Inside American Education (34 page)

Careless advising can mean not only that the student does not take the best selection of courses for his own intellectual development; it can also mean that his graduation will be postponed, if all the departmental or college requirements are not met by the program of courses approved by the adviser. None of these problems is peculiar to Columbia. At the University of Virginia, 40 percent of the students surveyed declared themselves dissatisfied with their freshman-year advisers, and the student newspaper referred to “the distaste with which some professors seem to view their advising duties.”
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At Stanford, 42 percent of graduating seniors rated as “poor” the advising they had received before choosing a major and another 27 percent rated it “fair,” with only a minority giving it a rating of “good” or better.
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David Riesman’s study of higher education in general concluded that advising was “at most large universities, including my own, at best an embarrassment, at worst a disgrace.”
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All these examples are from major research universities. They provide a clue as to why small liberal-arts colleges so often produce better results in undergraduate education, even when neither their students nor their professors have as impressive credentials as those in the more prestigious universities.

Classroom Performance

The most visible aspect of education, though not the most important, is the classroom performance of the teacher. This is what students see and respond to most strongly. When they speak of a “good” teacher, they typically mean a teacher who
is good at this and when they speak of a “bad” teacher, they typically mean a teacher who is bad at this.

One kind of teaching is that described by
The Confidential Guide
, published annually by the student newspaper at Harvard:

…Coles’ random, often guilt-inducing lectures can be fascinating, if not always relevant. Coles is a brilliant orator, and he prides himself on the fact that he doesn’t use any notes. His delivery is frequently awe-inspiring, and he uses words like fuck and shit just to prove how down-to-earth he is.
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This course had an enrollment of 800, the largest enrollment of any course at Harvard.
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The charismatic professor, or teacher as preacher, is only one of the kinds of ego trips or other self-indulgences by faculty members. Another Harvard professor described in the student-written guide was a variation on the same theme:

You will be going to the most expensive theater show of your life—a couple of thousand bucks to watch a famous guy stroke his ego in front of 300 students.
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Conceding that the professor “does have reason to be proud of his research,”
The Confidential Guide
says, “he does not have a reason in the world to be proud of his personal conduct during class, or for the course itself.” Among other things, he has been known to “waste 50 minutes talking about the World Series” in a course on geology.
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Such professors are not peculiar to Harvard.

At the University of Texas, a biology professor was noted for opening every class “by playing his favorite ditties (by Gershwin and Brubeck) to the students while waddling sleepily across the stage.” According to the
Texas Review
:

He is at his most enthusiastic during the sex education stages of his 303 classes; without warning he flicks up eye-popping slides of female genitalia onto the cinema-sized screen of AC21 and accompanies them with comments such as “this is not my wife” and “I did not take these pictures, ha, ha.”
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At Arizona State University, a student in a course on “Human Sexuality” testified before the institution’s board of regents that the slides shown included not only “genital penetration
from a variety of positions and angles” but also oral sex, to the accompaniment of such professorial comments as “I sure hope she doesn’t sneeze” and “Imagine if she got a cramp in her jaw now.” Another student in the same course, a young woman who missed an examination, reported that she was told by the professor that she could make it up by writing a ten-page paper on her own sexual experiences.
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Sometimes there is method in a professor’s madness: “Known for cutting class short to manage his tennis schedule,” a sociology professor at Northwestern “often arrives with racket in hand,” according to a student newspaper. The class itself is conducted in the same self-serving way: “Pitting black students against white,” this professor “relies on their emotional arguments to fill class time.”
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In addition to gross self-indulgences, professors have also been criticized for simple ineptitude, carelessness, and callousness. An anthropology professor at Berkeley was described as giving lectures so “unorganized” that “it’s hard to figure out exactly what she is trying to say.”
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The lectures of an economics professor at Princeton were characterized as “sleep-inducing,” those of a colleague “unorganized and incoherent,” and those of another “quite confusing.” Yet another Princeton economist was noted for his “general impatience in responding to questions” and still another tended to get “lost in his own equations.” In electrical engineering, one professor was noted for “mumbling” and another “literally read the book aloud in his lecture.” A Princeton math professor was noted for “proofs begun and never finished.”
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In Duke University’s Asian and African Languages department, a professor whose class discussions usually “went off on a tangent” was also someone who “embarrasses and insults students.” The report on one of his colleagues in the same department was “many students find that his condescending and sarcastic attitude discourages them from asking questions, disagreeing, or expressing ideas.”
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In the computer science department at Duke, one professor’s lectures were described as “disorganized,” another’s “boring and slow.” Another colleague “wandered off the subject” and for yet another computer science professor, the most noted experience in his course was “falling asleep in class and knowing you hadn’t missed a thing.”
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Professors are not the only classroom performers. Teaching assistants, popularly known as TA’s, teach many classes on their own, especially in mathematics and the sciences. Many of these TA’s are foreign graduate students, and their hard-to-understand English is a chronic complaint from undergraduates. One TA teaching at Harvard was described as “functionally illiterate in the English language,” someone whose “spelling errors, thick accent, and chaotic grammar render him incomprehensible.”
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A similar complaint about foreign teaching assistants who “cannot speak English clearly” was made at the University of North Carolina.
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Such complaints are echoed at universities across the country. At Stanford, most of the teaching assistants in an introductory statistics course “spoke only fragmented English.”
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At the University of Chicago, “unfamiliarity with English” and “problems with her command of English” were among the complaints against those teaching elementary mathematics courses.
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At the University of Maryland, a student enrolled in introductory calculus was glad that he had learned to speak Korean in the Air Force, for that made him one of the few students able to converse with the graduate student teaching the course.
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Complaints about the poor English of foreign teaching assistants have become so widespread that legislators in some states have introduced bills requiring that foreign teaching assistants receive instruction in speaking comprehensible English.
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Whether any of these bills will become law is another question. At Johns Hopkins University, where complaints about the English spoken by teaching assistants also abound, a faculty member suggested a different solution: “Undergraduates should try to be more accepting and to understand the difficulties facing the TAs.”
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Ideological Indoctrination

