[The Montana Professor 2.3, Fall 1992 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Paul A. Trout
English
Montana State University
As dozens of books and hundreds of articles and editorials make clear, the Ivory Tower--its facade already pockmarked from the "political correctness" engagement--is under a new siege.
The assault is now directed at the contested relationship between teaching and research.
This second wave of critics charge that the quality of undergraduate teaching is declining because professors spend too much time doing research and publishing. As Thomas H. Kean, president of Drew University, puts it: "in an academic culture in which ambitious, productive faculty members are promised by administrators that they will 'never again have to see another undergraduate,' teaching has become a second-class function in the professoriate" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 31 July 1992).
Erich Bloch, former director of the National Science Foundation, says that "in the past, the emphasis was on research and teaching. Today, it is on research and research" (U.S. News and World Report, 15 Oct. 1990). Robert Gavin, president of Macalester College, says, "the balance at research universities is way out of whack. Nobody cares about teaching at those places. Everything is your productivity" (CHE, 5 July 1990). William D. Schaeffer, former vice-chancellor at UCLA, and past president of the Modern Language Association, has asserted that by rewarding research and publication more than teaching, we "are forcing our undergraduate students to pay a terrible price. Indeed, we are cheating not only our students but also the society that innocently supports us and that, so I would argue, we have no other legitimate purpose than to serve" (CHE, 7 Mar. 1990). According to Charles Sykes, undergraduates have become "the orphans of higher education" (USA Today, 20 Mar. 1990).
This vociferous assault has attracted the unwelcomed attention of the general public, most of whom accept these charges at face value. A number of states are enacting laws, governing-board initiatives, and policies that examine workloads, tie salaries directly to the number of credits taught, require faculty to teach a minimum of 12 classroom contact hours a week, or mandate that additional classes be assigned to faculty whose course loads, research, and service activities appear to be less productive than they should be (CHE, 7 Aug. 1991).
This academic and popular assault on the Ivory Tower has thrown quite a scare into many of its custodians. Derek Bok, president emeritus of Harvard University, advises universities to do some quick PR work: "Until we convince the public, by our actions, that we indeed make education our top priority--that we are committed to the highest quality of undergraduate education--we will continue to be vulnerable to attacks on our curricula, our faculty, our tuitions, and on all the different issues for which we have been taking punishment the last few years" (Change, July/Aug. 1992). Yet, when universities hastily contrive programs and policies to respond to these criticisms, as many are doing, they concede that the charges are true. But even Bok rejects them as "unfair and intemperate." Are they?
When I began researching this article, I certainly didn't think so. I fully expected to wind up on the side of those arguing that the instruction of undergraduates has been hurt by the effects of a reward structure which seemingly places more merit on arcane and trivial publications than on superior classroom teaching.
But as I reviewed the arguments and the data, I had second thoughts. It now seems to me that this latest assault on the Tower, though very emotional, is not well-armed. Obviously, there is a lot wrong with higher education, from the pressure it puts on faculty approaching tenure to the way it exploits TAs. But the contention that undergraduate instruction is worse now than in the past, and that it is worse because of our growing professional commitment to research and publication, is simply not a contention that I find convincing. I'll explain why.
Although the critics shrilly insist that undergraduates are not being taught as well as they used to be, there is absolutely no cogent evidence that undergraduate instruction is either declining or that it is poor. None. To my knowledge there has been no attempt to assess the quality of undergraduate instruction across disciplines and campuses, perhaps because there is no reliable method of doing it. The absence of data has not deterred critics from pressing ahead with their accusations that undergraduate education is in trouble.
To make this case, critics employ surmises and deductions, many of which seem half-thought-out. For example, they argue that undergraduate teaching must be declining because the reward system of higher education privileges research and publication over teaching. That the reward system does privilege research and publication over teaching is beyond dispute, but this fact does not lead to the inevitable conclusion that the quality of instruction is declining or that it is poor.
Fairly recent surveys provide grounds for thinking that the reward system is not having negative effects on undergraduate instruction, or on the instructors doing it. In a survey of more than 35,000 faculty at 392 two-year and four-year institutions conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, 90 percent of faculty said they viewed teaching as their primary activity (On Campus, Nov. 1991), in spite of the reward structure in place on so many campuses. Another study conducted by the Carnegie Foundation found that the primary interest of 71 percent of the professors surveyed was in teaching (CHE, 5 Dec. 1990). Only 6 percent focused primarily on research.
