Class Dismissed

...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...

...Their faculties, interested in research, happily supervise others who are interested in research...

...At a graduate school at the University of Mississippi, for example, one teacher uses a lit overhead projector, a machine that displays material printed on clear plastic sheets on a screen for students to read...

...At North Carolina, for example, every March or April, full-time professors submit a report to their chairman detailing annual scholarly activity to be assessed for salary increases...

...There's an obvious distinction between those who are breaking new ground with original research and those who, under pressure to produce anything, It's one of the curiosities of the American university that a degree earned by writing dissertations on things like "oligopolistic structures" in political science or "Anorexia in Dickens" is required to teach young people...

...But why the pressure to produce arcania...

...is the central prerequisite to teach, not just research...

...This isn't a new complaint...

...That's the system's carrot...

...Snobbery, after all, pushed us into this...

...he wrote his novel during a sabbatical...

...Such a system worked here two generations ago, and even later at Oxford, where as recently as the sixties a B.A...

...The message in graduate school is, 'If you want to get ahead, focus on pubhshing,' " says Robert Speel, a young political scientist at Penn State's Erie campus...

...Formal interviews with students and tough questioning are obviously in order, but it's extremely rare to find evaluation that requires any faculty participation, as interviewing would of course have to do...

...There's no make-believe that a good teacher of graduate students necessarily wants to teach undergraduates...

...According to the Carnegie Foundation, just 58 percent of faculty in four-year schools say their chief interest lies in the classroom...

...And when teaching is evaluated, the results are often overlooked...

...the median for his rank in the English department is $60,000...

...Too often, however, the formulaic questions ("Was the professor well-organized...

...Routinely, I think chairmen fail to look at them," says Ted Leinbaugh, a tenured professor of English at North Carolina's Chapel Hill campus...

...degree (All But Dissertation) didn't go anywhere...

...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...

...If the department doesn't attract students, the state denies it new positions and money...

...In a lot of ways, the Ph.D., because of its coursework and the depths candidates have to plumb, has a salutary effect, at least in making the young teacher confident he knows his stuff...

...While 99 percent of North Carolina's departments use student forms, only 45 percent ask for self-evaluation...

...For each course the professor teaches, students fill out evaluations, usually 13 questions to rate different factors from "poor" to "excellent...

...Universities, however, occupy an inviolate place in American life...

...In Ohio, one campus has a plan in place that merits a serious look...

...What we talked about in class wasn't connected to what we read, and the movie wasn't really connected to anything...

...That leaves three decades or so of general unac-countability...

...If a physics professor, for instance, wants to be judged more on teaching, his annual salary can be computed 60 percent for teaching performance, 20 percent for research, and 20 percent for service instead of the more familiar 40/40/20 formula...

...Doldrums And there's no sign the university is even interested in such distinctions...

...The record is seven...

...What's lost, of course, is a simple thing called education—the thing students and parents and taxpayers are writing checks for...

...The best-known and highest-ranked professors teach sporadically, if at all...

...And, significantly, professors who teach the least make the most money...

...At Ohio Univer44 The Washington Monthly/May 1993 sity in Athens—a 19,000-student school with 16,000 undergraduates—there's a flexible way to figure salaries...

...No question, the aspiring research chemist or literary theorist reasonably wants to immerse himself in a Ph.D...

...It's too bad Kittredge's successors in academe have inherited his attitude rather than his skill...

...Reward is the rub, of course: Division of labor—an old idea that somehow never penetrated the ivy thicket—can't mean division of prestige...

...Class Dismissed Universities should start caring about how wetland how much-teachers teach 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...

...Young academics swiftly pick up on that and tailor their careers accordingly...

...after the award expired, the university didn't give him a permanent salary boost...

...There's a temptation to measure production, and it's easier to measure publications...

...But we're curiously wedded to the idea that a Ph.D...

...I am being trained to come up with increasingly outlandish ideas...

...What is reviewed is research...

...If any other business—an auto manufacturer, a bank, a supermarket—cut services and raised prices, customers would walk out...

...This man whisks the sheets on and off the machine so quickly that students, despairing of copying down things like biochemical purine ring formulas, try to calculate the professor's TPM rate—transparencies per minute...

...If the Ph.D...

