In the twentieth century, the lecture format continued, achieving limited success with undergraduates—the academically inclined and some vocationals took good notes and performed well on exams—and greater success with graduate and professional school students. This elite and carefully selected group demonstrated that lectures worked well in special circumstances: students needed to bring a high degree of personal motivation to the lecture course (they were determined to become doctors, lawyers, professors, etc.); in addition, they needed to master a large amount of material as quickly and efficiently as possible to pass difficult examinations (a good lecturer provided a pathway through mountains of information); and they possessed the analytic abilities to comprehend and take notes on the lectures, as well as the studying and library skills to complement the lectures with outside work (most graduate and professional school students started to acquire these skills as undergraduates, and built on them). These ambitious and atypical students made their lecture courses as active a learning experience as possible—whereas lectures rendered most undergraduates passive, if not inert. Thus, the exceptional minority provided university officials with the higher education rationale for a method imposed upon the vast majority of students throughout the twentieth century.
Yet, early in the century, some educators questioned the lecture method, pointing out that not only did most undergraduates learn little in large lecture halls, but generally they failed to master course material in small classes when the professor stood in front of them and lectured. Into the folklore of college life came such jokes as: “During a lecture, information passes from the instructor’s notebook to the student’s notebook without going through either head.” Nonetheless, lecturing continued as the standard teaching method in higher education, in part due to faculty tradition and familiarity, but also because the alternatives to lecturing—student—centered learning in discussion and collaborative groups—were difficult for faculty to envision and, if attempted, required a large investment of professorial time and energy. Alternative methods also demanded a major attitude shift for faculty: they had to yield some of their supposed omnipotence and omniscience in the classroom and actually listen to students—not easy tasks in an era when a majority of professors regarded most undergraduates with contempt, and also wielded their authority as shields against the “uncultured masses.”
In the first half of the century, some small, liberal arts colleges like St. John’s in Annapolis, Maryland, insisted that their faculty avoid lecturing and teach mainly in the Socratic manner (Q-and-A dialogue between the instructor and students). Unlike the predictability of the lecture method, courses at these colleges demonstrated the creative messiness of student involvement in the classroom, as well as its apparent effectiveness—more than the graduates of traditional schools, alumni of progressive colleges attributed their subsequent success to their “special undergraduate education.” In the 1960s, during protests at research universities, rebel students regularly invoked such educational models as St. John’s; however, the rebels failed to break the faculty’s commitment to lecturing.
In the 1960s, custom and attitude prevented the professoriate from abandoning the lecture method; in the 1970s and 1980s, in addition to the traditional reasons, other powerful factors—especially Upward Drift and cost efficiency—allowed lecturing to flourish. As a result, universities place the lecture class at the center of general undergraduate education, ensuring its continuing ineffectiveness in the twenty-first century.
As university budgets tightened, administrators realized that the way to lower the course load for research faculty, and still gain maximum dollars from their teaching, was to assign a professor one huge lecture class per year. The math was simple: according to standard accounting practices within higher education, universities calculated that, based on faculty salary, it cost them “$15,000 or more per class taught by a full-time professor”; therefore, if students paid $250 a credit hour, thus $750 a course, three hundred undergraduates in a class generated $225,000, and the university started this lecture course $210,000 ahead. After factoring in other expenses, say, $10,000 to pay five teaching assistants ($2,000 each) for their work in the course, and about $2,500 for the maintenance and utilities on the lecture hall and section rooms, and $2,500 for various miscellaneous and hidden costs, the bottom line for New Siwash was $195,000 profit.
But what were the numbers when a professor taught a class of twenty undergraduates? Tuition dollars totaled $15,000, a teaching assistant wasn’t necessary, and upkeep and miscellaneous expenses dropped to about $1,500 on the smaller room. But because this course, like the lecture, was taught by a full-time professor, it still cost “$15,000 or more.” The bottom line on the faculty member’s twenty-student class: New Siwash lost $1,500! But why not give this class to a part-timer and pay that person $2,500 for the course? The new bottom line: the school made $11,000. Hence the administrative decision to encourage Professor Mumble to do his lecture course every year and drop other undergraduate courses from his schedule, giving them instead to part-timers and grad students. Multiply Mumble by tens of thousands of professors across America, and the result was an expansion in the number and size of lecture courses from the 1970s to the present, and no growth in small undergraduate classes—as well as a shift from faculty to part-timers and grad students in charge of many of the small classes.
