In the 1970s and 1980s, as Upward Drift schools tried to lure researchers away from other institutions, and cosmopolitans responded willingly, often initiating contact and soliciting “outside offers,” the market overheated, frequently rewarding researchers with amazing deals. This situation further degraded the worth of undergraduate instruction—teaching talent had no value in a market driven solely by research fame. In the late 1980s, a number of analysts concluded that “American academe may be moving toward a single faculty reward structure, a system designed to maximize published scholarship and to minimize the time and effort faculty spend on instruction” of undergraduates.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century that single structure is in place, and despite all the lip service that universities now pay to a “commitment to undergraduate education,” most have established a faculty reward system that relentlessly denigrates undergraduate teaching. In addition, most faculty members are only peripherally involved in undergraduate education. In the 1970s and 1980s, as a way of pleasing research faculty and increasing their research productivity, universities turned over the teaching of many undergraduate courses to lowly paid part-time instructors, as well as to even more poorly paid graduate students. Again, the “monolithic status system” and Upward Drift drove the process.
In my four years at Michigan State, I have had exactly four classes with under twenty-five students and a real professor in charge. All the rest of my courses have been jumbo lectures with hundreds of students, and a professor miles away, or classes with TAs [graduate-student teaching assistants], or not regular faculty, people who come in off the street and teach a course or two. Very few of the TAs or these part-timers know squat about how to teach, some of them don’t even know anything about their subjects.
—A Michigan State senior woman in a 1995 interview
In the 1970s and 1980s, the new and expanded PhD programs at Upward Drift U’s and the diminishing number of tenure-track faculty positions due to economic conditions created a glut of young PhD holders unable to obtain permanent faculty jobs and willing to work as part-time instructors for low wages. In addition, because doctoral programs maintained their full complement of graduate students, these men and women provided their schools with another source of inexpensive labor. An economist who studied this phenomenon stated that the part-timers and TAs are “like any part-time employees that McDonald’s would hire—cheap labor that colleges and universities are relying on to save money.” Exploiting seems a more accurate term than relying on; furthermore, the money saved often went into salary raises for research faculty, as well as contingency funds to match outside offers made to “cosmopolitan” professors.
This situation accelerated the decline of undergraduate education. Time magazine reported on the part-timers in 1987—it termed them “Academia’s New Gypsies”—and noted that, nationally, 30 percent of humanities faculty were now part-timers. Other surveys in this period placed the number of part-timers in the sciences and many other academic areas in the 20-to-30 percentile range. Gypsies (also called Nomads) did the bulk of undergraduate teaching at many universities: nationally, by the late 1980s, they taught almost 40 percent of all undergraduate courses, and at some schools as much as 70 percent.
In addition to the part-timers, graduate students did a large amount of undergraduate teaching. Not only did grad assistants aid professors with the latters’ undergraduate classes—usually teaching sections of the course, grading almost all the essays and exams, meeting students in conferences, and so forth—but grad students also conducted courses completely on their own, so many that these accounted for close to 25 percent of all undergraduate classes taught annually in the late 1980s.
With the part-timers conducting 40 percent of the classes at an average research university, and the grad students 25 percent, then the regular faculty must have taught 35 percent. Not really: if those courses with grad assistants carrying the teaching ball for faculty were subtracted from the professors’ total, often only 25 percent of all undergraduate classes were under the sole control of tenure-track faculty. Predictably, in exit interviews at public universities in this period, recent graduates frequently noted that they had only taken a few classes during their student careers taught solely by full-time faculty, but, in many cases, they could not “remember the profs’ names.” (By the end of the century, the distance between tenure-track faculty and regular undergraduate students had grown even wider than previously, with more part-timers and grad assistants in charge of undergraduate classes than ever before.)
What is wrong with part-timers and grad students teaching undergraduates? For part-timers, the tenuous circumstances of their employment frequently negates whatever positives they bring to the classroom. Part-timers generally toil under oppressive conditions: they have minimal job security and prospects; they teach a course or two at one school, a course or two at another, and sometimes courses at a third or even a fourth university during a semester, and they spend much of their time traveling to and from various institutions—in California, they are called Freeway Fliers. For their labor, they receive short-term (usually one-semester or one-year), or per-course contracts (about $2,500 per course), and zero benefits. When they arrive on a campus, generally they do not have an office or a regular place to meet students in conferences. They try to be polite to undergraduates, but rarely do they have the time or energy to establish meaningful teacher-student relationships. Four, five, or six courses a semester—with normal preparations, as well as stacks of papers and exams to grade—grinds down the best-intentioned undergraduate teacher in the world. It is not a formula for producing quality undergraduate education.
