Inside American Education (36 page)

The futility of observing a classroom reflects the fact that
that is not where education takes place
. What has happened in the professor’s mind before he sets foot in the classroom, and what happens in the students’ minds after they have left it and pursued their assignment—that is what determines the quality of the education. Two professors may be pretty much the same in a classroom and yet, if one has greater mastery of the field and deeper insights into what issues need covering—and how and why—then what they bring into that classroom, and what the students derive from different assignments, reflecting these fundamental differences in depth of understanding, can be profoundly different, even though wholly invisible to a dean observing the scene.

This would be obvious in almost any other field. No one would expect to acquire any real grasp of military operations by sitting around a field headquarters (or even the Pentagon) watching a general handing out sealed orders to officers going out on their assignments. It is what happened
before
those orders were conceived and written up that constitutes military strategy and it is what those officers do later, in battle, that determines whether it will work. Observing the transfer point tells you nothing substantive, no matter how long you observe it.

If a dean or a college president cannot learn much of any real significance by being in a classroom, perhaps the department chairman could, given that he is trained in the same discipline as the instructor. Unfortunately, specialization is so far advanced in many fields that even this belief has a large element of wishful thinking in it. The department chairman may be an economist, for example, but if his specialty is international trade and the instructor is teaching industrial organization or labor economics, then the chairman is not much better off than the dean, when it comes to assessing the validity or relevance of what is being taught. The instructor may be wonderful at conveying the peripheral aspects of his field, while omitting or failing to bring out the significance of what is the central focus of his specialty. Someone else, more clumsy or
chaotic in classroom management, may be a far better teacher in focussing the students’ attention on what is crucial to an understanding of the subject.

Here, as in the case of student evaluations, there is no substitute for knowledge—no way to fake it. Unfortunately, the natural desire of an administrator to have some report in his files which he can use to justify a decision on appointment, promotion, or tenure, is likely to give a spurious importance to any document, whether it was generated from student evaluations or classroom visits. The more cynical administrators may not even believe in these documents themselves, except as cover if their decisions come under fire.

Administrative Responsibility

Many faculty misdeeds are too well known to require much investigation. The real question is whether administrators can do anything about them. This is not simply a matter of the administration’s legal or institutional authority. A dean or a provost may have the full authority to terminate an untenured faculty member, for reasons which deserve termination, and yet may have many practical considerations to weigh before exercising that power. If the junior faculty member is the protegé of an influential senior professor, and especially if the younger scholar is a vital member of a multi-million dollar research project at the university, then the exercise of the dean’s power or the provost’s power may require more recklessness than courage.

When the student editorial writers on the
Columbia Daily Spectator
said that faculty members who neglect their advising responsibilities “must be held accountable for their performance by the deans and by their department heads,”
⁸⁵
they assumed a degree of leverage which these administrators may or may not have. After all, what real leverage does a dean or department head have with a senior faculty member whose research and ability to bring grants on campus make him much in demand by rival institutions? Even to hold back a raise for such a faculty member risks losing someone who is a financial asset to the university. Moreover, as others see a distinguished
scholar being punished by a dean, they too may keep an eye out for greener pastures.

Some courses are an abuse in and of themselves, irrespective of the professor’s classroom skills—courses on tea-leaf reading, television soap operas, and the like. Easy courses and high grades may be offered to attract students, thereby building enough enrollment to justify the professor’s job or the departmental budget. As two retired faculty members have said, “junk courses fill classroom seats”—partly because “they are the only kind of course that unqualified students can endure.”
⁸⁶
Administrators may have formal authority to put a stop to both the junk courses and the admission of students who do not meet the academic qualifications. Whether college officials are willing to pay the price of exercising that authority is another question.

This does not mean that nothing can be done. It does mean that some
institutional
changes may be needed to rein in professors and allow a campus to have some coherent principles, rather than be simply a collection of baronial fiefdoms run by tenured faculty members.

INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES

Given the enormous variation in the quality of teaching, even on the same campus, the most expensive tuition paid cannot guarantee that the education received will be first-rate—or even adequate. Whether the heavy costs of a college education are borne by the taxpayers or by parents, there is very little institutional assurance as to the quality of what they are paying for.

With the disintegration of the curriculum at many colleges and universities, students may graduate from prestigious institutions wholly ignorant of entire fields of human knowledge, such as economics, mathematics, biology, history, government, chemistry, and sociology. Brooke Shields in fact graduated from Princeton without taking a single course in any of these subjects.
⁸⁷
Loose curriculum requirements are damaging, as William F. Buckley put it, “not because you cannot get a good education at Harvard, but because you can graduate from Harvard without getting a good education.”
⁸⁸

Because most people pass through college only once in a lifetime, and at a time when they have little experience with life in general, they cannot all be presumed to be knowledgeable consumers, especially since the central purpose of education is to make them knowledgeable. In short, institutions of higher education have weighty responsibilities, both to their students and to society, but lack the institutional means of carrying out these responsibilities effectively. It is not simply the difficulty of making tenured faculty members give serious attention to teaching, or otherwise obey institutional rules; the tenured faculty themselves make the rules—and they make them in their own interests. Thus, it is not uncommon for an English department to leave freshman composition courses in the hands of teaching assistants, junior faculty, or even parttime or “gypsy” faculty, hired just for doing the “menial” work of the department, while the senior tenured professors devote themselves to esoteric theories of literature. No amount of money will cause American students to receive much-needed, first-rate instruction on how to write decent English, so long as the institutional rules allow professors to structure the curriculum to suit their own convenience and leave them free to pursue “research” that will enhance their own individual prestige.

