Beer and Circus

by Murray Sperber

  Burton Clark described some professors as “cosmopolitans” and others as “locals” in his essay, “Faculty Culture,” in The Study of Campus Cultures, edited by Terry F. Lunsford (Berkeley, Calif., 1963), pp. 39—54. The Carnegie Foundation findings on locals versus cosmopolitans are in Ernest Boyer, College (op. cit.), p. 239, and in Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Princeton, N.J., 1990), p. 56. Christopher J. Lucas in Crisis (op. cit.) commented on “a single faculty reward structure,” p. 192-93.

  The interview with the Michigan State senior woman occurred in East Lansing, Michigan, 5/22/95; UCLA economist Emily Abel compared TA’s to “McDonald’s … part-time employees,” in Time magazine’s article, “Academia’s New Gypsies” by Ezra Bowen, 1/12/87. Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), had an excellent article, “Life on the ‘Effectively Terminal’ Tenure Track,” by Martin Finkelstein, January/February 1986; I draw many of my ideas and statistics from that article, as well as from an interview with Paul Strohm, the editor of Academe from 1984 to 1992, conducted in Bloomington, Indiana, 7/7/99. Updates on the part-timers’ increasing presence in higher education occurred throughout the 1990s, and a 1999 report, Facing Change: Building the Faculty of the Future, published by the U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C., summed up the situation, supplying excellent statistics. In addition, newspaper articles often gave a vivid picture of the life of a part-timer; see Joseph Berger’s long piece in the New York Times, 3/8/98—the headline and subhead set the scene perfectly, “After Her Ph.D., the Scavenger’s Life/Trying to Turn a Patchwork of Part-Time Jobs into an Academic Career.”

  Many writers within higher education criticized the increasing use of graduate-student teaching assistants—a result of the constant expansion of graduate programs at a time of shrinking economic resources for many universities. Christopher J. Lucas in Crisis (op. cit.) outlined the situation and supplied statistics, p. 10f; Cary Nelson and Michael Berube eloquently attacked graduate-school empire-building in the introduction to their Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis in the Humanities (New York, 1995). Ernest Boyer in Scholarship (op. cit.) disliked the use of TAs, p. 71, but Martin Anderson in Imposters in the Temple (New York, 1992), was vituperative about it, stating, “Children [TA’s] teaching children is unconscionable,” p. 65. Anderson continued his attack in other parts of his book; in so doing, he presented a powerful case against the exploitation of graduate and undergraduate students through the TA system.

  On the bleak landscape of part-timers and TAs, there are a few positive developments; for example, in recent years my own department, English, at Indiana University, has significantly increased its teacher training for its graduate students (euphemistically called Associate Instructors) and instituted a number of graduate courses in pedagogy to connect to the AI’s classroom work. Nevertheless, as I argue in the conclusion to this book, the entire graduate-school system is broken, and needs a total overhaul, not nips and tucks.

  The total number of classes taught by part-timers and grad students is an elusive figure because very few studies include all of the courses where a professor is in charge but grad assistants do the bulk of the teaching, and do all of the grading and conferences with students. Invariably, to pad their statistics, most research universities list these courses as taught by full faculty, but in fact the professor teaches only about 20 percent of the course (the lectures). Whatever the actual numbers, even the conservative estimates in the 50 percentile range are appalling high.

  Gail B. Promboin in the American Imperative (op. cit.) discussed how “The general public … sees teaching undergraduates as the primary mission of higher education,” p. 128.

  8: The Great Researcher = Great Teacher Myth

  Former Indiana University president Thomas Ehrlich wrote his comments on “Great Teachers and Teaching” in The Courage to Inquire (op. cit.), pp. 25-26; I assume that he does not mind my taking his title to heart, and inquiring into the myth that he perpetuated here. Professors Patrick T. Terenzini and Ernest T. Pascarella debunked the “good teachers are good researchers” myth in “Living with Myths: Undergraduate Education in America,” Change, January/ February, 1994, pp. 28-32; all of their quotes in this chapter are from this article. They based the article on their book, How College Affects Students: Findings and Insights from Twenty Years of Research (San Francisco, 1991); the interested reader can easily go from the topics in the article to the voluminous research behind it in their book, and I recommend this course of action.

