to hire an adequate number of faculty members to meet student demand by refusing to offer salaries high enough to attract talented people in sufficient number. Instead, we are forced to rely more and more on temporary faculty, who are too often unreliable and are not held to the same standards as are tenure-track faculty.
Secondly, the bean counters in administration are not overly concerned about students having a class schedule that will facilitate learning. They only see classrooms that are not occupied at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., and ask us to schedule classes at those times, even if it means student schedules spread out over 12 hours. Of course, these same people only work 8 to 5 (unless they are among the lucky few who earn much, much more than the average faculty member does).
You might have better luck in getting classes if you transfer to a place like Stanford. The downside of this strategy is that their tuition next year will be about $35,000. Even with the difficulties students experience here, I believe that they get much more than what they pay for!
Jay Devore
Statistics professor and former chair