...Presumably, no one was qualified to...

...That he wasn't a particularly good teacher didn't interest the universities which courted him...

...a salary committee assesses all the evidence, and a final rating is computed...

...30 percent have peer review...

...But changing the requirements for the Ph.D...

...Professors who took Ph.D.s—the wonder credential—and began their careers in the sixties are retiring...

...For one thing, when it comes to pay and promotion, it's easier to count publications than assess teaching...

...Jacques Barzun, the wise Columbia professor and dean, called the ranks of the Ph.D...

...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...

...A scholarly publishing star, he soon left to chair the philosophy department at one of the country's largest research universities...

...If the bachelor's or the master's degree results from rigorous work, the Ph.D...

...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...

...42 The Washington Monthly/May 1993 So why is there so little emphasis on teaching...

...Similarly, C.S...

...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...

...The real issue is why universities have let research become the alpha and omega of their culture...

...Another winner of that teaching award makes $40,000...

...the most expensive and least luxurious club in the world...

...In fact, accreditation and foundation funding depend, in part, on the percentage of faculty with doctorates, the number of research grants won, and how many graduate students departments can attract...

...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...

...So every 10 seconds or so, he's whipping off the sheet that's chock full of information," says one student...

...This had just been a very unremarkable course," recalls one student...

...By asking faculty to be realistic about how they spend their time, Ohio is doing more than mouthing quality control bromides—it's forcing teachers to decide where their best effort will repay them financially, and students benefit from teachers whose salaries are tied to the classroom...

...May 1993/The Washington Monthly 43 Why do we pretend otherwise...

...Since all universities have a seven- to eleven-year probation period for faculty, there's plenty of time to correct mistakes...

...And it's significant that one of the fastest growing segments of the nation's academic labor force is in "non-tenure track" jobs in which temporary faculty do the bulk of the teaching—but aren't rewarded with full, permanent status...

...If a candidate who hadn't taken a first wanted to impress a college, he did what used to be called a Bachelor of Letters, a limited research degree, to prove his intellectual stamina...

...is a sound idea...

...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...

...But, instead of putting it back on, he just tosses it in the out pile...

...program for six years to prepare to write or experiment throughout a career...

...Past attempts at creating what was derisively called the "A.B.D...

...A research degree, which is what we all have, doesn't say anything about how you might teach," says James Shinkle, a professor of biology at San Antonio's Trinity University...

...Chips How to assess classroom performance...

...Semesters are shorter, classes fewer...

...Measured over time, student evaluation is an invaluable resource...

...Without formal review and meaningful sanction, stories like these pass into student legend instead of getting corrected...

...Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies and Oxford's All Souls College are two places that honestly acknowledge their missions...

...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...

...Oversight for tenure and promotion decisions is vastly more stringent than the evaluation full-time faculty get after they are permanently appointed—a moment which usually falls when a professor is 38 or 39...

...The teaching awards, however, run out...

...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...

...When professors do teach, there is little sense of how well they're doing it...

...Sometimes, when he slaps the sheet on the machine, it will slip off...

...The professor was right...

...For starters, ask the students...

...As George Lyman Kittredge, the legendary Harvard professor, is supposed to have said early in the century when asked why he had never taken a Ph.D.: "But who would examine me...

...the average is usually five...

...Those who want to do the work of teaching can spend their time, equally paid and equally pleased, with younger students...

...In 1968, Barzun made a proposal: Do away with the dissertation and instead judge a candidate's writerly scholarship with his undergraduate senior thesis or master's thesis...

...and one department in the state—one—conducts exit interviews with graduating majors, presumably the most knowledgeable sources available...

...Goodbye, Mr...

...In other words, the reward for scholarly success is time away from students...

...But academe doesn't make that distinction...

...The press for research is really the press for prestige, something legislators, alumni, and parents covet as much as professors do...

...By definition, of course, a good teacher keeps working in his field, reading widely...

...Even when evaluation forms are circulated, they often get filed with little review...

...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...

...And it was simply assumed, both at Oxford and in the American university, that these bright young dons or professors would, under their own power, keep up with their fields...

...He went on: "The doctorate of course shows nothing about teaching...

...Solutions more radical than declaring good intentions are needed, beginning with how teachers are trained...

