Issue 50
In order to improve the quality of instruction at the college and university level, all faculty should be required to spend time working outside the academic world in professions relevant to the courses they teach. Does real experience in professions of the faculty help to improve the quality of institution?
In response to this issue, we need to analyze the proposition comprehensively from the dialectic perspective, taking different subjects or fields into consideration. When it comes to some subjects concentrating on theoretical yet applicative goals, taking quantum mechanics for instance, students need to master what exactly the traditional theoretical system is, while the professors’ duty is to throw light on these theories, meanwhile to focus on cut-edge researches to give impetus to the system. In this case, the outside experiences become unnecessary, which is the same in some other subjects based on theories and hardly related to outside experience. Through above analysis I want to emphasize what the author believes is not appropriate to some subjects and fields. However, to other subjects linked tightly to real career world, I agree with the statement.
First and foremost, in respect that some text books have been out-dated because of the world’s speeding changes, faculty’s experience outside the academic world benefits both the students and community. Some theories, principles or rules printed in the text books are ossified and have gap between what is actually happening. One typical example is that students majoring in finance will be told the EMH, or Efficient Market Hypothesis, which seems to be a perfect hypothesis, but in fact useless when analyzing American security market, especially in this period of financial crisis. Working outside the academic world makes the situation different in two respects. At the individual level, professors’ experience provides complementation and modification to the textbooks, and students have a more comprehensive understanding of what they are studying. At the community level, since students can learn more about the real career world at school, they can satisfy the society’s demanding, integrating the supply and demand of educated which benefit the community by making the labor market more efficient.
Another reason is that faculty’s experience makes the class different. Unlike the traditional boring classes in which professors echo what the books says without passion, and students receive the knowledge passively without interest, professors who have ever worked outside will bring projects back into the classroom, sharing with students fresh sights and contagious excitement about the subject in hand. Taking my personal example, in the class of Investment Banking, the professor, who used to be one listed company’s president of the board, demonstrated us the process of IPO, or Initial Public Offering with so many vivid details you can never discover in textbooks, that students can easily be appealed by the course and take part into it positively. Harvard Case Study is perfect instance to support this point.
However, we should concede that, despite the merits of faculty’s working outside the academic world mentioned above, overextended emphasis on this will be indeed harmful. Although we have narrow the discussion spectrum from all the subjects into ones linked tightly to the career fields, the harm it produces is, in my view, both palpable and profound. On one hand, working outside gives professors considerable income, a temptation hard to resist, which in return motivate them to spend more time outside academic world and leave academic studies aside. On the other hand, professors’ motivation in return gives students incentive to focus their career design more on jobs outside the academic realm, thus leaving few students devote themselves to academic. It’s no hard to imagine, if this happened, the knowledge system based on the fundamental researches would be ossified permanently.
To curb such unfavorable blights and improve the quality of instruction at the college and university level, we should call for balance between fundamental research and teaching between real experience outside academic world for subjects linked tightly to the career world, while for the theoretic subjects such experience is not essential. Only if this issue is investigated in overall aspects, can the quality of instruction in college and university have a substantive development.
ISSUE 50
被自己彻底恶心到了
以后把我的ISSUE都发上来
大家恶心，才是真的恶心
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