Survey results also suggest that when faculty members are faced with a need to choose between teaching and research, a large number choose teaching.
With an average teaching load of between three and four formal undergraduate courses per week, most faculty members are too busy teaching to carry out a sustained research program. The Carnegie Foundation study showed that 28 percent of faculty had never published an article, and another 28 percent had published nothing in the last five years. Fifty-seven percent had never published a book or monograph.
These results clearly do not support the widely ballyhooed contention that vast numbers of faculty are shirking their teaching duties in order to publish massive amounts of research. Reviewing these and similar studies, Robert McCaughey concludes that "most faculty members prefer to concentrate their energies on teaching, not research, and believe that teaching effectiveness, not publication, should be the primary criterion for promotion" (CHE, 5 Aug. 1992).
An even more important finding is that a vast majority of faculty do not feel that the reward system's emphasis on research and publication has adversely affected their own teaching. Of the 35,000 faculty members surveyed in the UCLA study, only 27 percent felt that "institutional pressures to do research and publication interfered with their teaching." In other words, the vast majority of academics--73 percent--feel that the reward system is not hurting their teaching. In another study, only 35 percent of faculty thought that the teaching of their colleagues was hurt (Campus, Feb. 1991).
These surveys do not support the notion that undergraduate education is suffering as the result of faculty spending vast amounts of time doing research. Apparently, when choices have to be made between teaching and research, most faculty members choose teaching, and live with the consequences. Since the majority of faculty list teaching as their primary activity, presumably because of its intrinsic rewards, it could be argued that undergraduate instruction is better now than ever. The contention that undergraduate education is declining is merely wishful blaming without any evidence to support it.
Undeterred by lack of data, critics use deduction to prove that undergraduate education must be declining. Time is finite, they point out, and so time spent publishing research is time not devoted to teaching. But this does not mean that the quality of instruction has declined, only the quantity. Although the majority of faculty still teach the same classloads they did a decade ago (thus leaving them little time for research), the average classload at schools emphasizing research is falling. Lynne Cheney writes, "at four-year institutions, time spent by faculty in the classroom has decreased steadily. According to one estimate, teaching responsibilities at noted research universities have, since 1920, decreased in many instances by one-third, and often by half to two-thirds." At many of America's best colleges the average teaching load is just 6 hours a week, or two courses a semester. At Montana State University, many departments teach 2/2, or 2/2, 2/3. In 1984, the English Department at MSU managed to reduce its teaching load from 3/3/3 to 2/2/2. With the conversion to semesters, the load was further reduced to 2/2, 2/3. In short, my two-year load has gone from 18 courses to 9. Although some taxpayers may object to this reduction (not understanding the value of research produced by this released time), this data suggests that the research and publications done by faculty come from newly released time, not from time taken from teaching. Which explains why 73 percent of faculty members surveyed do not think that research and publishing requirements have interfered with their teaching.
Critics continue to insist, however, that the pressure to publish research forces faculty to cut corners, to assign fewer books and papers, to spend less time on classroom preparation, and to be unavailable for advising and consultations. There is no way to counter this amorphous contention. Maybe at times some faculty members do cut corners to do research or write a paper, but they would cut corners as well if their teaching load were doubled. If one more paper or one more text seems crucial to the pedagogical development of students, conscientious faculty members will assign it, regardless of the reward structure. These kinds of calculations are subtle and personal, and I for one refuse to suspect a majority of my colleagues of seriously and continuously diluting the quality of their instruction for the rewards to be gained from research and publication.
Another argument critics advance to prove that undergraduate instruction is declining is that more of it is being done by TAs. The problem, says Martin Anderson, author of Impostors in the Temple (1992), "is not so much that professors don't teach very well" but that the classes they've been relieved of are "handed over to people who are unqualified." Again, the imputation that most teaching assistants are not qualified to teach and are doing the job poorly is simply not supported by any reliable data. Yes, more courses are being taught by TAs, and TAs are being exploited, but Anderson offers no data to support his contention that these "young people have little or no experience in the classroom and only a weak grasp of their subject matter" (Wall Street Journal, 8 Sept. 1992). Perhaps some are incompetent, but certainly most departments monitor the teaching of TAs and replace those who can't teach lower-level material. Most TAs are not dragged in off the street. They are superior graduate students who are studying and training (under supervision) to be the college teachers of the future. They have to acquire teaching experience somewhere, although there is a case to be made against burdening them with onerous course loads while they pursue advanced degrees. Again, where is the evidence that a majority of TAs are unfit to teach?
