Thought everyone would find this interesting.
The article comes from LAPolitics.com, many of you will find that the article agrees with many things this board has been saying for the past three years.
The article is quite lengthy, but worth a read
The Evolution of A Diploma Factory:
The Losing Plight of Instruction at Louisiana’s Flagship Institution of Higher Learning
Prepared exclusively for Politicsla.com by Dr. Chris Warner
Over the last five years student enrollment at LSU’s Baton Rouge campus has swelled to over 31,000. Buoyed by a unique and generous Tuition Opportunity Program for Students that annually appropriates over $100 million in state-financed tuition for qualifying Louisiana high school graduates and more recently a nationally successful athletic program, LSU’s classrooms and lecture halls are brimming at unprecedented levels. However, as Louisiana’s Flagship institution has recently added enrollment it has simultaneously reduced instructor levels as part of the “Flagship Agenda” spawned by its now departed chancellor. This exclusive article for Politicsla.com peers into the strained instructional realities that currently attempt to drive the state’s Flagship Institution of Higher Learning as well as its impending pseudo-intellectual fallout.
From Third Tier to Top Ten Research University
In October, 2003, it was announced that LSU, which is ranked among the third tier of United States public institutions of higher learning by U.S. News & World Report, would be making a concerted move towards reducing its number of instructors in order to replace them with more tenure-track or terminally degreed professors (those with Ph.D.’s). The move, according to the university brass, was and is essential in making LSU a premier research university in the South, one compatible with the likes of the University of North Carolina within the famed Research Triangle Park of Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.
The premise driving this flagship movement is that premier research universities in America create business and economic development for their host states by simply immersing intellectual capital into an environment that encourages the fomenting of entrepreneurial ideas. However, there is no substantive proof that “research” universities indeed create economic development for their host cities and states simply by physical juxtaposition. Businesses are not regularly created as a result of academics conducting research. To believe otherwise is a real world fallacy. Economic development has more to do with a fair tax policy, sound infrastructure, a quality of life that is attractive to raise a family and wide-ranging educational opportunities than it does academic research.
As the Flagship Agenda has been methodically implemented over the past six months it has resulted in necessary instructor attrition to make way for the more costly Ph.D.’s that are now teaching enormous classes ranging into the hundreds. Disciplines like English and Mathematics are now introduced to entering freshman in classroom sizes of three and sometimes four hundred students or more. Other classes like introductory Psychology in the Cox Communications Auditorium boast nearly 1,000 students. This is all necessary under the Flagship Agenda, according to LSU, so that the school can become a top-flight research institution by attracting brilliant minds from across the country to conduct their research under the stately oaks and broad magnolias in Baton Rouge.
Detractors of the flagship movement contend that it is quietly denuding LSU of its most reliable predictor for learning and growth—quality instruction. They say that large lecture classes are not the way to go because many college kids don’t respond well to the impersonal setting that virtually negates the all-important teacher-student relationship. Many LSU students value the instructor-pupil relationship and have spoken out strongly against the flagship agenda imposed by the departing chancellor. The following appeared in the LSU Daily Reveille in March, 2004:
Dear Editor:
As a student of LSU I feel that the plans to increase the sizes of our English and Math classes are a very bad idea. In my opinion college level Math and English are not only the most challenging courses we face as students, but also the most important. These are the classes that require a close relationship between student and teacher, something that is virtually impossible in the auditorium classroom setting.
Those of us who have taken classes in the Cox Communications auditorium for example, know that it is nearly impossible to ask a question in class, or even after class for that matter. This is due directly to the huge number of students enrolled in the class. We the students have more power than anyone does at LSU; this is an issue we all need to speak up on.
The increase in the size of our English and math courses, if made into a reality, will be damaging to the University as well as its students. Grades and attendance rates will inevitably fall in the most important classes of our lives as a result.
Paul Gonsoulin, Freshman, Mass Communication
Beer & Circus
Dr. Murray Sperber of the University of Indiana Bloomington has written a compelling book titled Beer and Circus: How Big-time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education (2000, Henry Holt & Co.). In his provocative treatise Sperber exposes what he calls “renegade chancellors and college presidents” for selfishly “striving for research fame, neglecting undergraduate education, and promoting their college sports franchises.” When reading Dr. Sperber’s gripping book last fall I could not help but recognize the many parallels between LSU and the many other public universities described within. LSU, like the schools critiqued, had a renegade chancellor that craftily negotiated a 72% pay raise against the working papers of the school, the LSU Board of Supervisors and the Tiger Athletic Foundation, which provided an annual cash bonus payment to the chancellor for serving the institution. This chancellor, undoubtedly a “team” player, equivocally stated, “Simply put, success in LSU football is essential for the success of Louisiana State University!” In doing so he made a strong case for fortifying the athletic department. Unfortunately, progress in the areas of research and athletics have occurred at the expense of undergraduate instruction because as university administrators focus on building research faculties and facilities and winning sports programs, like Sperber candidly says, “The undergraduates get the shaft.”