In its 1980s study of undergraduate education, the Carnegie Foundation declared that a large percentage of undergraduate “students at research universities report that ‘most’ or ‘all’ of their classes have more than one hundred students enrolled” in them. A Rutgers professor noted that at his school, “classes of three hundred and four hundred were quite common,” and only a minority of “students had even one class, out of the four to six they were carrying [per semester], with twenty-five or fewer students in it.” The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana was a typical Big Ten offender: U of I featured a panoply of huge lecture courses, often enrolling five hundred students or more, sometimes even exceeding one thousand. One Illinois political science professor taught an introductory course that enrolled almost twelve hundred and, during alternating years, he did a lecture course with six hundred students—he called the latter his “lounge act.”
Some students saw lecturers in the same terms as this political scientist, but they rounded out the portrait. An undergrad at Ohio State remarked:
A good prof in a lecture course is an entertainer—very far away and not a person to speak to one-on-one. A bad prof is a prison guard—definitely not a person to speak to one-on-one. Can you believe that I had a prof [last year] who took daily attendance by making us always sit in the same seat, and having his grad assistants walk up the aisles with the seating charts, marking off the absent students? And he was the world’s worst lecturer. Talk about a captive audience. I know what the hostages in Beirut felt like.
The Chicago Tribune reported that at many research universities, “Students find themselves in lecture halls seating 1,200 … . Many undergraduates leave college without having had a one-on-one conversation with a professor.” Not surprisingly, the combination of huge lecture halls, undergraduate anonymity, and bad teaching produced a stream of negative student comments. A University of Illinois junior condemned his mechanical engineering professor because the latter “faced the blackboard the entire time,” almost never taking student questions, apparently contemptuous of the undergraduates. An aggressive Indiana University senior remarked:
Every semester here I have encountered a professor who uses an overhead projector and writes continuously on it for the whole class, every class. No questions allowed, no eye contact made. I always feel compelled to ask these profs why they do not simply hand out all the notes they’re going to write on the overhead at the beginning of the semester, and just let the students show up for the tests? Not one of these instructors has ever answered this question. They just walk away from me.
(In the twenty-first century, so
me lecturers use computer projectors, furiously typing their notes to appear on the overhead screens. Technology advances; the lecture method remains as stagnant as ever.)
Sometimes these sarcastic and astute reviews of faculty lecturing appeared in student course evaluations—if the school’s scantron form also provided space for written comments. Anne Matthews, a writer on higher education, quoted a sample of student remarks that she found: “Never let this man near students again; his hobby is general condescension.” “Eurobore.” “Cancels lots of classes.” Matthews commented that “some reviews are deliberately mean, some pan performance and ignore content, some are heartfelt and perceptive notes tossed over a very high wall.” Many undergraduates realized that their university screwed them over in lecture courses. Nevertheless, students failed to understand that, to quote Matthews:
Few campus adults in power take [student] course comments seriously. Who cares what the students say? The greatest of all campus secrets is passing time. Wait them out. They leave eventually. We stay. [Faculty always say] You can’t allow students to dictate in the classroom. No one is going to tell me what I can or can’t do in my own courses (original emphasis).
Matthews tracked student reactions from the late 1980s into the 1990s, but, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the complaints about the lecture system continue. In a random, cross-country survey of a recent edition of The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges (compiled and edited by the staff of the Yale Daily News), the reader finds that at SUNY-Buffalo, “Most required lecture classes for first-year students have enrollments as large as 200 to 500,” and many students “just kind of sit through them, gazing off into space.” At Michigan State University, one undergraduate noted that the huge size of lecture classes makes it “impossible for the professor to give anything but multiple choice tests, the professor and TAs would never have enough time to grade five hundred essays.’” At the University of Colorado at Boulder, “Class size averages two hundred to five hundred for introductory” courses and many other ones. And at Washington State University, “Introductory classes, especially those that meet the core requirements, can enroll as many as five hundred students, and the norm in the other introductory courses is one hundred to two hundred.” To be fair to these schools—all Upward Drift research universities and members of NCAA Division I-A—undergraduates at similar institutions make the same complaints. In fact, the most astonishing note in this litany is the proclivity of universities to burden their least academically capable students—freshmen and sophomores—with the largest and meanest lecture courses.
In contrast to the passive roles students are encouraged to play in lecture/discussion classes, individualized and collaborative teaching approaches require active student involvement and participation in the teaching-learning process. Such methods encourage students to take greater responsibility for their own learning; they learn from one another as well as the instructor. The research literature indicates active learning produces greater gains in academic content [acquisition] and skills.
—Patrick T. Terenzini and Ernest T. Pascarella,
education professors.
