Queen’s to blame for prof’s stumbles
Anti-vaccine prof no longer teaching class at Queen’s, Feb. 10 Melody Torcolacci is a distinguished athlete of proven integrity. Hired at Queen’s to coach track and field, she found herself teaching, in her own words, “due to budget cuts.” Her lecture slides contain fallacious statements, to be sure: “No scientific evidence proves that vaccines do not cause obesity” is one such, there being no evidence that could possibly prove what isn’t the case. And she ignores the difference between correlation and causation.
But why on earth should we expect Olympic athletes and coaches to have been educated on deep verities about statistics?
The real fault here lies not with Torcolacci but with a system that hires phys-ed coaches, expecting them to do things they are not qualified to do. And it does that when it is not willing to pay the price it costs to hire people who are qualified to do those things because it spends inordinate sums on ever-increasing levels of superfluous, unproductive and grossly overpaid management.
Health 102 is a first-year undergraduate course that attracts as many as 800 students. Why? Because it has a reputation as a “bird course,” a lazy student’s access to an easy grade. More serious students have been complaining about the course to numerous Queen’s administrators since at least 2011, but have been system- atically stonewalled. Why? I don’t suppose it could have anything to do with the fact that the course attracts 800 tuition-paying students, and, thanks to our newfangled “academic planning,” departments at Queen’s now have to raise their own money to survive.
When a university creates massive incentives to cut corners, it has only itself to blame if corners are cut. With education, as with all else, you get what you pay for. So expect a proliferation of bird courses at Queen’s.
It is Torcolacci who is now suffering public embarrassment. But the real shame belongs to Queen’s administrators. Had they done their job in the first place, Queen’s (and Torcolacci) would not be the butt of jokes in the press.
Adèle Mercier, professor, philosophy department, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ont.