The current issue of Academe is running a piece by philosophy professor and former CUNY Graduate Center president Stephen Cahn on what it would mean for colleges and universities to take teaching seriously. Cahn opens with the open secret of higher education: that while there is plenty of lip service paid to the importance of teaching, in practice, teaching is systematically devalued many times over:

Which candidate for a faculty position is usually viewed as more attractive, the promising researcher or the promising teacher? Who typically secures the larger salary increase, the successful researcher or the successful teacher? When a faculty member receives an offer from another institution, is more effort made to retain an outstanding researcher or an outstanding teacher? And who usually receives such offers, the famed researcher or the famed teacher? Granted, the scholar-teacher is the ideal, but who is more likely to gain tenure, a top-notch researcher who is dull in the classroom or a top-notch teacher whose scholarship is thin?

Cahn's concise essay lists a number of policy changes schools would need to make in order to institutionalize a commitment to teaching that at present tends not to run deeper than the verbiage so many colleges and universities lavish--unconvincingly, in the grand cliched manner--on the subject. They include the radical concepts of having job candidates actually demonstrate their teaching skills, giving merit raises for excellence in teaching, tracking and evaluating individual teachers' teaching, developing a precise vocabulary for talking about teaching and differentiating among kinds and qualities of teaching, taking graduate student teacher training seriously, adopting open classroom policies, and making it possible for excellent teachers with middling research records to get tenure on the strength of their teaching--just as strong scholars who are weak teachers routinely get tenure on the strength of their research records.

It's a fascinating thought experiment, not least for the way it highlights how little colleges and universities would have to do--procedurally anyway--in order to restructure their priorities in ways they desperately need to be restructured. The real barriers here are economic and psychological (or, more precisely, snobological). The cynic in me says that at many schools--those with pretensions to be elite, anyhow--teaching must and will remain a lesser form of work than scholarship. The internal pecking order that is so essential to such schools' sense of themselves as nationally important must be maintained. Even more cynically, and more broadly, the new disfunctional norm, in which teaching labor is increasingly fobbed off on undertrained grad students and underpaid, uninsured adjuncts must be maintained.

Just for frisson of it, I'll note that the same issue of Academe is running two pieces on the adjunct labor system. They might be read, to borrow a phrase, as the political unconscious of Cahn's piece.

Via Milt Rosenberg.

UPDATE: Stephen Karlson puts it all into perspective.

Interesting. I've never been on a campus interview that didn't involve teaching a class.

_Colleges_, with very few exceptions, take teaching very seriously- even the ones that also expect serious research from their faculties. (In fact it's the latter that offer the best opportunities for undergraduates to be involved in research.) It's universities that often don't. I can understand why someone based at the CUNY Graduate center might not be aware of that.

Reminds me of the time, during my biology-teaching stint at Union College, when I went to the sumemr meeting of our "Pew Cluster"- these were loose consortia consisting of several liberal arts colleges and a research university (Cornell in our case), funded by the Pew Foundation for the supposed advancement of undergraduate science teaching. A Cornell chemist was bragging about his gen-ed chem course, and delivered himself of the following priceless remark: "Some of the papers were so interesting that I read them myself!" We TA-less college teachers got a good laugh out of that.

On the other hand too many liberal arts colleges nowadays tend to define "good" teaching as spoon-feeding the students and keeping them happy. But that's a different story, and even so they can't be accused of not emphasizing teaching. If an undergraduate wants to interact directly with highly-qualified and experienced professors rather than graduate TA's or adjuncts, then a good liberal arts college is the place to be.

Good teachers resemble successful entertainers and salesmen. They should be personable, natural talkers, good at cracking jokes. They should be able to charm an audience day in and day out, and at the same time be knowledgable in their field. A teacher should withstand exposure to the public for long stretches of time, very much like TV personalities and theater actors. How many people like that can you expect to meet in your lifetime? the obvious answer is - very few, no matter how you train and promote university teachers.

