Dustin Kidd

According to this post on USA Today , biology professor Dominique Homberger was removed from her courses mid-semester for grading too strictly. Homberger has taught at LSU for 30 years, is a full-professor, and has never received warnings or any other sort of intervention from the administration in the past. University's publish no guidelines on how many students should pass (or fail) a course in a given semester, nor are there established baselines for how much a passing student should learn. We rely on academic freedom and peer review: she has the freedom to set standards and devise methods; her peers are charged with reviewing her performance at various intervals (tenure, promotion, raises, etc.). This intervention by LSU administration undermines academic freedom and also undercuts the value of peer review. Personally, I am opposed to instructional styles that fail to challenge students and I am also opposed to challenging students through trickery. Our task is to promote ...

Increasingly, I find that some students use email as a way to get my approval for all creative decisions they have to make for their assignments. Obviously, we didn't have email when I was in college, so I have taken the emails for granted as a logical technological development. But now I'm paying more attention and putting my foot down at this abuse of emails. Students need to think for themselves, make their own decisions, and be prepared to face consequences. I don't think this warrants any new policy on the syllabus, but rather a deliberateness in my response. Instead of approving particular decisions, I'm going to respond to these questions with one of my own: What decision are leaning towards and why? Also, why are you hesitating? I can then focus on whether or not they are thinking about the subject on the right terms, but still require them to come to their own conclusions.