issue50 graduate06--Hamming组 自己的冲刺issue作业第15篇

graduate06UID: 2223299

TOPIC: ISSUE50 - "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."
WORDS: 561          TIME: 上午 12:45:00          DATE: 2007-1-31

Admittedly, in order to improve the quality of instruction at the college and university level, the requirement that let faculty to spend time working outside the academic world is reasonable. However, the statement that all faculty should be required to do outside work is real or imagined must be analyzed case by case.

There is no denying the fact that requiring professors to do work outside academia has some merits in some cases. In some academic areas, the practical work is necessary for professor being a good teacher. One telling example involves a branch of computer science--software engineering. In software engineering, which defines various part of programming, from writing code to ensure budget be met, in order to let the software effective and cost effective, a professor needs to do some practical work so as to grasp theories deeply and teach students clearly. If only a professor has involved a large number of projects of software, he would know what kinds problems will happen in the process of programming and how to solve these problems, and knows the demands of market. If so, he can teach his experience to students, for the sake of knowing the market information he can help students do more job-related exercises which will help the students in the long run. I consider that his students will benefit a lot from his classes.

Nevertheless, if faculty do too much work out side their academic world, it will do much bad than good for the quality of instruction at their institutions. Many faculty do part-time jobs outside the universities and omit their duties of teaching, this phenomenon is very popular in China. For example, in my university, a professor, who teaches database and was very popular in students on account of his abundant knowledge of this area and he spending a large amount of time to help students. Yet, since he participated in some projects of database with some companies two years ago, he spent less and less time in answering students' questions and his students could not find him after class. He opened a company of software this year, students are afraid that he will spend much less time and energy in teaching. This example informs us that faculty do too much part-time jobs will distract their from ordinary duties.

Furthermore, we must take some special subjects into consideration such as philosophy and pure mathematics. For these academic areas there is no practical work outside the academic world. It is absurd to let the professors in this field to do so-called "practical work". For instance, if a professor is forced to work in a computer company or trade company, it is purely waste of time, neither the professor nor his students can benefit from the "practical work". On the contrary, to improve the quality of instruction at the college and university, they should assure the faculty in these areas have as much time as possible to do their instruction and research.

Finally, I fundamentally agree with the statement that many faculty need to do some work outside their academia so as to enhance the quality of instruction, aside from some academic areas in which outside work is unnecessary. However, it is perilous to put the point to extremes. It needs a balance between doing duties well and involving outside work, not to incline to either to much.