...Because these topics, even in something as broad as literature, have been gone over so relentlessly for so long, you end up pulling your hair out to find the tiniest niche possible...

...A few years ago, Leinbaugh won a three-year distinguished teaching award that paid him a bonus of $5,000 a year...

...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...

...And the number of people seeking a Ph.D...

...And in a way, that's fine...

...Lewis once noted: "I found, as always, that the ripest [teachers] are kindest to the raw [students] and the most studious have most time to spare...

...In my experience, teaching is not explicitly mentioned," says Leinbaugh...

...since 1969, the percent of faculty agreeing that teaching should be the primary criterion for promotion fell from 78 percent to 62 percent...

...Because good teaching is simply assumed, the present system of professorial evaluation allows bad teaching to go undetected and unremedied...

...After seeing degree holders and reading their theses, it is hard to say what the title shows...

...So long as the professor wrote books and presented professional papers, that was good enough...

...That's mostly because World War II and Cold War defense research drove science faculties to require advanced degrees, and the impression quickly developed that all faculty had to be treated uniformly...

...But when the tough decisions come around, like tenure and promotion, teaching still doesn't count for much...

...digest and regurgitate other people's original research," says Daniel Cheever, the former president of Boston's Wheelock College and president of the American Student Assistance Corporation...

...Research is of course important, but that doesn't mean it can't be combined with good teaching...

...graduate who took a "first"—the Oxonian equivalent of summa cum laude—could get a fellowship, the English equivalent of an assistant professorship...

...are too soft to extract critical information...

...That lassitude provides cover for a multitude of teaching sins...

...Publishing scholars are more likely to win the university's endowed chairs, marks of professorial distinction which are held for life...

...Schools always say, 'We have a file on every teacher,'" says Patrick Callan, executive director of the California Higher Education Policy Center in San Jose...

...Sabbaticals and summers allow plenty of time for the research most professors do...

...I'm not being trained to teach anything, even in my speciality," says one doctoral candidate in the humanities at Northwestern University...

...North Carolina's university system is fairly typical of the large institutions where a third of all American college students are enrolled...

...And parents and alumni need to cultivate a keen sense of reverse snobbery...

...Not a bad deal at all...

...The stick...

...Raises run from 3 percent to 7 percent...

...Permanent tenure could perhaps be replaced by long-term, renewable performance contracts—another reform that is periodically proposed and rejected...

...It's not as radical as it sounds...

...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...

...Not everybody needs that formal training, however, and right now, because of university and union regulations, there's no way around it...

...Though the results of undergraduate surveys are published in student course guides at Harvard and a handful of the largest state universities, they are frequently undervalued by the institutions themselves...

...That was in 1944...

...The engine's chief operators, the professors, like all other respiratory mammals, respond to systems of reward and sanction...

...According to a three-year study published in 1993 by the North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research, only half of the nation's academic departments use peer evaluation...

...If the distinction between genuine research and make-research is made, the faculties are back where they were before the herd mentality took hold...

...It's one of the curiosities of the American university that a degree earned by independent research—dissertations on "oligopolistic structures" in political science, for example, or "Anorexia in Dickens" (both real topics from recent years)—is required to teach desultory young people...

...is of increasingly dubious value...

...is not keeping pace with expected enrollments...

...lock is picked, other institutional checks could go, too...

...Ph...

...Right now, the rewards are in research, and there are no significant sanctions for bad teaching over the years...

...Frequently, in fact, the busiest and best teachers are the best publishers...

...26 percent review a teacher's course assignments, syllabi, and tests...

...Columbia's Lionel Trilling, for example, produced some of the most popular essays of mid-century criticism while teaching 11 hours a week...

...Except, of course, to bury blind credentialism and base college hiring on ability and general scholarship, not hyper- specialization...

...Instead of building sports and fitness centers, alumni ought to endow teaching chairs and bang the alumni highchair for low student-faculty ratios and pay scales commensurate with teaching ability...

...For teaching to become important again, reputations built on publishing scholarship and research grants will have to be recast to showcase teaching, a tougher sell...

...The American Association of Higher Education estimates that 70 percent don't review course materials...

...Already, master's degrees are occasionally awarded by examination only, a convention that demands student accountability without extracting a tortuously long paper...

...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...