The author then goes on to blame students in 4 out 5 of the following points.

To his credit he does suggest several changes he and faculty could make by the end of the article.

But I think he's missing the most relevent point: with the vast number of online educational resources on the net, many students have been exposed to what great teaching looks like. Decades ago when this guy started teaching he did not have to survive that competition and comparison. He should stop entirely worrying about what students need to do and up his own game to at least match what anyone can find for free on video streaming platforms and elsewhere.

He is the paid professional here. When he has eliminated his own shortcomings then he can perhaps start to correctly identify things that aren't a result of those shortcomings.

They may have been exposed to great teaching, but do they recognize it? Asking people how they feel about the learning without an objective criteria to measure their performance could be a recipe for a local maximum.

> but do they recognize it?

They don't need to for it to affect attendance. You stick around when you find something captivating and skip that which you find dull. And something that was captivating twenty years ago compared to the other content that was available at that time might be dull compared to today's content. Teachers can't expect styles and material from decades ago to just work like it used to.

Yet the professor rejects out of hand that any changes need to happen with the course material, instead deciding the he needs to do a better job of "explaining how to succeed in the class" and "somehow making making office hours more welcoming.'

Very little to no time is spent looking at ways to do either of those. This the article really is just mostly the professor complaining about his students while doing no introspection on his own possible failures.