Complaints about political indoctrination in the classroom have been made on a number of grounds, including (1) their time-wasting irrelevance to the course in which the students enrolled, (2) their lack of balance, undermining the whole concept
of education, and (3) the tactual or logical deficiencies of the particular ideologies being promoted.

The strongest of these objections is the first, for students who are paying to take accounting or literature are not paying to hear their professor’s opinions on foreign policy or endangered species. When the money comes from parents who are asked to borrow against the equity in their home to pay inflated tuition, it seems especially unconscionable that professors should blithely indulge their own emotions after contracting to supply their expertise. Yet this pattern is widespread in American higher education, and especially so at its leading institutions.

An English professor at Dartmouth, for example, “doesn’t mind wasting your time by indulging in political diatribes,” according to a student report, while a radical feminist colleague in the same department turns the study of literature into “a tedious hunt for crotch symbolism.”
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At Arizona State University, a political science course described in the catalogue as being about political ideologies like “Marxism, liberalism, conservatism,” turned out instead to be dominated by the professor’s own anti-nuclear opinions and “overpopulation” worries.
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Quite aside from the merits or demerits of the professor’s views on these subjects, they were not what the catalogue said the course was about, not what students signed up for, and not what the professor was paid to teach.

A required course in American history from 1492 to 1865, at the University of Texas (Austin), gave over whole lecture periods to things that happened long alter 1865. Two class periods featured slides of poverty-stricken people from the Great Depression of the 1930s and another class period was spent denouncing the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Along the way during the course were all sorts of other editorial comments far removed from the ostensible subject of the class, including “I’m a fucked-up man” and “You can’t disagree with the values of a bunch of people without pissing them off.” This last remark the professor had the class repeat aloud.
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At Harvard, a professor of divinity spent a class period praising the “nuclear freeze” movement and explaining why he was involved in it. According to a student present, the class began with “people handing out material on how to get involved with the nuclear freeze movement” and ended with “a girl with a
guitar” singing “a folk-song about how we should all join hands against nuclear arms.”
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Required courses, with their captive audiences, seem especially susceptible to being abused for ideological purposes. Freshman composition has thus become focussed on ideological indoctrination at the University of Massachusetts
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and was scheduled to do so at the University of Texas (Austin), until a public outery, led by a local chapter of the National Association of Scholars, forced a change of plans.
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At Cornell University, the freshman seminar program has become “filled with courses of political orientation.”
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At the University of Michigan, introductory biology—used to satisfy students’ natural science distribution requirement—became a setting for films and slides about Nicaraguan politics, denunciations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and other unrelated matters.
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In addition to introducing ideology into courses in which the ostensible subject matter has nothing to do with ideology, there are other courses more or less blatantly taught ideologically. For example, the professor in a University of Massachusetts (Amherst) course entitled “Contemporary American History” declared: “I am biased. I’m not going to give you both sides to every question.” He also said: “This course will be consistently anti-American,” that this was “not a course that is going to make you happy to be an American.”
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Like brainwashing in the public schools and in Maoist China, this course requires “personal experiences” to be dealt with, beginning with a question on the first assignment: “Where’s your head and how did it get that way? What are your politics?”
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Where the fundamental purpose of a course is ideological, grades tend to vary ideologically, not only to reward those who espouse the ideology and punish those who oppose it, but more generally to attract a larger audience for the cause with easy grades. All this makes sense when education is regarded as simply a continuation of politics by other means. Thus a music course at Dartmouth, notorious for its obscenity-laden ideological ramblings, was also regarded as “a notorious gut.”
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A Harvard course on “Women and the Law,” taught from a “feminist perspective,” was characterized by the student guide as one in which it is “virtually impossible to do badly when exam time comes around” and one in which the term paper can be on “any topic you can think of that is even remotely related to
the course’s topic.”
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At the State University of New York at Buffalo, an English class regarded as “a snap course,” was given over to political issues and a student who challenged the professor was given “one of the lowest grades in the class”—an A minus!
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A professor at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota gave extra credit to students in his course who took part in a protest demonstration—5 points for marching and 20 points for carrying a sign.
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