In a much discussed op-ed in the New York Times, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, Greg Smith, skewered his company for rewarding traders who sold bad products to their clients, whom they nicknamed "muppets." It struck a chord because it played on our stereotypes of investment bankers putting profit before people. But investment banking isn't the only institution with a client problem.
Universities should provide their most important clients, students, with a quality liberal arts or professional education at a reasonable cost for a finite period of time. Unfortunately, many universities do not prioritize their clients' educational needs. College professors are neither trained nor rewarded for excellence in the classroom. Incentive structures and university culture reinforce other activities, such as research, service on committees, and graduate education.
Read more here.
Apt. 11d 
“Universities should provide their most important clients, students, with a quality liberal arts or professional education at a reasonable cost for a finite period of time.”
That makes it sound like a very passive process, where the student’s head is opened up, filled with stuff, and then carefully closed up again.
Students have responsibilities, too. They need to show up regularly, pay attention and participate during class, ask questions when they don’t understand stuff, reply to professor emails, do the reading and do the assignments (themselves) in a timely manner.
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Here’s an interesting post from last year:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/why-dont-students-study-anymore/23631
Apparently, in 1961, the average full-time college student who graduated in 4 years spent 40 hours a week on academics (class, homework, and study). Meanwhile, in 2003, that same average full-time student who graduated in 4 years spent 27 hours a week on academics. When we subtract out actual class contact hours from the 27 hours, that leaves barely any time for reading, homework or study.
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I’m sorry, but I’ve just come off of a market/job-hunting season, and there are inaccuracies in the first paragraphs. Which led me to break off reading before I found out the author’s affiliation/field/qualifications.
Not running your own course (as an adjunct or not) can hurt you hard. It’s plainly considered by at least five hiring committees (the only ones I ran into, admittedly). It was one of the first questions that came up. I would not be surprised to find this not the case in all fields, but it’s there, plain as day, in mine (once you get past the top-ranked R1s, who aren’t hiring anyway).
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It is incorrect to say that a) professors across the board are “not trained to teach,” b) hiring committees don’t take teaching experience and ability into consideration, and c) good teachers are not rewarded for good teaching. None of this is true of the university where I got my PhD or the dozen schools where I interviewed (though I didn’t get Ivy League-level interviews) or the state university where I’ve been working for the last seven years, or most of the places where my colleagues work. Did you do research to support this?
At most universities with large grad programs, there are mechanisms in place to train teachers – you can certainly argue they should be more extensive, or different (less exploitative, for example, making TAs do the work of profs without getting enough genuine experience). It’s also true that the first year or so of teaching, as you develop your own classes and get a sense of the student aptitudes in that particular place, can be difficult. But this is true of the first year in almost any job.
It’s possible things have changed a lot since you were in grad school and then looking for jobs, but wow, this is not at all reflective of the way things are in most universities today.
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re: the lack of college professor teacher training. The Chronicle and the academic bloggers have been talking about this problem for years. I didn’t really consider that statement controversial. My husband and I finished our dissertations in 2000 and 2001. We received no formal training like high school teachers get. Are there any grad programs that have mandatory classwork on assessment methods and classroom management? Do any grad programs make teaching experience a requirement for graduation? I haven’t heard of any.
re: teaching quality figuring into hiring decisions. Have you ever heard of a school that chose a candidate with a stellar teaching record over a candidate with a stellar publishing record? Teaching may figure into the equation, but it is very low on the list of priorities.
First years at any profession have to learn the ropes. Sure. But think about the training the doctors get with working with patients. There is tons of mentorship that happens. Some of them still suck at bedside manner, but in those first few years, there is a lot of mentorship that happens.
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“Have you ever heard of a school that chose a candidate with a stellar teaching record over a candidate with a stellar publishing record? Teaching may figure into the equation, but it is very low on the list of priorities.”
I think lack of a charismatic classroom presence probably hurts applicants during the interview process, even if teaching itself isn’t weighted heavily. People who have no personality whatsoever suffer during the interview process (also, to be frank, those with way too much personality).
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The interview process favors people who think well on their feet and have good social skills. Also, being able to explain your research to bored strangers who know nothing about your specialty during an interview has some connection to teaching. That’s all teaching-like, if not actually teaching.
(My husband’s institution has a grad teaching course and does not allow any grad student without an MA to teach a course independently.)
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Congratulations on the article!
I do second af’s comment. I recently finished graduate school – at a very research-oriented university – and I was required to attend training sessions on teaching (which included topics like classroom management and assessment methods). Was it enough training? Maybe not – but it was training nonetheless – and there were excellent optional training sessions that many of us participated in. Teaching was also a mandatory part of the program for graduation.
I was also recently on the academic job market. When I interviewed at liberal arts colleges (and some research universities), I was led to believe that teaching was an important factor in the hiring decisions. Why? I had to submit teaching statements and syllabi, teach mock classes, meet with undergraduates, meet with graduate students, and was asked many questions about teaching in one-on-one sessions with faculty and administrators. I was asked bluntly several times if I really cared about teaching because I had a good research record and came from a fancy PhD program. Given all of that, I did not feel that teaching was low on the list of those schools’ priorities, even though it was clear that it was not their only priority. I accepted a position at a R1 university and have been warned repeatedly by colleagues how much my teaching evaluations do matter, contrary to what I might assume, for my promotion and tenure. You’re right that the key may be more that the evaluations not be bad than that they actually be good, but so far I do not see any evidence in my department that good teachers are being forced to become mediocre teachers in order to do research.
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I left a comment on the site, too, but I really did have to take issue with the statement that there’s no teacher training for grad students and no consideration of teaching experience in the hiring process. That simply has not been my experience. While my Ph.D. institution did not require teacher training, it required it for anyone pursuing teaching, which was, effectively, everyone, as no one got any financial support without teaching being at least a part of it. And having served on many hiring committees in my years in academe, not to mention tenure & promotion committees, I can promise you that we take teaching very seriously. Much of this varies by discipline, so blanket generalizations simply don’t work.