English departments are by no means unique in this respect. Most introductory calculus courses at Harvard are taught by teaching assistants.
⁸⁹
This is a common pattern in mathematics departments at research universities across the country. So is a widespread use of foreign graduate students with incomprehensible English as teaching assistants.

Given the repeatedly demonstrated mathematics deficiencies of American students and given the key role of calculus as the foundation for the study of higher mathematics, as well as for use in other fields such as economics and physics, the decision to throw responsibility for this course on to inexperienced graduate students whose English is difficult to understand can only be explained by the self-interest of mathematics professors. These professors gain no recognition or prestige in their profession by teaching a first-rate introductory calculus course—and lose nothing by refusing to teach it at all.

Once again, the point here is not to condemn all professors, nor even to determine with any precision the prevalence of the
neglect of teaching. The point is to consider the reasons why academic institutions are unable to control even the most gross neglect of undergraduate education. Among the principal reasons are academic research, tenure, and faculty governance.

Academic Research

Like many things, academic research is neither good nor bad absolutely. The issue is one of proportion, of costs, and of methods. Even as regards teaching, research has an important contribution to make, however much an excessive emphasis on research has undermined teaching at many institutions.

Limitations on evaluating teaching by observation—whether by students or administrators—are inherent in the fact that education is invisible, taking place in the minds of teachers and students. It is possible to test what students have learned in college on Graduate Record Examinations, Law School Aptitude Tests and the like—but that tells very little about which particular professors were more effective in teaching them. Neither can the student tell, for though he knows what he was taught, and how effectively he was taught, he has no way to know what he was
not
taught. Virtually every course has a far larger potential content than any content which can be squeezed into the time available. The selection of what is important, what is peripheral, and what is expendable, is one of the most important tasks of a teacher and reflects the depth of his grasp and mastery of the subject. It is usually a task completed before the first class meets.

Given a decently conscientious effort to teach, the quality of that teaching is essentially the quality of the mind of the teacher. At the very least, that is the limiting factor—and, for many, that is a
very
limiting factor. Those most competent to judge the quality of a professor’s mind, his grasp and mastery of the subject, are typically not even on campus. They are his peers in his specialty, scattered around the country or around the world. It is these whom the professor addresses when he publishes. For this audience, it is no longer a question whether he can impress the sophomores three mornings a week, but whether those who have made the specialty their life’s work find his work solid or lacking.

“Publish or perish” is a misleading phrase. One can perish by publishing, if one’s work is rejected time and again by all the leading scholarly journals, and can only emerge shamefacedly into print in some peripheral publication. Even those who make it into print in a respectable academic journal may find their article devastated by a cross fire of criticisms in later issues. In short, academic publication is a sorting process and this process is valuable to the profession, not only when it uncovers gems, but also when it exposes frauds. Indeed, it may be more valuable when it exposes frauds, however impressive those frauds may be to students who see only the charisma or feel only the personal warmth, which may be quite genuine. Publication to one’s scholarly peers is the acid test of what education is all about—intellect.

To fulfill its role as a quality-control process, academic publication need not require a massive or continuous outpouring of research. A scholarly article once every few years may be sufficient to maintain the intellectual credentials of a professor at a teaching institution and such a pace is in fact not uncommon among the faculty at leading liberal arts colleges. At major research universities, the pace is of course much faster, as books, articles, and monographs are expected to follow on one another’s heels, if the prestige of the individual and the institution are to be maintained. Vast amounts of federal research money have added yet another reason to engage in research, well beyond the point where it is a complement to good teaching and well into the region where its effects on teaching are largely negative. Many academic scholars themselves are increasingly critical of the pressures to publish in large volume. Much of what is being mass-produced under the label of scholarship has been variously characterized as trivial, routine, or even meretricious.
⁹⁰
A survey of more than 35,000 professors at nearly 400 colleges found that more than one-fourth regarded research pressures as interfering with their teaching. At public research universities, 44 percent said that research pressures were interfering with their teaching.
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In very research-oriented institutions, the average faculty member spends more than twice as many hours per week on research as he spends on teaching preparation.
⁹²

Ironically, much of the massive federal spending on academic research has been seen, politically at least, as support
for higher education—even though teaching and research are obviously competing for the time of professors. No one would be surprised if massive federal subsidies to Sears had an adverse effect on Penney’s or Montgomery Ward, but many seem not to notice that throwing billions of dollars annually at academic research has taken more and more professors away from the classroom. Moreover, faculty research stars who are able to attract millions of dollars in research grants become as uncontrollable as feudal barons, for the large institutional “overhead” payments which accompany these grants make the university more dependent on such professors for money than the professors are on the university for a job. When, if, and how they will teach are not matters on which department chairmen or deans are in any position to say very much.