Inside American Education (33 page)

It is by no means clear that a negative editorial comment on such programs as “affirmative action” in the student newspaper
would escape the ban on “stigmatizing” fellow students. At Vassar College, an editorial in a student newspaper brought charges of “political harassment.” Since most of what is said in most editorials in most newspapers could be called “political harassment,” this charge may seem to be merely silly. However, three students on the staff on
The Vassar Spectator
were forced to spend hours answering these charges in college hearings, held at a time when they needed to be preparing for their final examinations in their courses.
¹¹³
What will or will not lead to charges on a given campus with a vague speech code can only be determined
ex post
, and may well depend on what the accuser or the college administration thinks will fly politically. Nebulous speech codes are a hunting license for harassing those who are out of step ideologically. Nor is this merely a speculative possibility. Colleges and universities with a history of ideological double standards are precisely the ones most prone to have vague speech codes.

Being “politically correct” is
not
simply a matter of holding certain opinions on various social or educational issues. Political correctness is
imposing those opinions on others
by harassment or punishment for expressing different views. For example, the issue is not whether one prefers so-called “gender-neutral” language and chooses to use it—but whether students are to have their grades lowered by politically correct professors for saying “Congressman” rather than “Congressperson,” or whether professors are to have their lectures repeatedly interrupted by politically correct students whenever the professor uses the generic “he” instead of saying “he or she.” The issue is not whether there shall be “a curriculum that includes more works by women and members of minority groups,”
¹¹⁴
but whether readings shall be chosen by the physical characteristics of their authors rather than the intellectual qualities of the publications themselves—and whether those who don’t have the right race and gender counts on their reading lists are going to be harassed. Group labeling of intellectual products is taken very seriously on many campuses today, though this represents something that has not been attempted in the Western world since Hitler distinguished “German physics” or “German mathematics” from their Jewish counterparts.

CHAPTER 8
Teaching and Preaching

… the good professor is underpaid at any salary, while the poor professor is overpaid no matter what he receives.

—Anonymous
¹

T
EACHING AND LEARNING
are at the heart of what most people think of as the function of a college or university, even if research or social engineering or other activities may preoccupy the faculty or the administration. There is almost always a favorable response when some president of a research university announces that there will now be a renewed emphasis on teaching,
²
however often such announcements have been made periodically in the past, without any visible changes following.

Complaints about teaching, especially the teaching of undergraduates, are legion. What is difficult is to sort out passing gripes from enduring and serious problems. What can be even more difficult is to know what to do about them, given that most of the usual panaceas are either unworkable or prohibitively costly. Some problems, however, are sufficiently gross that the only challenge they present is to the courage of administrators.

Teaching is both one of the hardest and one of the easiest jobs in the world, depending on how conscientiously it is done. It is also one of the noblest and one of the most corrupt occupations—again,
depending on how it is done. Because of the greater freedom of professors, compared to school teachers, the sweep of the variations tends to be even more extreme in higher education. Few responsibilities weigh so heavily as the responsibility for the development of a young mind and few temptations are so corrupting as the temptation to take advantage of the trust, inexperience and vulnerability of students. Cheap popularity, ego trips, and ideological indoctrination are just some of the pitfalls of teaching. Where good teaching exists—and there is much of it in many kinds of institutions—this is not merely because the faculty are professionally competent but also because they have the character to resist the temptations inherent in a situation of large disparities in knowledge, experience, and power.

Some professors misuse their position (and their tenure) for everything from ideological indoctrination to obtaining sexual favors from students. One professor at Rutgers was accused of forcing two students to work in his garden and do household chores for him.
³
A Stanford professor committed suicide in the wake of accusations of sexually molesting the son of one of his graduate students—and he was posthumously honored by the university, which created an award in his name.
⁴
Most complaints about professors and other aspects of collegiate education are much more mundane, but the extremes give some sense of the lax environment within which professors operate.

COMMON COMPLAINTS

While various signs of student discontent with their education are widespread, both geographically and across varying kinds of institutions, the level of discontent does seem to differ significantly by type of institution. Fewer than half the students surveyed at state research universities reported that they were satisfied by their contacts with faculty members and administrators—compared to nearly two-thirds at private four-year colleges.
⁵
Access to faculty, or to particular courses, is only one of the common complaints. Others include irresponsibility and ideological bias.

Access

One of the commonest complaints about professors is simply the difficulty of gaining access to them. Sometimes this means the difficulty of enrolling in their courses and sometimes it means the difficulty of seeing them outside of class, even after being enrolled.

Many courses at many universities are simply not taught by professors but often by graduate students. The undergraduate college at the University of Chicago, which has resisted this tendency longer than some other institutions, has been nevertheless giving in to this trend in recent years. One of its professors referred to “the excruciating problem” of “steady pressure from graduate departments on the College to allow grad students to teach as is the case at Harvard or Stanford.”
⁶
Another University of Chicago professor said, “a first-year student could take his Humanities core, Social Sciences core, a year of calculus, and a year of a foreign language without ever being taught by a professor.”
⁷
At the University of North Carolina, about half the freshman courses are taught by teaching assistants and only about a third by full-time professors.
⁸
A senior majoring in economics at the University of Minnesota said: “I am graduating from one of the best economics departments in the country and I’ve never had a professor.”
⁹
She had been taught by graduate students and part-time instructors.

