Class dismissed: universities should start caring about how well - and how much - teachers teach

Washington Monthly, May, 1993 by Jon Meacham

One day in the mid-eighties, during a course in philosophical ethics at the University of North Carolina that had randomly featured movies about the Chilean labor movement, political screeds about Central America, and chats about local news, the professor dutifully handed out forms for students to rate the class.

"This had just been a very unremarkable course," recalls one student. "What we talked about in class wasn't connected to what we read, and the movie wasn't really connected to anything. And, when he distributed the forms, the professor announced, very matter-of-factly, that whatever the students said would have no effect on his career."

The professor was right. A scholarly publishing star, he soon left to chair the philosophy department at one of the country's largest research universities. He's there now, presiding over an academic Olympus, while the undergraduates whom he unremarkably taught a few years back are probably as long forgotten as the janitors who cleaned his office. That he wasn't a particularly good teacher didn't interest the universities which courted him. So long as the professor wrote books and presented professional papers, that was good enough. And in a way, that's fine. Complaining that research scholarship is antithetical to the university is silly, an argument that belongs to people who take George Wallace's caricature of "pointy headed professors" literally.

The real issue is why universities have let research become the alpha and omega of their culture. Because good teaching is simply assumed, the present system of professorial evaluation allows bad teaching to go undetected and unremedied. This means that professors who do well in the public sphere of publication rise to the top, leaving teaching stars in a professional steerage class.

So why is there so little emphasis on teaching? According to the Carnegie Foundation, just 58 percent of faculty in four-year schools say their chief interest lies in the classroom; since 1969, the percent of faculty agreeing that teaching should be the primary criterion for promotion fell from 78 percent to 62 percent.

The rules of the academic road have followed those sentiments: Since the seventies, average faculty workloads have dropped from 15 class hours a week to about 6, and college costs have risen at five or six times the rate of inflation. Semesters are shorter, classes fewer. On average, full professors make $65,000 for about 90 minutes of class time a day for the eight months a year that school is in session. Not a bad deal at all.

And, significantly, professors who teach the least make the most money. A new study from the National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment finds that professors who spent fewer than six hours a week in class made $50,927, stomping on colleagues who made $36,793 for 12 hours of teaching. The best-known and highest-ranked professors teach sporadically, if at all. In other words, the reward for scholarly success is time away from students.

When professors do teach, there is little sense of how well they're doing it. And when teaching is evaluated, the results are often overlooked. What's lost, of course, is a simple thing called education--the thing students and parents and taxpayers are writing checks for. The disturbing levels of American collegiate academic achievement are well-known: Our college graduates read and know mathematics at a lower level than their counterparts in other industrialized countries, and, in 1989, a National Endowment for the Humanities survey found that half of college seniors couldn't identify the Emancipation Proclamation or The Federalist Papers.

If any other business--an auto manufacturer, a bank, a supermarket--cut services and raised prices, customers would walk out. Universities, however, occupy an inviolate place in American life. Since the GI Bill made higher education a broad right instead of a privilege in the years after World War II, a university degree has been our intuitive engine of social mobility.

The engine's chief operators, the professors, like all other respiratory mammals, respond to systems of reward and sanction. Right now, the rewards are in research, and there are no significant sanctions for bad teaching over the years. Young academics swiftly pick up on that and tailor their careers accordingly. "The message in graduate school is, 'If you want to get ahead, focus on publishing,'" says Robert Speel, a young political scientist at Penn State's Erie campus. Curiously, too, Americans train their college teachers by forcing them to do labor-intensive research projects, and then expect them to emerge, after years in Ph.D. darkness, as engaging teachers.

Cultural change only comes in times of stress, and the conditions which cause stress are growing in higher education for the first time since 1945. Professors who took Ph.D.s--the wonder credential--and began their careers in the sixties are retiring; William Bowen, the former president of Princeton, projects that 153,000 new arts and sciences faculty will have to be hired between now and 2012--a virtual 100 percent replacement rate for the 156,000 professors now at four-year institutions. And the number of people seeking a Ph.D. is not keeping pace with expected enrollments. It's an opportune time, if there ever was one, to cut through the credentialist kudzu and recognize that not every good teacher is good at research, and not every good researcher is good at teaching.