  Professor Lewis H. Miller wrote about “those rare few” faculty members who simultaneously conduct intensive research and teaching in “Hubris in the Academy: Can Teaching Survive in the Overweening Quest for Excellence?” Change, September/October 1990, pp. 9-11, and p. 53; and in “Bold, Imaginative Steps Are Needed to Link Teaching with Research,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/13/89, p. A52. The quote in the text is from the Change article, but some points in the paraphrase are from the Chronicle piece. Ehrlich (op. cit.) “underscore[d] that students benefit immensely,” p. 25. The Chicago Tribune discussed the University of Michigan study and quoted the U of M science professor, 6/23/92. Paul Strohm wrote his comments in “The Ideology of ‘Excellence,’” AAUP Report, a publication of the American Association of University Professors, Indiana University Chapter, Autumn 1991, pp. 2—5. Christopher J. Lucas in American Higher Education (op. cit.) discusses the myths surrounding research and teaching, p. 284f, and takes another run at them in Crisis (op. cit.), p. 198.

  A majority of faculty at research universities consider themselves good teachers, thus buying into the administration’s ideology on the subject as well as protecting their own egos. Some even cite those notoriously flawed indicators, student evaluations, as proof of their teaching excellence. However, most of these professors refuse to allow outside experts into their classrooms to evaluate their teaching, and to assess what their students actually learned, if anything, in their courses. A charitable observer has to conclude that some of these professors are probably adequate teachers but nowhere near as good as they imagine themselves and their colleagues to be, and many other faculty members are mediocre to awful teachers. Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, before I began the research for this book, I believed that I was an excellent teacher and I had the student evaluations to “prove” it; I subsequently had my teaching evaluated by outside experts and I have discovered that, although it is quite good, it is far from outstanding. The experts suggested that I devote more time to preparation, student conferences, and marking papers and, in this labor-intensive way, try to become an excellent teacher. I know that many other faculty members at research universities are in the same situation.

  The visit to the “freshman psychology lecture” is in Boyer, College (op. cit.), p. 140. Many commentators have discussed the lecture-course method: Christopher J. Lucas in Crisis (op. cit.), p. 169f; Simpson and Frost in Inside College (op. cit.) have an excellent chapter, “How Professors Teach,” and a section, “Interactive Methods,” of that chapter on these issues; and Robert Nielsen in the AFT Newsletter (American Federation of Teachers) offered insights into the history of lecturing, “Putting the Lecture in Its Place,” December 1990/January 1991, p. 16. Simon Bronner (op. cit.) related the folklore joke, “During a lecture,” p. 183. Christopher J. Lucas in American Higher Education (op. cit.) commented on St. John’s in Annapolis, Maryland, p. 280. Many authors have discussed the higher-education reforms suggested by rebel students in the 1960s; an excellent anthology on this topic was Beyond Berkeley: A Sourcebook in Student Values, edited by Christopher G. Katope and Paul G. Zolbrod (Cleveland and New York, 1966).

  The Chronicle of Higher Education discussed the financial crisis in higher education and its impact on class size in various articles over the years, including Karen Grassmuck’s analysis of administrators’ reasons for placing faculty in lecture courses, 1/31/90. Arthur M. Coh
en in Shaping of American Higher Education: The Emergence and Growth of the Contemporary System (San Francisco, 1998) explained the “$15,000 or more per class taught by a full-time professor,” p. 347. Ernest Boyer in College (op. cit.) quoted undergraduates on classes with “more than one hundred students enrolled,” p. 145; Rutgers professor Michael Moffat noted “classes of 300 and 400 were quite common,” p. 292; University of Illinois political science professor Robert Weissberg discussed his class sizes and his “lounge act” in the Chicago Tribune (op. cit.), 5/21/92; that newspaper also reported that “students find themselves in lecture halls seating 1,200,” 5/21/92; and quoted U of I student Dan Lillig on the mechanical engineering professor who “faced the blackboard the entire time,” 6/23/92. The interview with the Ohio State student took place in Columbus, Ohio, 6/6/88, while I was doing research for College Sports Inc.; the interviewee began complaining on tape about his undergraduate courses.

