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news
Forty-Niner focuses
efforts on education
By Greg Smith
On-line Forty-Niner
Starting Thursday
Nov. 2, the On-line Forty-Niner will begin a new series focusing
on the quality of education that students receive at Cal State
Long Beach. The series will be an overview of the teaching
quality at CSULB and where accountability lies within the
system.
The series' goal is to address issues that are of the greatest
concern to both students and teachers alike. Last week, the
California Faculty Association held mass teach-ins so that
teachers could enlighten students on the real problems they
are facing. The On-line Forty-Niner is offering a public service
to the CSULB community to show the problems that the entire
campus is facing, focusing on the quality of education received
by students.
The first issue of the series will explain what tenure is,
how professors receive it and why in the past five years only
one new tenure-track position has been created in the entire
CSU system. The On-line Forty-Niner will also be on campus
getting students' opinions on instructors and what they hope
to gain from their classes.
In the coming weeks, many other topics will be addressed to
give a clear view of what students want and are receiving
while enrolled at CSULB. The problem of teacher evaluations
will be
looked at, focusing on why students have no access to the
evaluations and how the university uses them.
Also the difference in the quality of education received from
part-time and full-time professors will be examined. CSULB
currently has 850 tenure instructors and 1,100 part-time instructors.
According to CFA officials this has a profound effect on the
education received by students.
Teacher pay and benefits are big problems as well, in that
many well-qualified professors may shy away from a public
university system like the CSU due to low pay and lack of
benefits, according to CFA officials. Some part-time instructors,
called "freeway fliers," work at two or three different
colleges in order to have an adequate source of income. This
effects everything from teacher availability to course stability.
Another article will address the Faculty Early Retirement
Program. FERP allows tenured faculty who are eligible for
service retirement to retire and continue teaching in part
time positions while receiving a higher rate of pay than normal
part-time positions. A perceived problem with this is that
full-time tenure-track positions may be held up while instructors
continue teaching on a part-time basis.
The series will also be looking at individual professors;
those both loved and loathed by students. The goal is to examine
why there are sub-par, under qualified professors teaching
classes and how it affects the education that students receive.
The goal of the On-line Forty-Niner's new series on the quality
of education is to better enlighten students of the university
community and to examine who is accountable for the quality
of education, be it administration, faculty or the students
themselves.
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