
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, August 21, 1993                   TAG: 9308210135
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: New River Valley bureau
DATELINE: RADFORD                                LENGTH: Medium

PRESIDENT SAYS RU PROFESSORS DEDICATED TEACHERS

Radford University's president on Friday defended his school from national criticism that college professors are spending too much time in the lab and too little time with their students.

"I believe that the criticisms of faculty workloads are often overdrawn, inaccurate, and in the case of Radford University, misplaced," Donald Dedmon told the faculty at a convocation in Porterfield Auditorium. "Clearly, professors are putting in many hours well beyond the classroom."

At Radford, formerly a teachers' college, professors still average a teaching load of about 12 credit hours per week.

Faculty on temporary assignments usually teach 15 hours, he said. "The shift toward emphasizing research and graduate instruction at the expense of undergraduate education has not happened at Radford University," Dedmon said. "Undergraduate instruction here has not been `back-burnered' in favor of anything else."

He said questions about professors' classroom hours have been around as long as he can remember. "Universities have always been criticized, but more so of late," he said.

Professors criticize their own profession, he said, and "tattling on the profession is a sure media story."

And it's true, he said, that some professors set poor examples that fuel the criticisms.

"I believe that professional activities at all universities must involve instruction," he said.

He said that explaining better what universities did would offset some of the criticism.

At Radford, he said, teaching responsibilities must be connected to meaningful evaluations and to all rewards in the academic system.

by CNB