Miami Student

"Faculty won't come here without graduate students"? Great news, because we don't want those kind of faculty to further degrade the priority, emphasis and quality of undergraduate education in the classroom.

"Grad students do things faculty don't have time to do, like write recommendation letters for undergrad students"? Sounds right in line with making Miami more like Ohio State, only more expensive. If faculty don't have time to write recommendation letters for undergrad students, then they don't have the time to be at Miami.

Faculty are too busy to write recommendation letters for undergraduate students, so they have grad students write them instead?? If faculty are too busy or too important to do that, then they should refuse to allow their pay to be contaminated by any tuition dollars paid by our undergrads.

But we can't pretend to be more like Ohio State if we don't have graduate programs.

Who do MY teaching if we don't have grad assistants?

How can I get away with teaching only 1 undergraduate class a semester if we don't have graduate students?

Who will program my clicker?

Who will do my Powerpont slides?

And most important of all, how can I play the Hodge-Herbst Miami game--you know, where we pretend to care about undergraduate education (snicker, snicker)--if I have to take extra time and mess with undergraduates?

You would think that undergraduates foot most of the bills around here.

Make Miami more Miami! We fooled you on that one, eh?

To "let me shirk": There are seminars available on campus to teach faculty how to program their own auditorium-classroom clickers and how to prepare their own powerpoint slides, and they're conducted by scores of dedicated Miami personnel. In fact, these seminars are constantly benchmarked, assessed aspirationaly, and expanded formatively to incorporate other helpful lessons, like learning how to breathe without the assistance of a grant, a grad student, a university vehicle, and a zero undergraduate teaching load. You should check them out.