Hundreds of Students Per Class
Under the Flagship Agenda LSU aims to ostensibly “…increase the number of tenure-track faculty, while maintaining instructional quality and capacity.” However, in order to increase tenure-track faculty, LSU has had to severely diminish the number of instructors that the university formerly relied on to teach these important entry-level courses. Thus the reason for the excessively large classroom sizes, and the many graduate student teaching assistants that are needed to aid in the grading of papers and multiple guess exams. Another point detractors of the flagship agenda continually cite is that using many different grad assistants to grade papers is unfair because grading becomes inconsistent as a result since students’ papers are graded by many different grad assistants that each grade differently.
With the beginnings of its transition into its Flagship Agenda LSU has communicated firmly through action that it intends to be a research university instead of one that boasts quality undergraduate instruction. Research universities tend to focus on and support graduate school efforts while undergraduate curriculums and students invariably suffer by buying into the myth that great researchers make great instructors for our undergraduates. The truth is that the two titles are independent of one another, and not directly correlated in any way. Patrick Terenzini and Ernest Pascarella, further elaborate in another Beer And Circus excerpt:
“The available empirical evidence calls the “good-researcher=good teacher” argument sharply into question…scholarly productivity and instructional effectiveness have less than 2 percent…in common. That means that about 98 percent of the variability in measures of instructional effectiveness is due to something other than research productivity.”
Large classes are not uncommon at large American public universities like LSU. However, during the last five years LSU’s enrollment has swelled due to TOPS and a winning football team. Therefore the most recent “Flagship Agenda” move to eliminate instructors has had a compounding effect on undergraduate classroom sizes, making class time more crowded and contradicting than ever. Unfortunately for the LSU undergraduate student bent on learning, in this case big is not always better. Patrick Terenzini and Ernest Pascarella, both educators, explain, as excerpted from Dr. Sperber’s book, Beer And Circus:
“At a freshman psychology lecture we attended, 300 students were still finding seats when the professor started talking. “Today,” he said into a microphone, “we will continue our discussion of learning.” He might as well have been addressing a crowd in a Greyhound bus terminal. Like commuters marking time until their next departure, students in this class alternately read the newspaper, flipped through a paperback novel, or propped their feet on the chairs ahead of them, staring into space.”
Enrollment by Level and Gender
Fall 1994 through Fall 2003 (http://www.lsu.edu)
The Importance Of Quality Instruction
When LSU’s former chancellor emphatically stated that “Simply put, success in LSU football is essential for the success of Louisiana State University!” he inspired an unparalleled commitment of the manpower and resources of the state’s flagship institution of higher learning to winning in football. This movement was spurred by the hiring of head football coach Nick Saban, in 1999, for $1.2 million per year. Nick Saban was known as a “hands-on” coach, a tireless teacher of defensive secondary tactics and formations. Saban routinely works one-on-one with his players, instilling in each aspects of his own character, drive and personality. Through word and deed he is molding each young man into a winner through caring contact, assistance and guidance. On the LSU football field, the student-teacher relationship flourishes and it has brought great dividends. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said regarding inside the halls of LSU academics. Within overcrowded lecture rooms few opportunities exist for students to get to know their professors, since they are vying for a professor’s attention alongside hundreds of other classmates. At LSU, winning instruction on the football field is not matched by winning instruction in the classroom, and it is a direct result of the priorities of its now departed leader.
Exploding The Myth That Winning In Football Makes A Great University
In his influential early-1960s book, The Uses of the University, Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California system, examined the established Ivy League schools like Harvard, Princeton and Yale against the up-and-coming schools vying for what Sperber refers to as “research prestige.” Kerr noted the following:
“…the mark of a university ‘on the make’ is a mad scramble for football stars and professorial luminaries. The former do little studying and the latter little teaching, and so they form a neat combination of muscle and intellect…” Sperber in Beer And Circus, added that this “keeps the faculty and the college kids happy,” and that “the administrators who create this conjunction between football and faculty stars do well: they bring fame and fortune to their schools and they enhance their jobs.”
Kerr added in his book that universities “on the make” that used intercollegiate athletics as public entertainment created an unavoidable by-product, what he referred to as “a superior research faculty that results in an inferior concern for undergraduate teaching.”
LSU’s departed chancellor often justified his overzealous approach towards supporting athletics by saying that success on the athletic courts and fields brought great notoriety and prestige to the university. Dr. Murray Sperber calls this specious line of academic reasoning “The Flutie Factor,” named after former Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie, the heaver of the famed “Hail Mary” pass that defeated a heavily favored Miami team in the closing seconds of a 1984 contest. The applications for admissions into Boston College rose 25 percent the year following Flutie’s spectacular flight into the sacred annals of college football history. LSU, one could argue, may experience a similar increase in admission applications as a result of its recent national championship in football, its first in 45 years. However, while the school’s ultra-loyal fan base basks in the long-awaited championship light, dedicated academicians and students futilely await the fulfillment of the chancellor’s prophecy—that success in academics is predicated by success in athletics.
