<p>I’m not against adjuncts (hey, I was one until recently), nor am I against graduate students learning how to teach in the undergraduate classroom. After all, they should have limited experience before they end up doing it full-time as assistant professors. And I’m not knocking this instructor’s qualifications – for all I know, he has an MD already or maybe his background makes him uniquely suited for the class. What bothers me is that Smith hired him for an upper level class knowing that he was in the midst of his own graduate studies. He (again, or she) is not one of Smith’s students, either, so they are not fulfilling part of an obligation to train a PhD student. Research universities MUST teach both undergraduate and graduates, and classroom training is part of the package. At an LAC, they can and do hire adjuncts who have degrees and teaching credentials, which is a different matter. But LACs tout their “no graduate student teachers” as their strength. If you look at the arguments on CC about research universities v. LACs, the first argument for LACs is generally “no graduate student teachers.”</p>
<p>Part of this instructor’s mistake is admitting to the class that he is canceling work because he doesn’t have time to grade it. Or telling them that he has a deadline so they won’t be having class. (I might not have known about his UMass grad student status if my daughter hadn’t been so amused by it.) That’s simply immaturity as an instructor and perhaps too much peer identification with the students. Is he unreliable? Well, not really – at least, not in the traditional sense. It’s not as though he has gone AWOL during the semester. Professors can and do cancel classes when they go out of town for professional reasons – to attend conferences or to review grant proposals or to deliver a guest lecture. These absences are either built into the syllabus or covered by colleagues, depending on the type of course it is. </p>
<p>Obviously, I’ve been stewing about this for a while and was somewhat hesitant about bringing this issue to CC, mostly because I don’t want prospective students to believe that Smith offers a subpar education – it doesn’t. My D’s education has been exceptional in every way. In this case, my concern was that this is a budgetary move, to avoid hiring another professor to cover an important course, that doesn’t serve the students well. For all I know, however, this course may have been taught by a rotation of graduate students for years. Or maybe someone recently left and the hiring freeze prevented the department from filling the vacancy. Or maybe the usual prof is on leave or on sabbatical, a valid reason for plugging in a grad student from another institution if no one else in the department is qualified to teach it.</p>