大学教育

Recently I attended several meetings where we talked about ways to retain students and keep younger faculty members from going elsewhere.

retain保留、聘请 
faculty 才能、（大学）系

It seems higher education has become an industry of meeting-holders whose task it is to "solve" problems--real or imagined. And in my position as a professor at three different colleges, the actual problems in educating our young people and older students have deepened, while the number of people hired--not to teach but to hold meetings--has increased significantly. Every new problem creates a new job for an administrative fixer. Take our Center for Teaching Excellence. Contrary to its title, the center is a clearing house (信息交流中心) for using technology in cla***ooms and in online courses. It's an administrative sham (欺诈) of the kind that has multiplied over the last 30 years.

industry工业 
professorj教授
deepened情感加强 
teach教 hired聘请、租用 
significant有重大意义的
administrative fixer contrary 

I offer a simple proposition in response: Many of our problems--class attendance, educational success, student happiness and well-being--might be improved by cutting down the bureaucratic (官僚的) mechanisms and meetings and instead hiring an army of good teachers. If we replaced half of our administrative staff with cla***oom teachers, we might actually get a majority of our classes back to 20or fewer students per teacher. This would be an environment in which teachers and students.

 attendance出勤率 
 proposition命题提议 
 mechanism机器装置 
 administrative staff 行政人员

The teachers must be free to teach in their own way--the curriculum should be flexible enough so that they can use their individual talents to achieve the goals of the course. Additionally, they should be allowed to teach, and be rewarded for doing it well. Teachers are not people who are great at and consumed by research and happen to appear in a cla***oom. Good teaching and research are not exclusive, but they are also not automatic companions. Teaching is an art and a craft, talent and practice; it is not something that just anyone can be good at. It is utterly confusing to me that people do not recognize this, despite the fact that pretty much anyone who has been a student can tell the difference between their best and worst teachers.

flexible混合的 复杂的 
curriculum课程  
consume消耗，耗费 
exclusive专用的,独家报道 
automatic自动的 
craft工艺;技巧 
utter 完全的 出声 
despite 即使