"I knew in my gut that there was something wrong with a system that couldn't fire its incompetents, and I had my share of incompetent college teachers"
About this Quote
The line points to a moral intuition colliding with institutional inertia. The word gut signals a pre-theoretical sense that something is off, not simply a policy disagreement. A system that cannot fire its incompetents is, by design or neglect, insulated from feedback. It struggles to correct errors, reward excellence, or protect those it serves. When the context is college teaching, the stakes are formative: students pay in time, money, and momentum, and a bad semester can ripple through an entire life.
Higher education provides a vivid example because its incentives often drift away from classroom quality. Hiring and promotion can privilege research output, grant capture, and institutional prestige more than pedagogy. Tenure exists to safeguard academic freedom and resist political or donor pressure, yet it can also shield chronic underperformance in teaching. The result is a paradox: vulnerable adjuncts face precarious employment despite solid teaching, while some secure faculty survive despite habitual classroom failure. A system skewed in that direction breeds cynicism, punishes initiative, and normalizes mediocrity.
The phrase my share underscores that the experience was not an outlier. When enough students collect similar stories, trust erodes. People start to doubt grades, credentials, and the fairness of the pathways they are told to follow. That erosion has a cultural cost: institutions lose their moral authority to ask for patience, sacrifice, or deference.
None of this requires scuttling due process or academic freedom. It does require mechanisms that make professional accountability real: rigorous peer observation, meaningful student feedback interpreted wisely, post-tenure review with consequences, and leadership willing to act. Freedom without standards decays into entitlement; standards without freedom calcify into fear. The gut sense captured here is a plea to reconcile the two, so that protection for the worthy does not become impunity for the inept, and institutions can deserve the loyalty they demand.
Higher education provides a vivid example because its incentives often drift away from classroom quality. Hiring and promotion can privilege research output, grant capture, and institutional prestige more than pedagogy. Tenure exists to safeguard academic freedom and resist political or donor pressure, yet it can also shield chronic underperformance in teaching. The result is a paradox: vulnerable adjuncts face precarious employment despite solid teaching, while some secure faculty survive despite habitual classroom failure. A system skewed in that direction breeds cynicism, punishes initiative, and normalizes mediocrity.
The phrase my share underscores that the experience was not an outlier. When enough students collect similar stories, trust erodes. People start to doubt grades, credentials, and the fairness of the pathways they are told to follow. That erosion has a cultural cost: institutions lose their moral authority to ask for patience, sacrifice, or deference.
None of this requires scuttling due process or academic freedom. It does require mechanisms that make professional accountability real: rigorous peer observation, meaningful student feedback interpreted wisely, post-tenure review with consequences, and leadership willing to act. Freedom without standards decays into entitlement; standards without freedom calcify into fear. The gut sense captured here is a plea to reconcile the two, so that protection for the worthy does not become impunity for the inept, and institutions can deserve the loyalty they demand.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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