Winning in Football And A Rise In The Party School Atmosphere
While winning in big-time athletics brings great recognition to an institution, Sperber says that there are nevertheless resulting negative repercussions. Sperber insists that the party atmosphere on college campuses increases as a result of the Flutie Factor, since students are drawn to the “hotness” of the school, defined by its “expanding sports fame” and burgeoning Animal House party scene. If this development proves true in Baton Rouge—then LSU will soon once again regain its lofty status as the undisputed “Number One Party School in America” as published annually in Playboy’s legendary Party School Rankings. In April, 2004, Playboy listed LSU fourth on its list of the nation’s Top 25 Party Schools. Ironically, during the tenure of LSU’s departed chancellor, he campaigned tirelessly against LSU’s party culture and mentality, denouncing publicly previous high party school rankings for LSU by Playboy and Princeton Review. Nevertheless, through his inexcusable actions of promoting football at the expense of instruction the chancellor was neutralizing his efforts by ostensibly facilitating the pervasive “Beer And Circus” mentality among the student body.
A True Flagship of Higher Education For Louisiana
In August, 1988, I enrolled as a freshman on academic scholarship at LSU in Baton Rouge. During that year LSU initiated, under the leadership of its chancellor, Dr. James Wharton, a bold program to raise admission requirements. For the first time in many years, LSU was no longer an “Open Admissions” university—one that would allow almost any level of student. Freshman English and Math classes averaged 15 to 25 people per class, respectively. I remember my teachers, their names, their backgrounds and their personalities. LSU has changed in 15 years—for the worse regarding the undergraduate looking for an education. LSU must change its policies if it is to change its effect on the population as a molder of young men and women. Under its current educational practices LSU is a de facto “Diploma Factory” that is annually churning out thousands of pseudo-intellectuals that think they have what it takes to reach self-actualization, that elusive psychological pinnacle aptly defined by Abraham Maslow.
Maslow was a psychologist who studied human motivation. Maslow's great insight and contribution to his field was to place actualization into a hierarchy of motivation. Self-actualization, as he called it, is the highest drive, but before a person can turn to it, he or she must satisfy other, lower motivations like hunger, safety and belonging. The hierarchy developed by Maslow has five levels. They are as follows:
1. 1. Physiological (hunger, thirst, shelter, sex, etc.)
2. 2. Safety (security, protection from physical and emotional harm)
3. 3. Social (affection, belonging, acceptance, friendship)
4. 4. Esteem (also called ego). The internal ones are self respect, autonomy, achievement and the external ones are status, recognition, attention.
5. 5. Self actualization (doing things toward becoming the best you can be)
Quality of life researcher Dr. Joseph Sirgy of Virgina Tech University, in his “Quality of Life Theory based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs,” suggests that governments bent on improving the plight of its people should strive to create a higher-ordered society, or one that has a high percentage of its people reaching self-actualization. This, Sirgy insisted, could occur by investing resources into education so that people might once-and-for-all transcend their lesser needs within the structured hierarchy in exchange for self-actualization and ultimately, success in life.
If one believes strongly that quality instruction is an essential part of the educational process, then one certainly sees the need for a change in policy at Louisiana State University. LSU is and will always be my alma mater. As a young man from a small, rural southwestern Louisiana town, LSU was a country boy’s dream. I received a great education for life there and while I was in Baton Rouge I made many friends and forged countless fond memories that will remain with me for a lifetime. We owe our posterity that same opportunity—to attend a public university that values quality instruction as an integral part in the successful education of its student customers.
As the TOPS program continues to provide qualifying high school graduates with a choice of where they will attend college in Louisiana, many will choose LSU. In order for LSU to become and maintain a distinction of a true flagship institution of higher learning, it will need to honor the student-teacher relationship by hiring more instructors with master’s degrees and by simultaneously increasing admission standards for the university. LSU’s enrollment levels have topped 30,000 and are where they were during the late eighties when the school was an Open Admissions university. A true flagship must be more selective in its enrollment. One other recommendation would be to increase the requirements for the TOPS scholarship, which is undoubtedly fueling the campus’ rapid growth.
Louisiana State University is a treasure to all of its alumni and fans. In essence, LSU personifies the very best that the State of Louisiana has to offer and is every bit deserving of its moniker as the flagship university. In that vein, LSU alumni need always remember the end of the school’s alma mater and its ephemeral plea for faithful allegiance among its alumni base:
“ Our worth in life will be thy worth, we pray to keep it true, And may thy spirit live in us, forever LSU.”
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Originally Posted by dawg80
) But the facts on the ground do not always support the belief that LSU is an “Animal House” campus, such as the fact that in the last few years, administration here has harshly cracked down on the Greek system, revoking the charters of many fraternities who have been here for decades and enforced a new, stricter code of conduct for Greeks. 