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I think there’s some training in grad school now–it’s been a gradual reform process. Plus grad students in top programs often do get a chance to teach their own courses as well as TA. Teaching is one of those things best learnt through experience: I would not wish some of the things K-12 teachers have to go through in their training on anyone, including them.
I think what a few commenters said at the Atlantic is on-target: that in elite academia it is not so much that you are not trained to teach as you are encouraged to see it as a second-order area of attention. When I see colleagues at professional meetings, they do not ask about or compliment me on my teaching, mostly, even though I make much more effort to talk about my teaching and make my syllabi public than your average academic. Almost all the questions you get are about what you’re writing or researching.
However, just to add to the common corrective you’re getting: don’t generalize too much. Small liberal-arts colleges commonly care a lot about teaching in their hiring and in their tenure processes. We spend a lot of time in our searches evaluating a candidate’s experience and skill in teaching, and negative assessments of your teaching after you’re hired can be devastating to your renewal or tenure. In many ways, your criticism is focused on research universities–which might mean the solution for you and other parents is, “don’t send your kids to most of the research universities for undergraduate education unless you think the trade-offs are worth it.”
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I’ve taught at an SLAC college, a state college, and an Ivy league. My husband was a community college professor. My father taught at City College of NY for 40 years. My best friend has a PhD. Her sister has a PhD. My cousin has a PhD. 75% of my Facebook friends have PhDs. I’ve been talking to PhDs on this blog for 8 years. I’ve sat in on the hiring processes. I’ve also been through the interview process a few times.
SLAC do not value teaching as much as they used to. Really.
Nothing that I said in that column was controversial. (I didn’t write the headline, and the lede was “spiced up”, btw.) Everything has been said thousands of times on the academic blogs and in the Chronicle of higher ed and in conversations with friends. All I did was repackage it up for the general public.
No, I don’t think that good teachers are forced to be mediocre teachers. I just don’t think that good teachers are rewarded for their efforts. There are more rewards for the good researcher. Good teachers, who don’t have research papers, are quickly shown the door at just about every university. But a mediocre teacher, with a CV full of papers, will be retained.
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Provocative article. I agree with your highlighting of the perverse incentives. I know that my interest in focusing on teaching isn’t what’s wanted anymore at Regional Comprehensive. I’m expected to up the research ante by a lot and yet somehow get the teaching done. So out the door with a lot of pedagogically valuable assignments that take too long to set up and mark, in with course enrollment caps since I really can’t mark that much material as well as publish an article a year and so on.
*sigh*
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The problem isn’t that what you wrote was “controversial.” The problem is that it was inaccurate. You said that teachers are “not trained to teach”; but numerous people are telling you that teacher training does go on at most universities. It’s a different kind than we see for K-12 students, and you could certainly say that it’s not as good or flawed in some other way, but you can’t say that we’re “not trained to teach.” How many people did you talk to in graduate programs now (not 15 years ago) about what teacher training they received? Or how many grad schools did you call and talk to about their teacher training process and requirements?
You also said that search committees don’t look for teaching experience and ability, and here and in the Atlantic comments section people have told you that in their own interviews for jobs recently and in their own experience on search committees, they do in fact look for teaching experience and ability. I also have tons of friends and family members at different types of colleges all over the country, and I can tell you for certain that your generalization is incorrect. It may be true for R1s, but I’m not even sure about that.
I do recognize that there’s some repackaging going on – some people might be shocked that we don’t have semester length classes on pedagogy the way K-12 teachers do, for example, and this is a perfectly legitimate piece of information to get out there. (Though as you pointed out, these don’t seem necessary for people to become good teachers at the college level.) The emphasis on research at better schools might also be surprising to some people. But the generalizations you made were inaccurate for at least 90 percent or more of the schools I know of, and it’s very frustrating – given the vast amount of time I and most people I know dedicate to teaching – to have these inaccuracies make their way into a national publication.
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I also put a lot, lot, lot of time into preparing my classes, af. Tons of time of time. Ridiculous amounts of time. Embarrassing amount of time.
What counts more? Getting an APSA article or being a star teacher?
Did a single one of those commenters say that teaching counted for more than research? Did any of those commenters say that they had semester long classes on pedagogy that counted for credit for their grade? You can’t walk into a Kindergarten classroom in this country and teach without two years of teaching experience. I’m not suggesting that we do that. But maybe one proper class?
I taught classes at CUNY without a PhD and without a single second of teaching instruction. That practice has not changed. I taught 50 kids and made $2,000 for the whole semester.
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I am never said that there are no good teachers out there. In fact, I said over and over that there were good teachers in academia, but their efforts were not rewarded. If you can name someone who is teaching as a full professor at an Ivy League with tenure and never published anything (and is under 60), but is there purely on his or her ability to inspire the masses, then I would love to hear about it.
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I taught 50 kids without a PhD or any instruction in teaching, but I got about $3,000.
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I once taught a graduate class for $3,000 for the semester. Nobody even bothered to observe me.
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I can’t say I’ve noticed any negative correlation between my professors’ teaching and their productivity or fame as researchers.
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To be fair, nearly everybody else who taught their own section had been a TA before. I did all sorts of stuff out of order.
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“I can’t say I’ve noticed any negative correlation between my professors’ teaching and their productivity or fame as researchers.”
Right. One of my husband’s newer colleagues is a really smart guy who both has a very strong research program and is a strong teacher and takes a lot of interest in students. (He’s one of those people who when he meets you, puts you into his iphone and you are friends forever–think Chris from Parks and Rec.) He’s hypomanic (that’s about two doors down from bipolar) and barely sleeps, which I’m sure helps quite a lot.
There are people who are so smart and so energetic that they really do not have to make any trade-offs.
