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Editor:
In response to the Arizona Daily Wildcat article dated Oct. 8 titled "Senate debates post-tenure review again," I quote, "Szilagyi said that the Senate should refuse to discuss the issue [of performance evaluations for tenured professors] and view any attempt by regents to impose its own plan of review as a hostile attack on the university."
I, for one, am not surprised that Prof. Szilagyi takes an emotional stance against post-tenure reviews. After all, under the current system, he is protected from literally hundreds of dissatisfied customers who would have otherwise prevailed in their demand for reform.
Allow me to explain.
Some three years ago, I and about 100 of my other classmates found ourselves in an electrical and computer engineering course for non-ECE majors. Miklos Szilagyi was assigned to teach ECE 207 (basically, the fundamentals of electric circuitry). In my estimation, it took us less than a week to realize that Professor Szilagyi was not the instructor type. By that I mean that he never really intended to teach us the concepts of electrical circuitry, but, rather, he proposed to teach us a few pertinent definitions about the subject, which he considered MOST RELEVANT to our learning.
Moreover, I feel that his goal was merely to probe our minds to find out if any one of us was worthy of his tutelage and to instill those inspired individuals with his knowledge. As you might imagine, at the conclusion of the class, few of my classmates were satisfied that he had taught them anything.
Sure, we could recite his definitions for the final, but as for the meaning, for which our instructor was so impassioned, it slipped our minds. In the end, we were forced to teach ourselves.
I believe that his method of teaching would be considered, if in some other profession, fraudulent, because it fails in the most basic objective of teaching which is to TEACH. He and others like him need to relearn teaching.
They need to be able to teach, to inspire, and to motivate students to learn. Failing this, they should not be permitted to instruct.
Let them sit in the laboratories and count their research monies! Let them puff themselves up with the pride of their worldly accomplishments! BUT, do not force me and my classmates to listen to hours upon hours of lectures about definitions and philosophy of definitions! To continue to do this is to allow only the select few so-called talented students to pursue higher education.
PS. I got a B in the class.
John Parker
industrial engineering senior
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