Lecturers need to stop trying to micromanage their students’ lives

How about the 'professor' who included her own work for critique then complained when it was critiqued rather thoroughly. That was at Keele's Law Dept. At the University of Chester the 'professor' who didn't teach the unit took over the work of another lecturer who had done the teaching, and marked it in her own narrow totally unprofessional skewed manner. The lecturer concerned only went off work with a minor cold/flu for a few days and for a professor to take over the marking of assessments in such circumstances is extremely unusual. The'professor' in effect could not stand the other junior lecturer doing her job while she was on research leave. This professor already had a reputation for unprofessional conduct when marking scripts, that was the icing on the cake.

If universities were permitted to have student self-determine their level of engagement (and that means having students fail a programme or module despite advice and feedback), perhaps academics will be less inclined to micromanage students' lives? Academics do have better things to do and will usually want students to self-manage their own lives if these performance metrics (e.g., number of students completing the programme, number of students graduating with a 'good' degree) were not listed as KPIs by various regulatory bodies.

Interesting article. While I do not condone control-freak behaviours as described here, there's also plenty of situation where students do and say really in-appropriate things. Many think that whatever they want should be allowed regardless of university policies and procedures, and many reflect the age of entitlement view that they consider excuses their bad behaviours. in fact they don't even se their disruptive or otherwise uncooperative behaviour as "bad". It should not be considered control-freak behaviour to require that digital devices are not used during lectures, seminars and tutorials. By condoning disruptive and anti-social behaviours by students, universities are doing a dis-service to those potential workers and workplaces alike. The social contract in education is about respect, co-operation and facilitation of the teaching and learning environment.

You don’t have to condone actively bad behaviour from students to avoid being a control freak. And being control freaky in education is totally counterproductive in terms of outcomes too. Students succeed or fail more based on what they do themselves than anything they do when supervised - so vital to treat them as adults and encourage them to self regulate. The growing trend to micro-manage in schools is a huge part of the problem but universities need to fight against it, not perpetuate the problem