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Did I ever write that being a good research some how mysteriously drains your teaching mojo? No, I did not. I just said that good teachers are not rewarded. There are more rewards for research than for teaching. Some people are good at both. That’s great.
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Laura, you’re changing the goalposts all over the place. You’re making sweeping generalizations that seemingly apply to all academia then saying something like “If you can name someone who is teaching as a full professor at an Ivy League with tenure and never published anything (and is under 60), but is there purely on his or her ability to inspire the masses, then I would love to hear about it,” and that’s not playing fair.
You know, sure, Ivies/R1s are different. I think we all expect them to be different and to attract the very elite. And then there are … a whole bunch of other colleges of varying quality. If you want to talk about Ivies, fine. Talk about them. But don’t lump them in with other colleges and then criticize the other colleges for the “sins” of the Ivies.
I am currently serving on our promotion committee, and we have a point system in place. To be promoted to associate professor, 70% of your points have to come from teaching. To get to full professor, 60% of your points come from teaching.
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I don’t know how to format this, but assume that there are four configurations.
1. strong researcher/weak teacher
2. strong researcher/strong teacher
3. weak researcher/weak teacher
4. weak researcher/strong teacher
Some people will be strong in both areas, and some will be weak in both. (There’s also the complicating discussion we had previously about the relationship between being a strong researcher and a strong teacher at the upper levels–some people may be poor intro teachers, but strong advanced teachers, and vice versa.)
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Do you know how many people who I know who were denied tenure at non-R1/Ivy colleges, because they had not published enough? One guy was specifically told that he put too much time into his teaching and not enough into research. He was at a school that was one step above a community college.
I have another friend who is at a community college, teaching a 5-5 load. Ugh, right? She was told that she has to publish to get tenure.
Shall I go on? OK, I shall.
I have another friend who is at a non-R1 college. She is an incredibly sucky teacher. The students absolutely hate her. She is a full professor based on her research. She is very good at getting grants, so she buys herself out of teaching all her classes, which I suppose is a good thing for everyone.
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“She is very good at getting grants, so she buys herself out of teaching all her classes, which I suppose is a good thing for everyone.”
Win-win.
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Some yes and some no. It doesn’t do the undergraduate students any good to have people around the place who are doing nothing for them. Imagine having a whole host of shoemakers who occupy a hospital. Wouldn’t all those shoemakers suck up energy that really should belong to people who actually cure people?
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Since there seems to be some call to add more data to the conversation:
graduate students getting a PhD in a foreign language often have to take pedagogy courses for credit as part of their programs. This semester or year-long course is often preceded by a week-long orientation of workshops on teaching techniques. They are frequently observed in a clasroom, filmed, and evaluated.
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Non-random sample of graduate requirements at 5 schools:
– University of Chicago’s Political Science program. No teaching requirement. No education class requirements.
UCLA’s English dept. http://english.berkeley.edu/graduate/requirements
Phd programs at Univ of MIchigan http://www.rackham.umich.edu/policies/academic_policies/section5/
A program at the University of Oregon. http://pages.uoregon.edu/dogsci/doku.php?id=graduate/phdreqs
Could go on all day…. No teaching requirements. No education class requirements.
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I’m glad you had the opportunity to write this article and that you’re starting a debate. I expect to see this article on the mailing lists, too, probably interpreted as saying that university professors can’t teach (just as your article on academic publishing was seen as an attack on JSTOR). But, that’s the risk of writing for a general audience, that your most controversial points will become the main point. And, hey, it’s the controversy that gets the book deals, right?
(but, since you’re publishing your strong opinions and not selling out your family our yourself, congratulations!).
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My own take on the issue is that I didn’t choose my university for the classroom teaching. I chose it for the peer group, the research opportunities, and the opportunity to hobnob with academic luminaries. I got all those things, along with teaching that varied from bad to good. I didn’t get any inspired classroom teaching, but that didn’t disturb me. I also didn’t get any teaching that made me understand something I didn’t think I could understand without the teacher, or teaching that made me reconsider my interests and choose a new field (though others at the same university did).
I guess before I got upset at universities for not judging their employees on great classroom teaching, I’d ask whether that’s what their clients really want?
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PS: All my comments are coming at once ’cause the captcha wasn’t working for me since it’s been changed.
I’m not familiar with a wide variety of institutions, but my take is that if there are institutions whose only responsibility is classroom teaching, that there’s little reason to employ people with Ph.D’s (i.e. people who spent 5+ years researching a specific topic) to teach them.
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bj – I guess before I got upset at universities for not judging their employees on great classroom teaching, I’d ask whether that’s what their clients really want?
Absolutely. A fair point. A good many are happy with just getting the degree with the least hassle and the most keggers.
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Apparently, in 1961, the average full-time college student who graduated in 4 years spent 40 hours a week on academics (class, homework, and study). Meanwhile, in 2003, that same average full-time student who graduated in 4 years spent 27 hours a week on academics. When we subtract out actual class contact hours from the 27 hours, that leaves barely any time for reading, homework or study.
Maybe they’re slacking off. Or they could be working to help defray the cost of college, which has risen astronomically since 1978. The graph on this Freakonomics page doesn’t even start in 1960:
http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/10/27/cost-of-college-on-the-rise-again/
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According to the 2011 Nessie (National Survey of Student Engagement), full-time college seniors reported spending 14-19 hours a week preparing for class, 9-16 hours working for pay, 10-11 hours socializing, 4-6 hours on clubs & activities and 5-6 hours commuting.
Variations by field are broken down here: http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2011_Results/pdf/NSSE_2011_AnnualResults.pdf#page=16
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re: controversy. When you write for a mainstream publication, the interest of the magazine is to create controversy, because controversy = lots of hits. I don’t do court controversy purposely, but headlines are written by others.