A somewhat different access problem is getting enrolled in the courses desired. Where the student is denied admittance to a course required for graduation, that can have serious consequences. A carefully planned sequence of courses may have to be disrupted in ways that make no sense educationally, simply in order to take the required course in some future term when it may be available. In a worst case scenario, graduation itself may have to be postponed, at considerable cost to student and parent alike. Yet, despite the serious consequences of denying students admittance to courses required for graduation, it happens with considerable frequency at some institutions. At the University of Texas, for example, nearly a thousand students were turned away from a required English course.
¹⁰

Being shut out of full courses has been a problem not only at huge institutions like the universities of Texas or Illinois
¹¹
but also at some small colleges like Davidson, Carleton, and Wellesley.
¹²
At the University of Virginia, it has become a practice for a student to write notes to several professors simultaneously, each note saying why it is especially important to be allowed to enroll in that particular professor’s course. However, the professor who grants the request may then find the student
not
enrolling. Such notes have become simply a tactic to use to ensure a choice of courses (including back-up courses) when over-crowding makes access a problem.
¹³
It is much like multiple applications to colleges.

Even when enrolled in a course, access to the professor may be quite limited. Huge classes with hundreds of students seldom permit any interaction during the lecture, and little immediately after class or in the professor’s office. The magnitude of this problem varies with the institution. A small college may have no class with more than 50 students but Brown University’s largest class has nearly 500 students
¹⁴
and the largest class at the University of Iowa has more than a thousand students.
¹⁵
The sheer numbers of students can limit how much interaction is possible, even when the professor is interested or cooperative. Moreover, a Carnegie Foundation study found that only 35 percent of the full-time faculty members at research universities considered teaching their chief interest, compared to 71 percent of faculty members at all institutions combined.
¹⁶
A science professor at the University of Michigan put the situation bluntly when he said: “Every minute I spend in an undergraduate classroom is costing me money and prestige.”
¹⁷

For untenured faculty members, spending large amounts of time with students or in preparing carefully crafted lectures can cost them the job itself. It has become commonplace for an untenured faculty member to win a teaching award and then be told that his contract will not be renewed. At M.I.T., for example, the teaching award “is frequently referred to as ‘the kiss of death’ because its recipients are often denied tenure.”
¹⁸
In the up-or-out system of academic employment, being denied tenure is equivalent to being fired.

Neither this pattern nor this phrase is peculiar to M.I.T. Both have been recurrent at Ohio State University, for example.
¹⁹
At Stanford, a lecturer in biology received a number of teaching awards over the years and was then denied tenure.
²⁰
At the University of Pennsylvania in recent years, professors of English and of political science have been denied tenure after receiving teaching awards.
²¹
Some academics dispute the belief that a teaching award is the kiss of death, either in general or at a particular university.
²²
However, the very fact that there can be a controversy over the issue suggests how widespread the phenomenon is.

The direct competition of research versus teaching for the professor’s time is accentuated when a particular individual in a research-oriented department devotes himself to teaching. Although Columbia University, like other research universities, says that “high effectiveness as a teacher” is a necessary (though not a sufficient) requirement for tenure, a faculty member denied tenure there both disputed this claim and provided an insight into the dynamics of the teaching-versus-research process:

… if you are unlike many members of the senior faculty (that is, you are a good teacher who cares about undergraduate instruction), you attract lots of students. This gives you a disproportionate amount of work, making it less likely that you’ll be able to publish enough to get tenure.
²³

A teaching-award winner at Harvard who was likewise denied tenure, despite being described by a senior colleague as “an extraordinarily gifted scholar,” blamed his own allocation of time to teaching for his having to leave. According to the student newspaper, the
Harvard Crimson
, “he plans to reduce the portion of time he spends teaching in his new job.”
²⁴
Not only junior faculty members, but even graduate teaching assistants and advisers, learn that spending too much time on undergraduates imperils their own future. One Harvard teaching assistant refused to reveal his last name to his students until the last day of the term, in order to prevent their phoning him.
²⁵

Advising students on setting up their academic programs is another important function which often gets short shrift at research-oriented institutions. At Columbia University, the student newspaper complained that the advisers, who supposedly help undergraduates shape their education through their choice of courses were in fact elusive, uninterested, and uninformed:

Students often see their advisers only to get a signature on their program filing forms, and advisers in every department sometimes seem more ignorant of departmental requirements than their advisees are.

…Since being a good adviser offers few rewards, faculty do not hesitate to let their advising responsibilities slide. Thus students often find their advisers unnervingly indifferent to their academic program and surprisingly uninformed of school and departmental policy.
²⁶