Classroom instruction aside, critics contend that the reduction of teaching loads has hurt undergraduate education by reducing the number of available courses students can take to graduate. They point out that 53 percent of freshmen take 6 years to graduate, the result, they say, of faculty wanting to teach less and research more. But there are many other explanations for this phenomenon. If lower teaching loads were the culprit, one would expect to find that students at research-oriented universities take the longest to graduate. But students at research institutions take slightly less time to graduate than do students at non-research schools (CHE, 15 July 1992).
Another argument advanced by critics is that faculty too often bend the few courses they do teach to fit their esoteric research interests, thus depriving undergraduates, especially lower-division undergraduates, of exposure to broad and fundamental topics. There is no doubt that even at the undergraduate level, research does occasionally drive the curriculum, but whether or not this practice is widespread enough to hurt undergraduate education is not clear. Presumably, colleagues and undergraduates themselves will start to object if this practice becomes too prevalent within a department. It is an exceedingly fine calculation to weigh the costs and benefits of allowing a faculty member to pursue his or her narrow interests in the undergraduate classroom. Maybe a course on Lacan is not something that most undergraduates desperately need, but if it is taught by a lively teacher intellectually excited by the material, it could have all kinds of value for students. An occasional trot on a scholar's hobbyhorse might be good for all concerned.
There's one remaining charge to be dealt with. As William Schaeffer puts it,
if all the free time granted professors for research were producing a concomitant upgrading of scholarship, the reward system in higher education might be more defensible. But as junior instructors scramble to fatten tenure files and tenured professors maneuver for research grants, what has emerged is a massive--and to many, a massively wasteful--academic publishing industry. The extraordinary effort faculty members in the humanities are forced to spend on what more often than not is worthless publication detracts from the one that could and should--and one can only trust would--be spent preparing classes and working with students." (U.S. News and World Report, 15 Oct. 1990)
A lot of scholars in the humanities would agree with this stinging indictment of their disciplines. But there is a problem here: how does one determine what is "worthless?" Schaeffer does not tell us. Presumably, the publications Schaeffer brands as "worthless" have not been so deemed by the editors, review boards, and outside referees who have published them. A colleague of mine, who strongly agrees with Schaeffer's indictment, is spending a lot of time on an article that almost every person on the planet would regard as utterly unnecessary and valueless, yet he is emotionally and intellectually engaged by the enterprise, and presumably thinks it worthwhile. "Triviality" and "worthlessness" are in the eye of the beholder: what we publish is never worthless, but what others publish probably is, especially if it doesn't help us to publish something else.
It seems to me that people who advance this argument have a rather simplistic notion of the way systems work. Every system encourages "over production" because no system can determine beforehand which products will be beneficial and which will be "waste." This is determined by the environment, or market, or community of scholars after the fact. Whether "The Differentiation of Francophone Rapists and Non-Rapists Using Penile Circumferential Measures" (Idaho Law Review, Vol. 629, 1986) contributes to our understanding and treatment of rape is a question that can only be answered after the article is written, published, and scrutinized over a period of time. Presumably, the more research that is done on rape, the greater the chances that we will understand it. Ten thousand compounds will be duds for every new drug that reaches the pharmacy. Nature requires five million pieces of information to specify a mere bacterium, and 100 million for a simple roundworm.
Obviously, each faculty member must decide how much time to give to teaching and how much to research. The very fact that one needs to choose can provoke tension and frustration. But this does not mean that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the two. It is customary to say that they feed each other, and sometimes they do, but clearly research supports teaching in a way that teaching can never support research. This is one reason why our evolved reward system privileges research over teaching.