People will also misunderstand you sometimes. In the case of higher ed, everyone is still very sensitive about the Levy article. There have been a lot of anti-higher ed articles written in the past year. But it should be expected as tuition rises and student debt load increases. It’s only going to get worse. You know that someone is probably working on an article right now calling for the regulation of colleges.
I’m not writing that piece. In fact, I think I’m done with higher ed critiques for a while. Don’t want to get into a rut. I’m thinking about writing about pre-K or autism or gardening next.
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“According to the 2011 Nessie (National Survey of Student Engagement), full-time college seniors reported spending 14-19 hours a week preparing for class, 9-16 hours working for pay, 10-11 hours socializing, 4-6 hours on clubs & activities and 5-6 hours commuting.”
Wouldn’t it be funny if the 2011 students worked less for pay than the 1961 students? It wouldn’t surprise me, though. (It really blows my mind how much real work the local undergraduates put into their recreation–step teams, campus sing, homecoming floats, etc. They work hard at this stuff.)
I’m told that around here, for promotion you need excellent research and adequate teaching.
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I listened to a call on the Dave Ramsey show from earlier this week from a husband whose wife had left a six-figure job to go to seminary at Columbia (Union Theological Seminary, presumably). Now, with $100,000 in student loans for seminary, she is working for $45,000 a year as a Presbyterian minister.
(If you were able to get St. Paul on the line, I wonder what he’d say about starting your ministerial career by borrowing over two years of salary.)
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I think Wendy, af, and bj make some excellent points. SLACs are also different as Tim Burke notes. At my third tier slac, teaching is worth 60% at least for tenure and it is what the administration and faculty really care about. We have tons of faculty development for teaching, and the two search committees I have been on could have cared less about research–the main focus was teaching. The world of higher ed is a highly varied place
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But I’ve also talked to a ton of people from SLAC who feel the pressure to spend less time teaching. If you’ve had a different experience, Miranda, that’s great.
Maybe it’s time for a different ranking system for colleges. From a parent’s perspective, I would like to purchase a quality educational experience for my kid, so I would like to see a college ranking system that rates schools based on commitment to the classroom. As a friend and a former scholar, I am very interested in everyone’s research. And a parent, I’m more interested in universities that reward professors who wow the students and make teaching their priority.
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Really, truly, teaching matters at most SLACs. Maybe not as much as you think it should, or even as much as I do. But it matters a good deal. (Don’t cut yourself off from folks who are basically sympathetic to your view over a matter of emphasis!)
Even when it matters a lot, the problem is that it’s hard to measure, hard to assess, hard to compare. I happen to think intrinsically, inevitably so, because I think most metrics for teaching can’t capture what matters about it. I go back to your own experience recently. When you see a great, motivated teacher, you know it, right? Huge difference. But tell me how to measure that so it shows up on paper. You’re going to have to turn to something horrible like a difference in test results (just, ugh, even in K-12) or who kisses the principal’s (or chair’s) ass enough. Really great teaching is imho like art, like performance: you can get everyone to the point of making good work but beyond that it’s tremendously hard to say why it works, just that it does.
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There’s a bottom-feeder website for grad students to post anonymous comments about job prospects. The assholes are discussing this article right now and one jerk even pretended to me in the comment section. Some jewels from that comment section:
“she has a point about crap colleges and directionals demanding publications for hiring/tenure/promotion. It’s lead to a proliferation of horsesh*t journals and a lot of wasted time by real scholars reviewing the dreck. Most people aren’t cut out for serious research, but that doesn’t mean they can’t teach a 4/4 at Tennessee Tech or whatever just fine. Why force them to waste their time and ours doing something obviously suck at (that’s why they have that job) rather than focus on something they might actually be half-way decent at? Let’s leave serious scholarship and publications to the serious scholars at actual Research universities.”
Nice, right? You want this guy teaching your kid?
A couple of the other commenter were nicer and said this,
“At my #10-ish program, TAing was not mandatory and because we had a small undergrad enrollment and lots of fellowship/RA funding, maybe 1/4 of our students never TAd at all. Half only TAd once. As a TA there, I received no mentoring, not even so much as being handed a university-wide memo on how not to harass your students. No one ever observed any section of mine, no one ever glanced over any assignment I had graded, no one ever looked at my evals with me and had any suggestions. I imagine if greater than some threshold number of students formally complained there’d have been intervention, but short of that our TAs received no guidance and no feedback.”
and
“The teaching of undergraduate students at my R1 is equated with cashing “meal tickets” by most faculty members. The emphasis is on research, research, research, mentoring grad students, and service in that order.
I suppose the embarrassing laziness and stupidity of the student body seems like a good excuse, but it really isn’t. This is leagues worse than the environment at a moderately successful LAC.”
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Yes, yes, Tim, you’re right about many things in that comment. (Sorry, long day and I’m losing my ability to write.)
It is very hard to measure the quality of individual teachers, but it is possible to measure the commitment of a university to support good teaching. What is percentage of adjuncts in the university? That number alone tells you a lot. What is average teaching load? (Too many classes bad, too little bad.) Average class size. Number of classes. I don’t know. Talking off the top of my head here. But I think it is not an impossible task.
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“Do any grad programs make teaching experience a requirement for graduation? I haven’t heard of any.”
I have friends at grad schools across the country, and I’ve heard of very few schools which don’t.
I am a PhD student at the university of Chicago. Departments don’t have teaching requirements, but the university does: teaching is a requirement for matriculation from the university, meaning any PhD student has to teach. (And in addition, at least part of our funding is tied to teaching). In order to teach, we are required to attend a 2-day teaching training session. It’s much less than other schools require, but far more than you assert it is. To teach a stand alone class in the core (as I do and everyone in the social sciences is strongly encouraged to do), I had to apply for and then undergo a year long competitive internship. I think grad school has changed a lot in the past 10 years. The university of Chicago beefed up its teaching requirements 5 years ago (from none to 5 quarters of TA-ing or 3 quarters of stand-alone teaching, or various combinations thereof.)