Significantly, these experts contrast “lecture/discussion classes” with “active learning” situations; they and others discovered that not only did professors lecture undergraduates in huge halls, but that graduate assistants continued to lecture them in so-called “discussion sections”—small subsets of lecture classes with about twenty-five students. The effect upon undergraduates was almost the same in both situations—passivity, lack of responsiveness, and frequent failure to comprehend the material. One study found “lecturing to be the mode of instruction of 89 percent of the physical scientists and mathematicians, 81 percent of the social scientists, and 61 percent of the humanities faculty.” Another study calculated that the number of questions from students per classroom hour in discussion sections and lecture halls averaged 3.3, moreover, most of the queries were “procedural” (for example, Is the final exam in this room?), and did “not really get at the substance” of the course. Even good students with good questions complained about the lecture format, particularly its rigid structure; one undergraduate commented, “Lectures frustrate me because they whiz along, and when a prof brings up an interesting point, he never stops to allow students to delve into it and to really think about it.”
This student cried out for an “individualized instructional approach,” and Terenzini and Pascarella stress that “Long trails of research suggest that … [these] approaches are consistently more effective in enhancing subject-matter learning than are the more traditional” techniques like lecturing. The student-centered methods “emphasize small, modularized units of content, [and] student mastery of one unit before moving on to the next”; whereas the premise of every lecture is that “all students learn at the same rate … learn in the same way, and through the same set of activities”—listening to the lecturer, taking notes, and taking multiple-choice tests and exams en masse.
A vast and growing body of scholarship supports the nonlecture position, one expert on “Interactive Methods” summing up the findings: “While students may sit passively in a lecture class, they are forced to assume active roles” in nonlecture situations. However, a key to the success of alternative methods is “frequent feedback to students on their progress” in a course, not simply with numerical grades on scantron tests, but through lengthy conferences with the instructor during which the teacher carefully goes over the student’s work in the course. The phrase individualized instructional approaches means exactly that, and strikes fear into faculty who want to spend minimal time with undergraduates, as well as administrators who want to keep their universities as research-oriented and cost-efficient as possible. If a class of twenty students taught by a professor loses money, imagine the cost of a class of ten students working with a faculty member and doing individual and collaborative projects; one in which, in addition to class time, the ten students meet one-on-one with that professor in semester-long tutorials? The actual dollar loss is high, but the time spent by the professor goes from about five hours a week to at least twenty.
Beyond the amount of faculty time and energy involved in nonlecture teaching, most professors will not accept “individualized instructional approaches” because they reject their basic premise: faculty can learn from all of their students; therefore, listening to each at length is a worthwhile endeavor. Every faculty member in America mouths the cliché about “how much I learn from my students,” but when questioned about this, most professors respond with about as much clarity and detail as their lecture course students exhibit when confronted by an obscure exam question. In fact, in surveys of faculty opinion, professors at research universities continually complain about the “attitudes” of average undergraduates, particularly their passivity in class, their absence of intellectual curiosity, their lack of questions, and their reluctance to do the course readings and discuss them. Of course, almost all faculty contact with average undergraduates occurs in lecture classes, so these criticisms are self-fulfilling-lecturing produces student passivity, absence of intellectual curiosity, and so on. Finally, professors rebuking students for not being engaged by lectures is an exercise in blaming the victim.
The average undergraduate understands the situation better than most doctorate-holding professors; a University of Texas (Austin) junior commented, “The reason for the lack of student interest in most classes at my school is the fact that profs fail to engage their brains during lectures. They seem so bored, and they’re always in a hurry to leave as soon as the class ends. We know that faculty are concerned about their research, and not in teaching us, and so, like the profs, we go essentially ‘brain-dead’ during class.”
Ernest Boyer summed up the situation in College: The Undergraduate Experience in America:
If faculty and students do not see themselves as having important business to do together, prospects for effective learning are diminished. If students view
teachers as distant and their material as irrelevant, what could be a time of exciting exploration is reduced to a series of uninspired routines.
Fortunately, some excellent small universities and colleges still exist, and faculty there usually provide their students with individual attention and a multitude of active learning situations. At these schools, students often see faculty outside of the classroom and office hours, an almost unheard of occurrence at most research universities—indeed, at the latter, with students constantly “cutting” class, and very few going to faculty office hours, many undergraduates rarely see their professors at all. This reality is the final refutation of the myth that “great researchers = great teachers.”
9
NEW SIWASH IN RED INK
As the quality of undergraduate education declined in the final decades of the twentieth century, the price of tuition increased dramatically. Universities claimed that their costs had grown enormously and that they had to pass on these expenses to their “customers,” their students. The public, particularly parents of undergraduates, complained, but they could not discover the real reasons for the increases. And the media mainly focused on the price tag for a year at various famous schools, rarely investigating the causes or the situation at large, public research universities.
Beer and Circus Page 12