Graduate students share many of the part-timers’ difficulties—short-term contracts, and long hours at low pay—but many universities compound the teaching problems of grad students by failing to prepare them for their classroom assignments in a systematic or effective way (the main preparation for part-timers are the semesters of trial-and-error as grad student teachers). Because university teaching has long been a poor cousin to research, formal teacher training has rarely existed; graduate students spend years acquiring research skills and little time learning how to teach. Indeed, their main pedagogical model is the graduate course, and, sometimes, when teaching an undergraduate class for the first time, many grad students make the fatal error of trying to conduct the class as a mini-graduate course, even using PhD research material, much to the confusion or boredom of the undergraduates present.
In addition, many grad students, when thrown into a class full of students from the collegiate, vocational, and rebel subcultures, remember their recent undergraduate days and their dislike of these undergraduates. As academically inclined students, they had defined themselves in opposition to students in other subcultures; now, as instructors, they are supposed to be nice to them and to understand their spotty class attendance and frequent apathy toward academic work. Some graduate students climb over these obstacles and become good teachers; others allow their insecurities and inexperience to sabotage their teaching efforts, and they watch in frustration as students mentally and physically depart their courses.
All teachers take student indifference and/or hostility personally; sometimes undergraduates so wound beginning instructors that the latter never recover. On the other hand, successful, experienced teachers place negative student attitudes within an institutional context, and understand the difficulties of breaking through the subculture walls surrounding most undergraduates. These teachers try to work with the undergraduate reality, and do not take student attitudes personally.
Therefore, the main difference between part-timers and grad-student instructors is experience: the former have enough to survive to fight another semester; the latter either learn from their mistakes and improve, or they give up, or sometimes they go on to become outstanding researchers but bad teachers as regular faculty members.
A 1999 study charted higher education’s ever-growing reliance
on, and exploitation of, part-timers: nationally, the percentage of part-timers on university faculties had reached 40 percent. And when grad student teaching was factored in, they and the Gypsies conducted more classes than ever before—at some schools, almost 75 percent of all credit hours taken by undergraduates. Yet a majority of Americans believe that experienced professors teach most university classes. As one writer observed: “The general public, which pays most of the bills” for universities through taxes and/or tuition for their children, “sees teaching undergraduates as the primary mission of higher education, and perhaps the only important one.” Moreover, the public does not understand the research bias of Big-time U’s, nor does it have much sympathy for it. Nor should it.
8
THE GREAT RESEARCHER = GREAT TEACHER MYTH
In the late 1980s, in reaction to growing criticism about the research imperative of large, public universities and their neglect of undergraduate teaching, some university presidents and administrators promulgated the myth that great researchers are also great teachers. They hoped that this myth would make the problems in their general undergraduate education programs disappear.
Great Teachers and Teaching …
Teaching and research are too often polarized—at least by those outside the university … . It turns out time and again that those we honor for excellence in teaching are the same faculty we honor for excellence in research.
—Thomas Ehrlich, former president of Indiana University
Myth: The good teachers are good researchers …
The available empirical evidence calls the “good-researcher = good-teacher” argument sharply into question … scholarly productivity and instructional effectiveness have less than 2 percent … in common. That means that about 98 percent of the variability in measures of instructional effectiveness is due to something other than research productivity or accomplishment.
—Patrick T. Terenzini and Ernest T. Pascarella,
education professors
To promote the myth, many schools established annual teaching awards to reward their best undergraduate teachers, and, lo and behold, at the head of the line were the institution’s most prominent researchers. Local media covered the award ceremonies but rarely inquired into how the school arrived at its decision to honor this particular professor. Too often, no criteria, other than wanting to promote the “great researcher = great teacher” myth, existed. In some cases, the award was also an attempt to stroke the already huge ego of a star researcher, or to show a professor with an “outside offer” that the school cherished her/him in yet another way. And sometimes the award included the famous “course off” prize.
Terenzini and Pascarella examined the myth closely, concluding that its proponents invariably “argue by anecdote” and cite that small cohort of “extraordinary” faculty on every campus who manage to be good researchers and good teachers. Lew Miller, a professor at President Ehrlich’s university, admitted: “I envy and admire such colleagues, those rare few who,” in addition to full research schedules, “insist on a full schedule of [undergraduate] courses and who continue to put in long hours grading papers and meeting individually with their students. But I do not for an instant believe that there are enough of these extraordinary people to staff” whole departments, never mind large universities.
