Last semester, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Kerry Grant revived the Center for Teaching Effectiveness; designed to improve mediocre teachers' lackluster performances through critiques of videotaped lectures, workshops to impart better teaching techniques and lessons designed to familiarize faculty with technology designed to enhance the educational experience, such as the Internet. The Spectrum praised this initiative last September and does so again today.
However, we are deeply disturbed by our discovery of a second office, the Center for Teaching Incompetency. Located in a secret room deep within the bowels of Capen Hall, the center operates only on weekends and under the cover of darkness. Professors and instructors, after being tricked into knocking on a door and uttering a secret phrase thinking they are entering a secret faculty bar and casino, are whisked into a world designed to inhibit their interpersonal relation skills, dull their mastery of their chosen subject matter and enhance their ability to overload their students' workload while simultaneously converting the classroom experience into a painful morass of boredom, insipidness and a waste of money.
The gruesome lessons imparted by a staff of the least-popular UB faculty are endless and chilling: improving recognition skills of the students in class with the least insight regarding material yet the most to say and calling on them repeatedly; constructing multiple-choice exams where any number of choices could be plausible correct answers; learning to speak with marbles in one's mouth to inhibit students' audio-recognition ability of course material; setting one's wristwatch ahead one hour to purposefully miss office hours; mandate students purchase grossly expensive textbooks only to use them sparingly, if at all; firm instruction in ways to academically reward physically attractive students while punishing their homely classmates; how to incite and inflame racial, ethnic, gender and religious tensions inside the classroom. The litany of horrors continues, but space considerations limit how much can be revealed on this page.
Why administrators would tolerate the existence of such an office is head-scratching baffling. Maybe it is the result of a drunken bet between Grant and Provost Elizabeth Capaldi. Maybe President William Greiner has gone insane, changing the goal of turning UB into the "Berkley of the East" to turning UB into "McUniversity." Or maybe, just maybe, there exists a shadow university, one the administration and the entire student body knows nothing about. And this insidious shadow university works in darkness to undermine the current administration by lowering teaching standards, which then creates poor word of mouth about the university, which then decreases enrollment, which then forces a change in administration and the members of the shadow university sweep into power. Then again, perhaps not.
Whatever the reason, the Center for Teaching Incompetency must be shut down. Either by firing those involved in its creation and operation or flooding the bowels of Capen Hall with caustic gases or sealing the entrance with an overkill of plastic explosives; it matters not how. All that matters is that UB goes back to the traditional method of engendering student disgust, displeasure and disagreement towards faculty at this university: by earning it.
