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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm also a professor, and I've been teaching for 20 years. I'm tenured (in the humanities) at an R-1. 
I'm guessing that OP had a bad day or a series of incidents with bad students. I totally empathize. 
I will say that 98% of my students are good eggs. They are engaged, smart, do the work, etc. Most don't even come to my office hours or stop by to talk to me after class. A small fraction are notably ill-prepared for college, whether it be academically, socially, or psychologically. Those that really require help I do notify admin about through various means--an all reputable universities will have deans, support services, etc., in place for faculty to flag students who are in need of help.
We are most definitely, however, not trained counselors or even teachers. We receive minimal pedagogical training, and we are rewarded with tenure (at research universities) not for teaching, but for publishing. Our pay raises are for publishing and for winning grants, not for teaching. 
Parents who expect professors to intercede on behalf of their children who need to shower, do laundry, learn manners (via email or otherwise) do not understand the role of faculty in a college. University is not an extension of high school. We are not "partnering" with parents to raise your children. We are experts in our chosen fields, and we transmit knowledge to young adults. 
And while I sympathize with parents who have SN children, we are never to assume that a student of ours has SN and therefore treat your SN with courtesies that we would not provide to other students. If you child does have SN, then you as a parent must communicate with the college's disabilities office. That office will then send a letter to your student to send to professors about any academic accommodations. Academic accommodations, not social ones. [/quote]

Excellent response. R1 means the university brings in substantial government and foundation grants and other investments.
I taught at a land-grant (public) R1 as a grad student, and then at private R1 and "tuition dependent"  universities as a newbie PhD before I moved on to the private sector. Now I'm a parent of one student in college and another looking at schools right now.

I very much agree most students mean well, whether or not they "like" you as a professor. Teaching at a public R1 generally insulates tenured professors the most from interference regarding teaching and grading, as the focus is indeed on research productivity and generating revenue. Non-tenured and tenure-track faculty will get trouble if they irritate students known to the administration for donating significantly or having some sort of other leverage (i.e. relationship with state legislators, paying out-of-state tuition, prominent athlete, etc). Such faculty will also run into problems if they can't fill their classes. But tenure provides almost total protection from students (and parents) seeking unwarranted (i.e. non-SN) special treatment. Most parents almost certainly can't generate enough $$$ or leverage to convince the University to welcome the "academic freedom" firestorm that would ensue from stepping in without cause on the favored student's behalf against a tenured professor.

Things are somewhat different with private R1s because private college tuition replaces the state funding that allows for in-state tuition and other support. But here research still matters much more because it is publicly verifiable (unlike "good" teaching) and it reflects well on the University's reputation.

Students and their parents have the most leverage at tuition-dependent (non-R1) private schools. Indeed, these are places where they're most commonly perceived to be "the customers". These are the types of places where you'll see the "Center for Teaching Excellence" and similar endeavors that seek to boost the quality of instruction. Indeed these efforts are quite successful at many places. The metric, of course, is generally the students' responses to the teaching evaluation questionnaires rather than other non-student generated evaluations of teaching.

I suspect OP is a (presumably male) tenured professor at one of these private tuition-dependent institutions of higher learning. He'd love to retire but he's got one more to get through college, and can't afford the tuition if he loses the tuition remission from his current position. He's also not prominent enough in his field to be able to get a tenured faculty position at another university as his research has gone rather stale.

He gets frustrated with the antics of certain students in the wake of getting various emails about best practices in undergraduate education and invitations to all sorts of "teaching excellence" workshops. Perhaps he fields calls from the Dean on a fairly regular basis asking if that kid who plagiarized his paper really understood that you can't repeat four pages of an article word-for-word given that there wasn't an explicit admonishment against such behavior on both the syllabus and the printout of the assignment itself. He may be asked to re-grade the paper, while learning that yes indeed the young man is indeed the grandson of the person for whom a building on campus is named. Or perhaps the young woman is a key starter on the women's soccer team and really can't be expected to keep up with the overly strenuous demands OP's assignment places on all students in the class.[/quote]

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