During the history of the blog I've occasionally posted anecdotes and other comments from my 5-year career as a (never tenured) college professor. My last year was as a visiting professor at ISU, and I couldn't land a followup offer in recessionary times. Being a professor has always been my dream career. I came close on a couple of occasions to returning to academia. The latter fell through due to a likely blackball from former ISU colleagues (the chair name-dropped meeting them at a conference during our phone interview; she had waived the usual campus visit and informally offered me the job--which made for a shock when I got a formal HR notice saying they were dissatisfied with the current pool of candidates and would reopen the position that fall for the next academic year.. I directly confronted the chair why I should bother applying again, and she tersely responded they were trying to be tactful. To this day, she had never confessed what happened, but my ISU chair had done a couple of things to me which were off-the-charts unethical. I knew going into ISU I had a nonrenewable 1-year contract. I really didn't want to red flag the situation to prospective employers, and I knew they were likely to contact the chair about me. All I wanted was a fresh start elsewhere and chalk up ISU to a learning experience. The one good thing about ISU is that I got to teach my dream grad course on human factors/ergonomics in IT..)
I did turn down an interim 1994 offer from a primarily black Louisiana university. (It had nothing to do with race.) The context was that the I had my campus visit and there was no followup over several weeks. I had had a difficult time rejoining the IT profession after leaving ISU jobless. I was treated as if I had been unemployed for 8 years and any IT skills I had were seen as obsolete and degraded; the recruiters treated me as if I were trying to use them and would jump ship at the first academic offer. I had managed to get on a couple of temp projects but was living on savings at the time of the campus visit. In the meanwhile I got an unexpected interview at a marketing research company in the Chicago suburbs. I had taken a couple of database courses during my doctoral coursework, didn't get a chance to teach it at UWM because 2 senior profs "owned" the course but got to teach it undergrad at UTEP. I had had the idea of reinventing myself as a DBA if I ever returned to the IT profession. So the Lombard position was the best professional offer I had seen in 3 years, and I felt I had to get a couple of solid years under my belt to reestablish my bona fides. They got me at a bargain salary, but I wanted that foot in the door. So when the Louisiana job offer came, I was already a few weeks into the role. It came at a demoralizing time because they initially assigned me to development tasks, and I worried about a bait-and-switch. It wasn't the money; it was more than any of the offers I had gotten in academia and much more than I was currently making, probably about mid-range in my discipline. It was not an easy decision to turn it down. It was more a matter of timing. And then a year or 2 later, I started getting unsolicited recruiter calls at work from Coopers & Lybrand and elsewhere. I had stopped attending academic conferences in my discipline (ICIS, DSI) where most colleges did preliminary interviews. I still occasionally review positions in The Chronicle of Higher Education, but to be honest I probably haven't gotten a serious query in over 10 years, and many professors my age have retired. I think my lasr publication, a book chapter, was published over 20 years ago. I can still research and write, but I've been out of the loop for a few years. The University of Phoenix approached me a couple of years back but only for an adjunct position and dropped the conversation when I raised the question of a full-time role. Western Governors University contacted me about serving some unconventional role in their data science program. I really didn't follow up because I'm not as familiar with online education.
But let me deal with the meme's question, dealing with teacher qualification at the college level. It probably differs by university.
Every university I have been at evaluates teaching at some level. Most did so on a subjective level, based on student appraisal of teacher performance. I am a critic of these on technical criteria of reliability and validity (I've done a lot of related research). There really aren't objective measures of educational performance. I was focused on knowledge, skills and abilities, I worked harder and was more innovative than my colleagues on my lectures, textbooks, exercises and test construction. What made things more difficult is that high tech is constantly changing. I professionally reviewed 2 or 3 textbooks. I was the first UWM professor/instructor to require use of COBOL-85 standard compilers (Ryan-McFarland bundled a compiler with a textbook), at UTEP the trxtbook I chose included a functional relational database product. [This may not sound impressive today, when one can download software in seconds. But at the time university resources were limited. E.g., at UWM, we didn't have an IBM mainframe on campus, so my school of business focused on a local lab of IBM PC's.. And faculty and administrators hated me for not using the MS COBOL-74 compilers in their labs.] We had transitioned from teaching COBOL in service courses to microcomputer applications at ISU. I still remember one of my farmer students writing a dBASEIV app for tracking his animals' vaccination schedule.