The notion that research supports and creates good teaching does not rely merely on anecdote and personal experience. Professor Robert McCaughey, who has studied this relationship, found that "senior professors who were identified by external reviewers as being among a college's most active scholars also were more likely to be ranked among the most effective teachers than were senior professors with little or no scholarly record. (The ratings of teaching were made by deans who had not seen the rankings of scholarly productivity.)" In another study, "the most productive scholars made up about three-quarters of the list of the best teachers at both the undergraduate and graduate levels" (CHE, 24 June 1992). As W. Patrick Leonard, Chancellor for Academic Services, Purdue University, explains:
Long-term teaching without the support of some complementary amount of scholarly activity places the individual faculty member at some risk of becoming a passive conduit of increasingly dated material. Such instructors are at greater risk of perishing intellectually than they are with respect to their employment. This maybe particularly true for faculty at smaller institutions where the stimulus from knowledgeable peers within their discipline is not readily accessible. (CHE, 17 June 1992)
Faculty who take pride in their contributions to the profession are more likely to be committed classroom teachers and to imbue their students with high intellectual standards. According to John Jutila, past Vice-President for Research at Montana State University, students coming from a university where research is emphasized have a better grip on their disciplines, have higher expectations for themselves, and have a better background for doing their own research.
Although some critics might concede that research does inform teaching, very few are willing to countenance the pedagogic value of scholarly publications. Consumed by a Luddite mentality on this subject, William Schaeffer claims that scholars wrong-headedly stress the "less important" activity of "dissemination in print" over "the most important--dissemination in the classroom."
Consider that statement for a moment. How many scholars actually believe that "publishing" in the classroom is more important than publishing in print? This is not to imply that undergraduate students are unimportant, but it is to suggest that most are not at a developmental level to evaluate, apply, and extend important research findings. One writes to one's peers so that one's work is picked up, used, re-worked--so that research is given practical and immediate social value. This is why people like Schaeffer have published their criticisms of higher education in books and articles. They want to reach a national audience who can do something to change things. They do not relegate their tirades to the classroom, and may not even mention them there. If you had one chance to announce and explain your cure for cancer, would you announce it to a classroom full of undergraduates, or publish it in a medical journal?
As teachers, we all know that we can get away with spouting all kinds of absurdities in the classroom that would never be tolerated in an article submitted to a scholarly journal. Editors and external reviewers, and the very act of composition itself, forces us to say things rigorously, precisely, and responsibly. This is why publication is seen as a more cogent test and demonstration of one's acumen and disciplinary rigor than success in the classroom. This is why the "public act of publishing" is so prestigious to us, and so highly rewarded within academia.
And that's why writing even an arcane article is so important for our own sense of intellectual well being. As Teresa Ann Sears puts it, rather bluntly,
Quite beyond the thirst of institutions for grant money and prestige, scholarship allows us to use our minds in the ways for which we were trained, and which has become increasingly difficult to do in the classroom. Many of us are expected to deal with students who are not prepared to do real intellectual work, and who frequently have no interest in it. We are teaching at levels that previously would have been considered appropriate for, at best, the secondary level. Legislators, boards of trustees, and administrators have handed this problem to us, and they have a vested interest in not identifying it as such. They therefore should not be surprised if we burn out and prefer to retreat to the library. (CHE, 6 May 1992)
Sears has inverted the charge made by critics of higher education when she says that students aren't ill prepared because teachers have fled the classroom, but that teachers have fled the classroom because students are ill prepared. Perhaps it is not yet possible for us to admit that we have more time to do research and to publish because it takes us less time to teach today's unchallenging and easily taxed undergraduates.
Critics insist that "scholarship" should be more broadly defined to include teaching; maybe "teaching" should be more broadly defined to include publishing. A published article teaches, and as I have already argued, it teaches a more important and demanding audience than one finds in the classroom. When the word is more broadly defined, the notion that publishing is somehow "antithetical" to teaching becomes, according to Donald K. Sharpes, "myopic" because it simply fails to see that colleges and universities--despite their pious rhetoric--are not merely sites for undergraduate instruction but "developers and providers of knowledge" to a local, national, and international audience (CHE, 15 July 1992).
The reward system that privileges research and publication over teaching has evolved on thousands of campuses over decades, the creation, in part, of those productive and influential faculty members who have gained the respect of their colleagues by their creative and scholarly endeavors. And this reward system does not exist in a vacuum. In many ways it is the reflection of the needs and desires of society itself. Although the following point is obvious, it evidently needs re-statement: research is crucial to the well-being of our society. This is a simple but crucial fact, and it is not affected by whether or not some scholars do research to satisfy themselves, to climb a ladder, or to avoid undergraduates.