Also, at my department we fired a TT professor after 3 years. It was a combination of a lot of things, but terrible teaching reviews was the primary reason. Professors who can’t successfully teach grad students get the boot. Research matters here, but teaching (and mentoring) grad students is probably equally important, and all professors are required to teach 1 undergrad course a year in the college core, on top of department teaching requirements.
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Yes, we need to think about the student. But what about most of his professors? We rave on about our professors, we go on about our instructors, but how many really know that most of us make less than the person standing at the counter at Target? Please make a stink: if we don’t stick together, and we don’t promote ourselves and our own cause, we won’t get anywhere. Don’t let this injustice continue! Students have it bad. Grad students have it worse. But adjuncts, who are out in the real world but making a salary they cannot live on, have it the worst. Please sign and share this petition with everyone! http://signon.org/sign/better-pay-for-adjuncts.fb1?source=c.fb&r_by=426534
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it’s good to hear about U of C’s teaching requirements. When I was there, grad students were not allowed to teach.
TT faculty are fired for not working well with grad students? What happens when they have mediocre evaluations with undergraduates? Sorry, but 1 undergrad class per year is pathetic. As a customer of a higher education for my son, I want faculty who teach at least 2 classes every semester. I want tenured faculty to teach the intro classes, not adjuncts.
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I think that the emphasis between teaching and research is very different between R1s (where the grad students’ comments come from) and SLACs and directional states.
I got my PhD in 2006 and yes, the university required attendance at a 3 day teaching seminar. Teaching is slowly being addressed, but needs more work.
The biggest quibble I have with the article is that you assume that students are the customer. This is not surprising given the recent rhetoric about students as customers. They are not customers (especially at R1s). They are the product.
Think Facebook. The users are able to demand changes and more services, they still aren’t the customer.
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“What happens when they have mediocre evaluations with undergraduates?”
Don’t evaluations correlate most predictably with the grade the student expects to receive?
Now, if there are recurring substantive complaints, that’s different. I had a graduate professor in a rather arcane and difficult linguistic subject who was a classic blackboard abuser. He talked to the blackboard, he wrote quickly on the blackboard and blocked it, he erased excitedly (while people were still copying) in order to get room to put new stuff, he used error-ridden drafts of his upcoming book to teach his class (and they were substantive errors that would cause real trouble). But he was also rather old, and had undoubtedly received tenure some decades earlier.
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To be fair, he was also one of the nicest people in the department.
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tulip: explain more. Customer v product v user. Interested.
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Just want to thank everyone for the supportive comments and for the constructive criticism. It will make the next article better. You know 5 out the top 10 articles on the Atlantic website yesterday were about higher Ed. Including this one. It is definitely a hot topic right now.
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About my old professor the blackboard abuser–he LOVED teaching, loved his students and wrote lots of books. He was a wonderful person, just a terrible teacher.
Even though the TA training that people have mentioned may sound pretty minimal, it may be enough to keep really gross pedagogical errors from fossilizing into habit.
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Thank you for opening this debate, Laura. As the parent of high school students, it’s raised things to think about.
I don’t want my children to think of themselves as customers, as in “the customer’s always right.” They certainly shouldn’t be able to demand good grades in exchange for money.
On the other hand, in my simplistic opinion, I’m sending my children to college to get an education. Obviously, institutions vary. If teaching undergraduates is assigned the lowest priority at certain institutions, that’s something I really want to know. It’s certainly possible to argue that R1 universities’ most important tasks are research and training graduate students. When/if my kids are looking to attend graduate or professional schools, they should head to those institutions. As undergraduates, though, I don’t think I’m willing to spend [i]that much money[/i] for neglect, when there are other institutions which do place the greatest importance on teaching undergraduates.
It does come down to money. How much of the universities’ budget depends upon undergraduate tuition? If the undergraduates are providing a significant share of the budget, are they a priority? Or are they subsidizing other priorities?
I don’t think that teacher training in ed schools produces great teachers. On the other hand, two days of training isn’t enough. There’s also no mention of continuing supervision of professors’ teaching. How many tenured professors teach well? What happens if they don’t?
There may be the same sort of trade-off implicit in teaching hospitals. There must be institutions which train the doctors and professors of the future. However, the medical care or undergraduate education might be better at institutions which employ seasoned professionals.
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Laura,
I’ll try to write more this evening/weekend when I have more time.
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I also had one of those teachers (“blackboard abusers”), in fact, he’s the one I think of. But, in our case, he was a theoretical mathematician who clearly thought about math very differently from most people. Teaching classes might have taught him pedagogy, but he was probably better off not being required to teach.
I haven’t seriously thought about what I think my kids should have in college, but I’m pretty sure that teachers who wow them in the classroom is not what I’m looking for. In the past, I would have dismissed “teaching” (i.e. classroom instruction) at a college level completely in terms of importance, but recently, I have become more attuned to the role that coaches and teachers and directors play in shaping skills. I’m still not sure how important it would be at the college level, but am more open to thinking about it. I still don’t think it would be a very high priority, or if it was, it would be in search of a particular teacher, rather than in search of institutional supports (though they may be related).
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I know of a large private university that does a one-month summer seminar to work on teaching skills for newer faculty. The carrot to attend is the equivalent of 20% of yearly salary (i.e. it would make a pretty good house downpayment).
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Maybe I wasn’t clear. TT faculty in all social sciences are required to teach 1 INTRO class for freshman/sophomores a year in the social sciences core. This is on top of all the other teaching (grad, undergrad) required in the department. In residence faculty usually teach about 2-3 classes a quarter. And…TT faculty are fired for bad teaching evaluations from grad students, not for not working well with them one-on-one. At R1 universities, teaching grad students is also an important component, not to mention about half to 2/3 of the classes offered are undergrad/grad mixed, so those classes with grad students also have undergrads.