Instead of relying on brilliant and learned entertainers addressing passive audiences, school systems should look for another model of teaching and learning, one in which human limitations are acknowledged and existing technology used. Such a model exists for a long time and it is quite successful.

In a Yeshiva , a traditional Jewish institution of higher education, there is very little frontal teaching. Instead you have small groups of students who study together some text (usually a page of the Talmud with commentaries). A supervisor, the equivalent of a professor or an assistant, is on hand to answer questions and to direct students to additional literature in the library. The supervisor follows the students' progress and it is he who assigns the next text for study. This system takes advantage of print technology which is largely ingnored in the current humanities teaching model, where so many students evade reading as much as possible. The study in groups is said to be effective, as students are monitored all the time not only by the supervisor, but by their peers as well.

I don't have personal experience of studies in a Yeshiva, and I know there are many complaints about boredom in the Yeshivot (plural of Yeshiva). Nor do I think that such a model can be emulated as is in other environments. Still, I think some of its elements can be carried over successfully to universities and transform the current model which is unchanged from the time books were scarce and the readily available source of knowledge was the teacher.

Perhaps we need to return in some respects to the ideals of an earlier time, when the value of a college education was believed to consist largely of the opportunity for students to have sustained contact with learned people, rather than merely in the passive absorption by the students of performances staged by the faculty for their entertainment.

Bouncing off of Steve LaBonne's first point, I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this so I'd like to play devil's advocate. Some schools, namely liberal arts colleges, focus on teaching, whereas others, namely research universities, focus on research. Competitive students can choose where they'd like to go. For instance, within a short distance of Erin's institution are Swarthmore and Haverford, both of which make comparable demands on a student's wallet and vita as U Penn. It seems unfair for a student to enroll at a research university and then expect the institution to become a liberal arts college. The same applies to faculty who, if they wished, could have applied to and accepted offers from liberal arts institutions.
Backing up to my more conflicted actual position, it's very difficult to disentangle on the one hand, judgements about the correct balance of teaching vs research, from, on the other hand, judgements about the value of that research. For instance, Hanson and Heath's "Who Killed Homer" and "Bonfire of the Humanities" essentially argue that the humanities should abandon research for full-time teaching, that the social sciences should be abolished, and that hard scientists should continue to focus on research. Their arguments are compelling in parts (a notable exception is the concluding fantasy of the classics-centric university of the future). They make a good case for the educational value of the classics but this pales next to the full-steam assault on the complete vacuousness of postmodern classics scholarship. (my favorite part of "bonfire" is when Hanson shows how Thucydides--a politician, general, plague victim, and exile--used the "personal voice" in a restrained and effective manner, in contrast to the incessant whiny navel-gazing one finds in academic writing about the slings and arrows of their comfortable pedestrian lives).
Anyway, I guess the point is that I think most people wouldn't object to good researchers disproportionately focusing their efforts on good research but that the more serious problem is when bad researchers waste time on bad research. In other words, it offends me more for a mediocre researcher to have a 2/1 load than for a good researcher to have a 0/1 load.

This is perhaps a bit off topic (but perhaps not). One problem that consistently comes up when I talk with faculty who broadly agree is the difficulty in defining some easy metric to assess quality teaching.

Plenty of metrics exist for research (at least in the physical sciences where I spend most of my time) - things like number of publications, citation impact (somehow normalized for subdiscipline) while perhaps not including all good research clearly represent some subset.

I'd be curious to hear any suggestions as to effective ways to represent teaching quality those in university administration.

Kramer,

You're absolutely right that good teaching metrics are hard. I don't know if this is demonstrably true, but the folk wisdom has it that course evals reflect pandering and grade inflation more than actual teaching quality.

Gabriel

The idea that colleges teach and universities do research is an interesting one. I don't think the majority of high school students see a distinction there. They think they are going off to State U to get an education, not to fund somebody else's research.