A joint letter published in The Chronicle of Higher Education by a scholar of comparative literature, a director of instructional development, and a geneticist, explains the social value of research very effectively:
Our country's intellectual well-being depends upon the public's appreciation of research. In a global society the exploration of nature, the examination of civilization, the analysis of human values, interests, and conceptual orders, and the criticism of received opinion potentially serve all human beings by expanding our knowledge of the world. Ecological, agricultural, medical, and technological research, the practical purposes of which encompass the improvement of human health, agricultural production, and our environment, can raise the standard of living of peoples everywhere. What we learn about the world makes, we hope, a better world.
The pursuit of truth is a communal activity advanced by the exchange of ideas. As our society is presently structured, it is our institutions of higher education that foster and protect this exchange, by providing scholars freedom from political, economic, religious, and commercial pressures, freedom to think, to experiment, to write, and to teach.
If, under pressure from the public, research universities decreased the time allotted faculty for "reading professional magazines," "consulting with colleagues," and "thinking" and increased the time assigned faculty for undergraduate classroom instruction, they would be making the transmission of received opinion a higher priority than the attempt to understand the world. Furthermore, they would be neglecting the training of graduate students, our nation's future thinkers, which takes place not only in the classroom but also in laboratories, in the field, and in one-on-one discussions about mutual research interests: this too is teaching, and it is inseparable from research. (CHE, 6 May 1992)
This is why state and federal agencies--the larger society--provide so many billions of dollars for academic research (see Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, ed. Peter Galison, 1992). Expenditures for research and creative projects at MSU alone reached 24.5 million dollars in 1992. That sum is a 29 percent increase over last year's expenditures and nearly triple the expenditures in 1984. As Robert Swenson, Vice-President for Research and Creative Activities at MSU, explains, "grant-funded projects support the development of new ideas and technologies that can have a direct impact on the state's economy."
As I have argued, there is no reason to believe that the quality of undergraduate education is declining or badly off. The citizens of this country should be reassured that their children are getting all the education most of them can handle. Each faculty member, each department, each college, and each school struggles to negotiate a humane and rewarding balance between teaching and the publication of research. There is no cogent reason for thinking that even when this balance tilts towards the publication of research, it does so in a way that lessens the quality of undergraduate instruction. These negotiations take place within complex human beings, and within an exceedingly complex institutional context in which all kinds of subtle costs and benefits must be taken into account. College presidents should explain this institutional context to taxpayers.
Taxpayers will have to accept that most colleges and universities are required by society to commit themselves to research and its publication because this enterprise has the potential for enhancing national prosperity and benefiting the world at large. It is society itself which helps create the reward system and priorities of higher education.
Although I do not think that the new critics of higher education have made a strong case that the emphasis on research and publication has hurt undergraduate instruction, I do think they are reacting to something outrageous that is occurring on college campuses throughout the country. Their attack, I suggest, is animated by a deep revulsion at the discrepancies between official rhetoric and actual practice. These critics are saying that the people who are running the universities are not telling the truth about the reward system, about what is important, about what they're doing. It is hypocrisy that is deeply troubling them, not hard data that students aren't being taught as well as they used to be. Just listen to Bruce Wilshire:
The oft-repeated claim made by the research universities that excellence in teaching is as important for professors' employment and tenure as is excellence in research is usually false. Those who make the claim must realize that it is false. So it is a lie. The lying must cease. (On Campus, Apr. 1991)
Martin Anderson isn't really upset by the fact that evidence shows TAs to be incompetent teachers (there is no evidence to support this); he's upset that universities lie about the extent to which undergraduates will be taught by TAs. He says the title "teaching assistant" is "misleading," that their use is a "shabby secret" that universities "are loath to discuss publicly," that "catalog-talk" deceives parents into a "bait-and-switch scheme." Schaeffer doesn't really think that an undergraduate lecture is as important as an essay in The Atlantic; he's upset that universities won't admit that publication is prized higher than instruction, so universities are "cheating" a society that "innocently" supports them.
These critics exist because too few leaders of higher education have been willing to bring official pronouncements in line with actual practice. Actual practice is not going to change much, as both critics and defenders of the Tower agree. What is left is for college and university presidents to tell the truth about the priorities and values now shaping higher education. It seems to me that if they do so, many of these critics won't have much more to say.
[The Montana Professor 2.3, Fall 1992 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]