This criticism pinpointed the flaw in the “great researcher = great teacher” fable: teaching is labor intensive, and to do an adequate job—not even a good or first-class one—requires many hours per week, at least thirty for minimum results, and closer to forty or fifty to approach excellence. But research work is also labor intensive: whether in the sciences or the humanities, the researcher must spend at least thirty hours a week staying abreast of his or her field, preparing research materials, as well as writing time-consuming grant proposals, conducting research, and writing it up. Then there are meetings to attend, colleagues and assistants to talk with, and so forth; and, in the present age, added to traditional duties, e-mail to answer, Internet sites to monitor, and so forth. Thirty hours a week is a baseline for research activity, but most faculty spend many more hours per week in this endeavor, particularly during the frequent “crunch times” when papers, articles, and books are due.
That some faculty members can actually find enough time in a week to teach well and to maintain their research at a high level, and even do some service, mainly proves that in any large sample of humans, a few will accomplish extraordinary feats. Finally, the “great researcher = great teacher” myth resides alongside the “great athlete = great student” one: yes, Bill Bradley was an outstanding basketball player and a Rhodes Scholar, and yes, every year, some Division I athletes attain perfect grades in difficult majors—but they are a tiny minority of the more than one hundred thousand athletes playing big-time college sports annually, about the same small percentage as great researchers/great teachers. Intercollegiate athletes, working forty, fifty, or more hours a week in their sports jobs, have the same problem as research professors—lack of time and energy for undergraduate education.
Professors Terenzini and Pascarella went beyond the anecdotes about great professors/great teachers, and they examined every serious study on the relationship between “scholarly productivity and instructional effectiveness.” They also plowed through the vast literature on the latter topic—the elements that produce effective teaching and those that do not. Their conclusion, cited above and published in 1994, should have driven a stake through the “good researcher = good teacher” myth, but it did not. (Note that they use the word good, not great as Ehrlich and others did; nevertheless, their weaker version did not come close to reaching their lowered bar.)
The myth endures in the twenty-first century because it serves large, public universities so well: officials can continue to hire, promote, award tenure, and give high salaries to researchers because previous university presidents and administrators have equated outstanding research with outstanding teaching; don’t all those teaching award winners, commemorated with plaques on a wall in a prominent place on campus, prove the equation? On this issue, circular reasoning triumphs, illustrated by the awards and the on-going rationale (phrased here by Ehrlich): “I underscore that students benefit immensely from having as role models faculty members whose energy in the classroom derives from their continual learning [and productivity] in research and scholarship.”
This argument, much beloved by university administrators, is wrong on every count. Only a minority of undergraduate classes are taught—often badly or indifferently—by research professors; hence, these faculty members are infrequent and negative role models. And when these professors conduct an undergraduate course, they rarely teach their research because the latter is too technical or abstruse for undergraduates.
More importanly, as Terenzini and Pascarella show, effective teaching has almost nothing to do with “scholarly productivity or accomplishment.” A University of Michigan study illustrated the actual attitudes of many researchers toward undergraduate education with the comments of a science professor at that school: he “noted that the nature of his discipline is such that he cannot teach his research to undergraduates, and he concluded, ‘Every minute I spend in an undergraduate classroom is costing me money and prestige.’”
Paul Strohm, a longtime critic of university hypocrisy and cant, remarked that, despite the reality, administrators love the “good researcher = good teacher” equation, and they will never give it up because “it solves the problem of conflict between research and teaching by denying its existence.” In addition, the myth not only helps administrators preserve the status quo at their schools, but it also creates a situation where, according to Terenzini and Pascarella, “the research on effective teaching methods will continue to be ignored,” and undergraduate education will continue to decline.
Another higher education myth that Terenzini and Pascarella debunked was: “Traditional methods of instruction provide proven, effective ways of teaching undergr
aduate students.” They focused primarily on lecturing—the main teaching form for faculty at large, public universities—and its failure to meet the educational needs of most undergraduates. One of the studies they examined was the 1980s report of the Carnegie Foundation on undergraduate education; in it, Carnegie investigators described a typical lecture class:
At a freshman psychology lecture we attended, 300 students were still finding seats when the professor started talking. “Today,” he said into a microphone, “we will continue our discussion of learning.” He might as well have been addressing a crowd in a Greyhound bus terminal. Like commuters marking time until their next departure, students in this class alternately read the newspaper, flipped through a paperback novel, or propped their feet on the chairs ahead of them, staring into space.
The irony of this professor’s students not appearing to learn anything from a lecture on “learning” apparently escaped this faculty member.
Lecturing has long been the pedagogical workhorse of higher education. Before the twentieth century, when textbooks were expensive and scarce, lectures were an efficient way to convey information to a large number of students—as long as they took adequate notes. Lecturing also mirrored more authoritarian, paternalistic societies: the supposedly omniscient, older male stood in front of the young students, all knowledge flowing from him to them. Then industrialism seemed to confirm the wisdom of the lecture system, particularly the placing of workers/students in neat rows, and the checkpoints/tests during the production process. Except, by all accounts, most undergraduates did not learn much in their lecture classes.
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