Word: parkers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...critizes the lack of peer evaluation and scruitiny after tenure as an inherent weakness. To replace tenure, she advocates negotiating renewable faculty contracts. In addition, Parker feels that since only a small proportion of faculty members engage in scholarly research, it makes little sense to limit their careers to academia. She suggest that more teachers become part-time and pursue a career in the outside world. She reasons that for professors, greater exposure to the world outside the Ivy walls would considerably upgrade their contribution to teaching...
...PARKER BELIEVES that many professors today are trying "above all to reassure themselves that they are invaluable members of society." She explains the arguments so prevalent today for "a return to core courses, grand syntheses of ethincs and history, morality and nature,' as the outcome of professional insecurity. Thus, the result of the Sixties is that the ideal of disinterested scholarship has been replaced by "the image of the professor who can inculcate values in the hearts and minds of the young...
...However, Parker does not sufficiently examine the validity of the students' shift towards preprofessionalism. While she emphasizes teachers' self-doubt, she fails to consider whether students should entertain doubts about their own careers...
...also believes that students are being duped into believing that a B.A. degree will ensure success in the corporate job market. Parker's alarm at what she sees as credential worship leads her to recommend abolishing the B.A. degree in order to shift focus to the value of the education itself...
...Parker reserves her greatest criticism for faculty attempts to gain control over administrative decisions. Her experience with the Bennington faculty leads her to assert that college professors are unwilling or unable to share responsibility for the financial solvency of their institutions. They refuse to make realistic projections about the future of higher education, based on the financial problems facing them. This refusal to contribute in an effective way to solving critical problems reduces their insistence on greater input to a joke, she says. Parker may have overreacted to their short-sightedness, though, by failing to solicit adequate faculty input...