Student evaluations are heavily influenced by perception of the professor's personality. Look on Ninja Courses and you'll see what I'm talking about. Coward has a cult of influence that makes him seem like a close friend to his students, and this no doubt skews his ratings and potentially distorts students' perception of the professor's performance as a teacher (rather than his personality).
There are professors whose teaching quality is actually proficient and sometimes excellent, but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc. Student evaluations are flawed in the same way intelligence tests are flawed; student evaluations favor professors who speak and communicate most closely to the popular consciousness of students at the time in the same way intelligence tests are biased against non-native test-takers (some questions posed on intelligence tests may use culturally native objects).
$67K is on the high end of the spectrum for a newly seasoned non-tenured faculty member. Anyway, teaching salaries are required to increase incrementally, so his original starting salary was most likely lower than that salary.
Most universities, particularly public ones, will engage in the practice of recycling lower-division teaching faculty every so often in order to avoid the wage jump from non-tenure status to tenure status.
Yeah, established teaching positions are a thing in other industrialized countries like Canada. The public higher-education system in the state of California has many flaws, and the absence of established teaching positions is one of them ... because the system is financially crippled.
And that's the point I'm trying to make here. Coward should not be mad at UC Berkeley's Math Department. He thinks the buck starts and stops with the Math Department. The department is the way it is because of the greater UC system's financial insolvency molded by factors out of the control of UC Berkeley's Math Department and UC Berkeley as a whole. The UC system sucks because of inappropriate state economic policies over the past decade or so that include egregious spending on unnecessary things.
Unpopular opinion, but I think he's being overly dramatic.
"My Fall 2013 Math 1A students were tracked into the next course in the sequence, Math 1B, and it was found that their average grade in Math 1B was 0.17 grade points higher than that of those students who took Math 1A with another instructor."
0.17. Not even a whole point.
Student evaluations don't really count since those are highly subjective. Students tend to hastily mark whatever they want on them because they want to get the evaluations over with as soon as possible. If a professor is somewhat amicable and invests a moderate level of effort into his/her teaching, then it's not hard to score at least a 6 on average on these evaluations (as students would mark either 6 or 7 in such a case).
Anyway, his performance as a lecturer is irrelevant to his argument. There are three criteria that junior faculty are assessed against in order to become tenured at UC Berkeley (or, otherwise, dismissed): teaching quality, reputation and research. Funny how he left out the last bit. He hasn't published anything since 2013.
And the university is probably firing him to hire another professor at a cheaper salary in order to save money, contrary to his belief that the university is firing him because of disagreements with his teaching philosophy. Universities tend to do this to professors who don't have much research potential and don't teach specialized, upper division courses. The UC system is crippled financially, so departments are more inclined to carry out dismissals of non-tenured professors who don't publish much and who solely teach lower division courses. Non-tenured professors can be fired at will. That's just another day in the life of academia.
The part about the micro-managing harasser and treatment of women, staff and lecturers is definitely worrisome, though. But we need to be careful about believing in these implications absolutely because of Coward's state of mind at the moment. He has already blown the quality of his teaching out of proportion.
There are professors whose teaching quality is actually proficient and sometimes excellent, but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc. Student evaluations are flawed in the same way intelligence tests are flawed; student evaluations favor professors who speak and communicate most closely to the popular consciousness of students at the time in the same way intelligence tests are biased against non-native test-takers (some questions posed on intelligence tests may use culturally native objects).