Also, on top of teaching multiple classes per quarter, faculty are expected to be basically self-sufficient by bringing in grants to fund their research. A prof who just got tenure last taught an undergrad course that was so amazing it made the Chicago Tribune as the most popular course ever taught here AND won a McArthur Genius Grant award the same year. This was considered nice, but somewhat par for the course in my department. I agree with Amy: maybe in some disciplines professors are allowed to be terrible teachers and great researchers, but at top schools it’s not uncommon that you’re expected to be at minimum an adequate to good teacher and a great researcher, if not excellent at both.
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Bj, I’m coming to value tough grading scales. My eldest is a humanities kid, so I suspect she’ll end up at a liberal arts college.
Is it possible that many professors underestimate the value of teaching, because they were such strong students they needed less support in the classroom?
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I just read the article (yesterday was a bad day). I thought it was good.
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These discussions about university teaching always make me worry about what is being overlooked in the relationship between teaching and research. This client/customer model of the student is one that an average American understands well, but it’s not a great model for understanding the role of research (which your average American does not understand at all) in teaching, even at the undergraduate level.
Without an ongoing commitment to research informing his/her teaching, a university professor becomes essentially a glorified high school teacher–and it seems to me that administrators who hire increasing numbers of adjuncts are on course to turn their universities into versions of expensive and elite high schools. (I’m not suggesting that adjuncts don’t do or care about research, as I know many who do; but they are not evaluated on it and their workloads make it close to impossible to keep it up, especially over the longer term).
The PhD that differentiates university from high school teachers represents not only the professor’s achievement of original and quality research, but the training to continue such research and to bring that sophisticated knowledge of the field into the classroom. I realize you and your blog readers know all of this, but the vast majority of Atlantic readers do not.
This doesn’t mean teaching as a practice shouldn’t matter (it does, and that’s why most tenure-stream faculty are evaluated equally on teaching and research), nor does it mean that there isn’t (at least some) room in universities for tenurable faculty whose commitment is predominantly to teaching rather than research. But the emphasis really needs to be on the reciprocal integration of teaching with research. The biggest danger of discussing university teaching using this customer model of satisfaction, I think, is abetting the public’s lack of knowledge and information about the truly central role of research in the life of the university. This is actually what parents are paying for when they fund their kids’ undergraduate college degrees, and they should in fact be really pissed off if they’re not getting it.
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Let’s say that I agree with that notion of what a university should be, the problem is that students aren’t getting that at many schools. They aren’t getting engaged, research infused lectures from intellectuals. They are getting lectures from adjuncts, especially in lower level classes. It’s a bait and switch. Adjuncts are wonderful teachers in many instances and should be well compensated for their efforts. My point is just that if tell students that they should want research-heavy professors teaching their classes, then we should give that to them. Tons of studies show that adjuncts teach between 50-70 percent of classes at many schools.
Families are going into huge debt to pay for their kids’ educations. We have no money saved for their college education. With our late start on our second careers, all of our income goes to pay for our mortgage and our own student loan debt. We will have to take out a second mortgage on the house to pay for our kids’ higher education. In addition to that, students also have to take out on average $20,000 in personal debt. We’re not alone. The national student loan debt now totals $1 trillion.
With so many of friends working their asses off at universities, I would love to be a bigger defender of higher education. I just don’t know how to tell other families that they should gladly put a second mortgage on their house to support research that doesn’t help their kids in the classroom and that they aren’t allowed to read at their public library.
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“With our late start on our second careers, all of our income goes to pay for our mortgage and our own student loan debt. We will have to take out a second mortgage on the house to pay for our kids’ higher education.”
Please tell me you’re just forgetting to mention your ample retirement savings, because otherwise, you’re headed for trouble.
(Sorry–had to say it.)
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ample? We have some, but when I started the blog, we had just gotten off of welfare. Have I talked about the cost of autism therapy?
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Flossing regularly? Dentures cost as much as a semester.
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Speaking of dentists, happy Passover.
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“I just don’t know how to tell other families that they should gladly put a second mortgage on their house to support research that doesn’t help their kids in the classroom and that they aren’t allowed to read at their public library.”
Well, the high tuition prices are definitely NOT caused by too much money going to research! I wish we were prioritizing the production of knowledge to such a degree that this was becoming a problem. And, I believe curious monolith did explain how research often does inform what goes on in the classroom; I can certainly vouch that my teaching informs my research and that my research informs my teaching.
High tuition costs are definitely a problem–they are a result of a lack of support by the state, bloated administration, increased services to students (services that make it possible for students with learning disabilities to succeed, for example), increased reporting duties and unfunded mandates from states and accrediting agencies, more elaborate facilities that students and their parents demand, athletics, Baumol’s cost disease, etc. There are always individual examples of crappy professors being paid outrageous salaries, but most of the problems with the cost of higher ed don’t have anything to do with professors. People are taking out a second mortgage to support a professional- level basketball team, lovely gym, apartment style dorms, and raft of administrators and directors of various services–the lion’s share is not going to research OR teaching. Oh, and healthcare. Healthcare costs at my institution are killing our budget–single payer soon, please!
Nevertheless, I guarantee you that at most higher ed institutions (not for-profits) in the US, students have fabulous opportunities to learn. A lot of professors do a great job of teaching. Students need to seek those opportunities out–hardly any of these discussions of higher ed focus on the student’s responsibilities. I wish that 50% of my students were intellectually curious and wanted to learn–it would transform the classroom.
The community colleges are doing great things with teaching, and more students are going to them. Look beyond the RIs (and even the RIIs). People certainly won’t have to take out a second mortgage on their house to send their kid to community college for 2 years and then transfer to a.good 4 year institution to finish their B.A.
We live in a culture that does not value education, and despite that, we have one of the best systems of higher ed in the world. Now, we seem determined to screw that up.