  Indiana University student George David related the story of the professors and the overhead transparencies, 11/14/94. Anne Matthews in Bright College Years (op. cit.) quoted the student remarks, and discussed the evaluations, pp. 198—99. The cross-country survey of the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges is from the 1999 edition. Many studies contrast “lecture/discussion classes” with “active learning” situations; a classic work, still valid, is Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of American Higher Education, National Institute for Education (Washington, D.C., 1984).

  Randolph H. Weingartner in Undergraduate Education (op. cit.) included the study that “found lecturing to be the mode of instruction of” most faculty, p. 102. The day that I wrote this footnote, I passed by a seminar room at Indiana University and, through the open door, I saw a professor standing at a lectern, lecturing four students! Mary Beth Marklein reported on the study that calculated the number of questions from students per classroom hour in USA Today, 10/9/90. An undergraduate at the University of Iowa remarked that “lectures frustrate me” in an interview in Iowa City, 10/19/99.

  The Carnegie Foundation has tracked faculty attitudes toward students for many decades: Ernest Boyer in College discussed some of their findings, pp. 140-45; and individual universities, including my own, have discovered similar faculty complaints over the years. The interview with the University of Texas (Austin) junior occurred in the student union, 11/21/98. Ernest Boyer in College summed up, “If faculty and students do not see themselves as having important business to do together,” p. 141. A comment as powerful as Boyer’s came in What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited by Alexander Astin (San Francisco, 1993), p. 419. Astin, a UCLA professor, has conducted the most extensive polling of undergraduates ever undertaken; he concluded that “the net result of these trends [emphasis on research, de-emphasis on teaching undergraduates] is a large physical and psychological distance between the research university faculty and their undergraduate students.” The latter feel that they are “not regarded as important enough to merit the personal attention of the university community’s most esteemed members: the faculty. No wonder, then, that student satisfaction with faculty is lower in the public university than in any other kind of institution.”

  9: New Siwash in Red Ink

  Arthur Levine’s comments came in an op-ed piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Higher Education’s New Status as a Mature Industry,” 1/31/97, A48. USA Today did a good job of tracking the escalating costs in higher education and printing the comments of the corporate critics (it did not explain the main reason for the costs—Upward Drift): see Mary Beth Marklein’s article on the costs, 2/5/97; Jon C. Straus’s op-ed piece on the same subject, 5/17/97; and the editorial complaining about the costs, 3/5/98. All of these pieces provided excellent and accurate statistics, and I have used them in the text; the Marklein piece noted the increase in research expenses of “157% between 1981 and 1995,” and the item about George Mason University; and the Straus one, “bureaucratic bloat.” Nancy J. Brucker wrote about “50 percent of their time to fund-raising,” and “States now typically supply,” in the Washington Post, 2/22/98. She also noted that when the job performance of administrators is reviewed, they are “graded on their fund-raising ability, and those who won’t do it, or don’t do it well, don’t get promoted”; indeed, some get fired.

  Christopher J. Lucas in American Higher Education (op. cit.) wrote about the history of state universities and their late-twentieth-century predicament, chapters 5 through 7; and he discussed the topic in his Crisis (op. cit.), pp. 110f. From a market point of view, raising tuition made some sense, but in terms of higher-education history—public universities were established to allow bright students within the state to attend, regardless of their economic status—raising tuition changed the nature of many student bodies, particularly at residential campuses, with poor students increasingly priced out of the school and relegated to urban institutions and community colleges. Sara Hebel of the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote that the Clinton administration’s tax credits for tuition were not helping competent but poor students enter and stay in four-year universities, 10/22/99.

  Patrick Healy of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported the prediction by Harold A. Hovey of State Policy Resources Inc. on the decline in “state spending on higher education” in the twenty-first century, 7/27/99; in the article, David Breneman, a high official at the University of Virginia, seconded this prediction: “The basic message is a sobering one—we’re acting like everything’s just wonderful right now [during the current prosperity] and all the problems are solved for higher education,” but we’re living in a fool’s paradise. Lisa Guernsey of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported the U.S. General Accounting Office’s figures on the 234 percent increase in tuition fees of four-year public universities, 9/6/96. Time magazine did a cover story on the escalating costs in higher education, 3/17/97, and discussed the University of Pennsylvania numbers, as well as the “Chivas Regal effect.” No doubt, that effect has transmuted into the “Glenlivet effect,” and keeps changing names as tuition and the cost of rare brands of Scotch whiskey escalate.