One of my favorite UWM student critiques I've posted before, i.e., "I learned more in Dr.. Guillemette's class than any other class I've had. But he doesn't deserve any of the credit. I had to do it all by myself." Dude, welcome to college; you're not in high school anymore. In real life I won't be there to debug your computer programs. You need show initiative, demonstrate a hard work ethic and good work ethic, keep current in today's technology.
Another favorite evaluation came from an ISU student. ISU prided itself as a teaching-oriented vs. research-oriented school. I had met these types before in preliminary screenings. These presumptuous, jealous jerks would say crap like "I could have a long list of publications if I were to cut corners at the expense of my students." You have to keep your professional demeanor intact, knowing he has no intention of recommending someone he sees as a potential threat. In the back of your head you think, "Dude, the reason I have articles is because I work long hours and have no social life, not because I take it easy in the classroom. I come to each class with typed lecture notes, I don't reuse textbooks or tests across semesters. I have multiple class preps each semester." Anyway, I also have kept in touch with industry publications. So I fondly remember one of my students in my software design class writing, "You know, Dr. Guillemette is the only professor I've had here who is talking about things professional recruiters want to talk about (e.g., object-oriented computing)."
Tests are another topic. Curiously tests were not one of the things students griped about, maybe because I graded on a curve. But there were a few comments from my teaching fellow days at UH. I was shopping for a suit one day at Montgomery Ward when I suddenly recognized the salesman as one of my first students. As a perfectionist I thought about 1001 things I could have done better, and I was apologetic. He said, "Dude, when I was taking you, I hated your guts. [Okay, this really isn't going well...] But your class was the first real college class I ever had there. And the first real tests I ever took. I was just mentioning you at lunch the other day. I wouldn't change a thing..." One of my other students quipped, "We rate your tests by how many beers it takes to forget them." And another student moaned, "Taking your tests is like having a lobotomy."
But getting back to the point, many universities assess teaching by student evaluations, not say by standardized tests. It need not be restricted to that. Others may evaluate your course syllabus, materials, exams, and/or grade books and/or "expert" teachers may audit random lectures. My ISU chair was scheduled to do that my final semester.
There are other types of training that differ in context.
For instance, when I was a first-semester grad math student at UT/Austin, I was a teaching assistant for freshman calculus. At the time, students earned 4 semester hours, 3 lectures a week (MWF) and 2 problem sessions (T/Th). We TA's did not lecture calculus but conducted the problem sessions. We generally took a teaching seminar the first semester where they would video a segment of each of us teaching something and then critique our performance.
Quite often you might shadow a fellow instructor. For example, the semester before I started teaching COBOL at UH, I attended Dr. Michael Park's mass enrollment COBOL class (I remember one imaginative session of his students playing parts in COBOL theater.)
Although not a university, Navy Nuclear Power School, in addition to class shadowing, required passing a certification lecture before the school XO.
I also delivered a guest lecturer in Dr.Ricketts' grad DSS class. (I am an experienced APL programmer/analyst and had prepared supplemental materials for my lecture.)
We doctoral students at UH had a mandatory residency period. I had full classroom teaching authority for multiple class sessions per semester for 3 years.
I think my prior IT industry experience was important background for the courses I taught. I hadn't done professional coding in COBOL, but I had worked with multiple computing languages, like APL and FORTRAN, developed applications and a plotter interface, etc.
I had high, but not unrealistic expectations. I was always on campus, researching if not preparing for class and had virtually open office hours. My Mom was always a skeptic; she figured a straight-A student like me could never relate to an average student. I think she was wrong.
I'll conclude with one telling anecdote. For most business students, taking a COBOL class was a form of legalized torture. One of my last COBOL students at UH was a middle-aged woman of color. She couldn't understand why her program wasn't displaying the results she wanted. I looked at her code and it was fine except for one thing: her displayed text wasn't justified correctly. In other words, her program was working and she just didn't know it. All her code needed was a minor tweak to work as expected.
She looked up at me with shining eyes and softly said, "You're a GREAT teacher!"
Bless her always. You live for moments like that.