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I meant that the professor’s research wasn’t helping the student in the classroom, because, at many schools, they aren’t getting that research-professor in the classroom. They were getting an adjunct in the classroom. I was referring to my first paragraph in that comment.
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“We live in a culture that does not value education, and despite that, we have one of the best systems of higher ed in the world.”
For not valuing education, we spend a heck of a lot on it at all levels. Would it be fairer to say that lot of people think of education as something that you buy and pay for, rather than something that involves active involvement?
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Compare, for example, the set of people who drop big bucks on expensive exercise equipment and gym memberships to the set of people that actually look like the Nordic Track models.
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“If you can name someone who is teaching as a full professor at an Ivy League with tenure and never published anything (and is under 60), but is there purely on his or her ability to inspire the masses, then I would love to hear about it.”
That is a much different question than asking people to name the ways in which individuals are trained or gain experience, or the ways in which teaching is rewarded.
At my university, teaching is rewarded. Can one get tenure solely on teaching? No. Does it matter in tenure cases as much as research? I don’t think it does, for most decision-makers. Do I think my department and university value teaching? Absolutely. We have teacher training, we talk about teaching and how to improve our teacher training, we have teaching awards, we discuss teaching in annual reviews, we spend time observing each other’s classes and our graduate student classes, we have incentives to encourage individuals to participate in various innovative teaching programs on campus….
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If I wanted to measure a university’s commitment to teaching, I wouldn’t look immediately at the % of instructors who were adjuncts, although that could be informative. I would look at class size, graduate placement, existence of programs like Honors, Study Abroad, etc…..I would talk to people who had gone to that school. And I think at large universities, one’s experience (class sizes, adjuncts, etc.) varies pretty substantially across colleges / schools, and even departments, so I would look closely at particular units.
I am not that concerned about whether my son is taught by someone who teaches two (undergraduate) classes a semester, or whether the introductory classes are taught by tenured faculty–I think that it is possible for new teachers to teach well, and it’s necessary for them to get the experience. Getting a PhD doesn’t magically confer the ability to teach–it can’t just be tenured or tenure-track professors in the classroom. Departments don’t necessarily put graduate students in the classroom because they value teaching, but those who value teaching do encourage graduate students to teach, and do mentor those graduate students.
And instructors (particularly long-term instructors) that are great teachers are an asset to many universities. Do universities reward them adequately? Usually not. And is it a problem that they are overloaded and that there is high turnover? Absolutely. But there is a lot of variance in how universities handle the instructor issue.
I also seriously hope that an anonymous jobs blog is not representative of a discipline, much less academia as a whole. Every profession has obnoxious individuals; they are probably over-represented on those sorts of blogs.
If the message is that people at universities could think more about excellence in teaching, I agree. Frankly, I think they could think more about excellence in research; more research, done quickly, on narrow questions, is not always better. But if the message is that universities don’t train grad students to teach, departments never value teaching, and faculty who teach two undergraduate courses each semester are better teachers than those who teach one a semester or even one a year, and always (or even usually) better than instructors or graduate students–I don’t buy it.
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[Arg. My own blog ate my comment. Starting again.]
Thank you, BK, for your thoughtful comment. I have to be brief, because it is a holiday weekend and my family is getting grouchy about all the time that I’ve spent on the computer.
This article was liked 1K on Facebook, and passed around widely on Twitter and e-mail. There is clearly a lot of division among faculty about research, teaching, adjuncts, student rankings, and graduate training. (I really did cram too much into one article.) Within this comment section, there is also some disagreement about what makes a good teacher. Is it research? If so, then are community college teachers bad teachers? Are older faculty, who haven’t published in a while, terrible teachers?
I have to move on, though I’m keeping this thread open. Feel free to tell me that I’m a jerk. I’m cool with it. As I wrote up thread, I want to work on an autism article next, but I’ll come back to higher ed probably in May when I guest blog somewhere else. Right now, I’m geeking out over student loan research and alternative ways of calculating college rankings. (Thanks, BK, for your input.) If you think that I should look at other issues within higher ed, let me know. If you have some great studies on higher ed, send them my way.
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“If so, then are community college teachers bad teachers?”
Some are, but not necessarily because of the lack of research. But remember what people (Ragtime?) were saying about how research becomes more and more crucial in a teacher as you get to the higher levels of a subject?
Also, bear in mind that some hotsy-totsy private high schools like to hire people with doctorates.
“Are older faculty, who haven’t published in a while, terrible teachers?”
Some are. The lack of activity in publishing might well be a sign that they are slowing down across the board. On the other hand, it’s common for mathematicians to do almost all of their work very young and then write textbooks in their mature years–that’s a normal life cycle.
On yet a third hand, I had a professor who was a very amusing and competent old guy who taught news writing. He’d worked in news for many years before turning to teaching and he taught from notes in an obviously ancient yellow legal pad. Since it was a journalism program, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the fact that he wasn’t a scholar of journalism and didn’t have a doctorate (Lord only knows if he even had a BA). There were lots of crusty old retired journalists and crusty young working journalists teaching in the program, and why would you want anybody else?
I guess the profile of a good teacher may be very different from field to field.
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Speaking of competent, old, and amusing teachers, Happy Easter to the Sisters of St. Francis and wherever s else applicable.
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Well, I can’t imagine why anyone would call a blogger they didn’t know a jerk.
If teaching didn’t matter, you wouldn’t see so many people feel that it is important to say that their experience suggests that teaching does matter, that there is training for future professors, that there are rewards for good teaching.
It sounds as if your argument really is that one can’t entirely succeed in higher education as a faculty member JUST based on teaching, and that indeed, other things often matter more. I would agree with that. (Thinking about the comparison to high school, I am not sure how much quality teaching matters in secondary education….or how it is measured.)