  Financial World, 3/15/94, carried the report by Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene on the rise in tuition versus educational quality. Just as the media loves and focuses on the “horse race” aspect of politics, it does the same with the “admissions competition.” In a typical example, the front-page feature article in USA Today, 4/16/96, by Kavita Varma, headlined “Top Colleges Reject Top Kids,” and subheaded, “More students than ever are turned away/Better than 1500 on the SAT is no guarantee of an Ivy League education.” Nowhere in the feature article is there a discussion of the lack of selectivity of the colleges and universities beyond the Ivy League. In its 1998 college issue, U.S. News, in a prominent place at the front of the “How to Apply” section, listed some important statistics, including, “Schools that accept over 90 percent—205.” Yet most readers ignored this reality.

  Gordon C. Winston wrote about “prestige maximization in an article for Change magazine, “The Decline in Undergraduate Teaching: Moral Failure of Market Pressure” (September/ October, 1994) pp. 9—14. The quotes from U.S. News about its criteria for rating universities are in the 2000 edition; the comments of Angela Browne-Miller, California higher-education expert, about “students graduating who cannot write a business letter,” were in her book, Shameful Admissions: The Losing Battle to Serve Everyone in Our Universities (San Francisco, 1996), p. 12. Rudolph H. Weingartner in Undergraduate Education (op. cit.) complained about the student concept of “having been to college … [as] the important” thing,” pp. 126—27. The Boyer Commission’s Reinventing Undergraduate Education (op. cit.), remarked about “undergraduate programs as sideshows to the main event,” p. 37. The male senior at Ohio State put his remarks in the P.S. section of the survey form for this book on the web, 8/12/99.

  10: Student Mix and Match

  In the mid-1990s, in my advanced expository writing classes at Indiana University, Blo
omington, I used Clark and Trow’s essay (op. cit.) as the basis of a writing assignment. I asked students to read the essay carefully, and then to respond to the following question: “In what ways, if any, do Clark and Trow’s four student subcultures apply to current undergraduate life at Indiana University, Bloomington? Feel free to illustrate your argument with personal examples—however, be sure to focus on the question, and do not write a memoir of your college experiences.” This intentionally open-ended assignment received a variety of responses and I quote from some of them in this chapter. Because the students in this class were typical IU undergraduates, I believe that their responses reflected the opinions of many students at their school and at similar universities across the country. However, I claim only anecdotal, not scientific, validity for these responses. Finally, for obvious reasons, I cannot use the students’ names but, if they read their comments here, I wish to thank them, as well as all of the other students who wrote such good and thoughtful essays on this assignment over the years.

  A number of historians and sociologists noticed that the campus turmoil of the 1960s broke down the barriers between student subcultures, often unifying undergraduates from various groups against the administration or the national government. Helen Lefkovitz-Horowitz (op. cit.) remarked that “the boundaries between groups became more permeable,” and this continued in subsequent decades, p. 290. Patrick T. Terenzini and Ernest T. Pascarella remarked on this phenomenon in their late-1970s article on Clark and Trow’s subcultures (op. cit.), pp. 245— 46. Alexander Astin’s comment about “the student’s peer group” is in his What Matters in College? (op. cit.), p. 398.

  The most authoritative study on intercollegiate athletes engaging in antisocial behavior is the ongoing “National Initiation and Athletics Survey,” conducted by Alfred University in upstate New York. Educational journals and the national media have printed the results of this survey, for example, USA Today, 8/31/99. In addition, the national media has increasingly covered specific incidents at various colleges and universities, for example, the Associated Press, 11/25/98, carried a story about a party involving North Carolina State athletic scholarship holders that resulted in a murder, and USA Today, 2/4/00, featured a hazing incident involving the University of Vermont hockey team.