That, however, is much different than what you actually say in your essay, particularly in the beginning, which is that people aren’t rewarded for teaching, or trained to teach, and that teaching doesn’t matter.
I also don’t really regard my students as customers; I think of them as (potentially) pursuing opportunities (at significant cost to them) to carve out a particular pathway in life. My role is to help provide the opportunities. But they need to take responsibility for making decisions about learning, and they need to work hard to succeed. There are so many educational opportunities–study abroad, internships, undergraduate research opportunities, service learning–it’s amazing what kinds of opportunities there are, even at resource-poor universities. But students need to pursue those opportunities, and I wish parents would talk more to their kids (very early on) about how to pursue those kinds of opportunities.
Students who take ownership over the experience are most likely to get the most rewarding experience….no matter how committed a university is to teaching, the best students are the ones with initiative, who take advantages of the opportunities that are unquestionably there.
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But if the message is that universities don’t train grad students to teach, departments never value teaching, and faculty who teach two undergraduate courses each semester are better teachers than those who teach one a semester or even one a year, and always (or even usually) better than instructors or graduate students–I don’t buy it.
Well, the faculty who teach two undergraduate courses each semester have a larger teaching load than those who teach one a year. That means it’s more likely they’ll come into contact with undergraduates.
Teaching undergraduates should be distinguished from teaching graduate students, when one speaks of a commitment to teaching. Many undergraduates won’t continue on to graduate school.
The small liberal arts colleges we’ve been visiting have been careful to emphasize the lack of graduate students on their campuses. They also emphasize the ability to get to know professors, and the small class sizes. If we would spend the same amount at either institution, I’m inclined to believe our child would get a better education at a SLAC than at an R1 university.
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I can’t believe nobody has mentioned this, but instructors in the sciences are particularly notorious for take-or-leave-it teaching (see, for example bj’s experiences).
Locally, I heard a story through the grapevine (perhaps unfair) that in the sciences, they think they’re doing pretty good if they refrain from just reading out of the textbook.
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Real people are are putting their lives’ savings into higher education. Real people are investing years of their lives in school. They think that they are paying for a soft warm place for their kids where all resources are directed at the students. They don’t care about research. And why should they? Nobody has bothered to explain it to them. They have no idea that there are professors who only teach one class a year. They expect that colleges are like high school. If they pick up a “let them eat cake” attitude about the costs of high Ed and a distain for their kids’ ability to navigate the bureaucracy, there’s going to be a rebellion. They won’t send their kids to research heavy schools. See Cranberry’s comment. Or they will start telling the gov’t to stop subsidizing the system with student loans. Or they will demand regulation.
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I was just remembering that as an undergraduate, two of my more memorable teachers were ones with obvious research programs–obvious even to an undergraduate who didn’t really know what research was.
At University of Southern California, I had Bruce Zuckerman for a course on the Bible’s influence on literature (Faulkner, Moby Dick, Master and Margarita, Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, Kafka, etc.). He was a very passionate and engaging instructor and well organized (weekly reading quiz!). I don’t know his standing in his field, but I liked him enough to sign up for his Old Testament course. In his free time, he jetted around the world photographing ancient documents. You can see his recent research grants here–he seems rather good at getting them.
http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1003855&CFID=2193551&CFTOKEN=16748434
Another standout at USC was John Bowlt of the Slavic Department. I had him only for Russian Culture (an eclectic mix of language, poetry, art and a little ballet). He was a really electrifying teacher (it wasn’t really a language class, but I learned a LOT of Russian there). He also had a research program that was clear even to the undergraduate eye–he still presides over a treasure trove of Soviet artifacts (the Institute of Modern Russian Culture). I see from looking at his CV and Amazon that he has a very strong publication history.
Anyway, I really feel that there is a category of professor who does everything well.
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Even as an undergraduate, I would have thought it total insanity to think that I was somehow cheated as a student by the time that Zuckerman or Bowlt spent on their research. And the funny thing was, I think those were the only two professors I had as an undergraduate where I had a clear idea of what their research was. I had a number of uninspiring professors, of course, but I have don’t recall any of them mentioning anything about their research, which may well have been just as sawdust-flavored as their lectures.
As a graduate student, I had a very good vantage point for studying a professor who was both a very strong and popular teacher and a very active researcher. Namely, I had the cubicle next to her office, which featured a simply endless stream of adoring undergraduates sucking up her time. She still got an awful lot done, though.
Now that I think about this, all off the strong researcher/strong teacher types that I’m thinking of are either male or female and childless.
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Laura,
I still don’t have much time, but..
I think it is clear that what Facebook is selling is access to all the members. Advertisers can use the posted information to target ads. Users really want Facebook because of the other users. What fun is it if it is just you?
I think colleges do the same thing. The college experience is all about the people you meet. That is what they are selling – that experience. In addition, it functions as a marriage market where parents can send their children to meet “people like us”.
The students aren’t really the customer – they are what the college is selling.
(I have to run – email me if you want more detail.)
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I know higher ed is off-topic this week, but I just saw this article on One L. Goh and Oikos University and thought of this thread.
Btw, I can’t seem to post comments while in Chrome. Am posting this via Safari.
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I couldn’t post from Chrome either. Tulip is right but at a guess FB also sells aggregate data (X thousand women who are 41 shared X link…I don’t think they are quite there yet but soon should be), app development/deployment and contest fees. It’s not just the sale of the advertising but the smartness capability of it.
Magazines and newspapers started and perfected this model when they opted to sell copies at less than they cost to produce and to make up the difference via advertising. Sometimes I think the story of media for the last 100 years is that it will have been a blip in its history – not too expensive, not funded by a rich artst-loving patron, and not solely produced by those with strong enough special interests to do it at a loss either of actual money, or time.
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Thanks for the info about the comment section. Typepad switched comment systems last week and everything is majorly f@cked up. I keep saying that I’m going to upgrade this blog and go to a better system. Should do something about it.
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