Teaching Is Better Than Ever

THE neglect of teaching has become a fashionable theme in current lay discussions of university education. Commentator after commentator has proclaimed that students are being shortchanged, that teaching has become a poor relation of research, and that teaching ability is inadequately weighed and rewarded by the universities. One of the causes most frequently cited for the neglect of teaching is dependence of universities on government research funds. The manner in which these funds are sought, allocated, and administered, say the critics, is compromising the autonomy, integrity, and independence of scholars and universities. Under the rubric “The Treason of the Clerks,” Gerard Piel lectured last April with alarm about current conditions in our universities. “The neglect of graduate teaching,” he said, “presumably in favor of research, must inevitably reduce the quality of the research. . . . The principal casualty of the Federal grant system, however, is the undergraduate. . . . The burgeoning of project contract/grant research has downgraded the teaching function in all of these universities — with but a few notable exceptions —especially in the sciences and including even graduate education.” Other commentators have charged that our system of higher education is now “rigged against good teaching.”

The critics have raised an issue which unquestionably demands constant attention from university administrations and faculty members. I salute them for their contribution to that ceaseless debate so necessary to the improvement of education. But the issue is far from being as black and white as they suggest. The “neglect of teaching” and the “flight from teaching” have become contagious clichés that glibly convey a one-sided view of university teaching, especially undergraduate teaching. There is much on the other side, and it is important to highlight the good if we are to pinpoint the bad. On balance, I firmly believe that the good heavily outweighs the bad, that the present emphasis on research in our universities has had the result in most places of improving the quality of teaching.

It is certainly true that the universities are currently confronted with many new challenges to the maintenance of good teaching. Enrollments have been growing faster than the number of adequately trained teachers. Our society tends steadily to assign new duties to the universities — as, for example, the current proposals that universities become agents of urban service and renewal. They are called upon to assist small colleges, carry knowledge to the people, run special programs for the disadvantaged, undertake curriculum development projects, and manage summer institutes to train teachers to teach the new curricula. The university’s educational responsibility has been expanded by the growth of graduate and postdoctoral study and by the rapid increase in demand for continuing and refresher education. Along with meeting this wider spread of teaching responsibilities, faculty members, especially scientists, social scientists, and engineers, increasingly are called upon, as we so well know, to undertake public tasks as advisers and consultants and occasionally to serve as administrators and ambassadors. The domain of affairs demands ever more of the domain of learning.

Despite these demands, teaching has steadfastly remained the central mission of our great universities, and over the past several decades there has been improvement, spotty but steady, in the quality of their teaching.

Not only have the lay critics failed to recognize improvements in university teaching; they have tended to give the wrong reasons for the poor teaching that exists. They claim, for example, that sponsored research necessarily subverts good teaching. On the contrary, it can be a powerful aid to good teaching. It can minimize obsolete learning and the drab, anemic academicism that comes to afflict universities when they are mainly “teaching factories.” Teachers who do no research or who fail to deepen their mastery of their fields are likely to become teachers of obsolete knowledge, and the first to find this out are the students themselves. As President Lee DuBridge of Cal Tech has written in a letter protesting an editorial in the New York Times on the neglect of teaching in the universities, “Heavy teaching loads without research opportunities lead not to good teaching, but to bad. . . . No university I know will condone a gross neglect of teaching by any faculty member. . . . Today some of the finest research scholars are doing outstanding teaching.”

Neither is it true that the involvement of professors in outside activities is ipso facto harmful to their teaching. The work of professors as consultants and advisers can be a stimulant rather than a deterrent to good teaching. The experience they gain in outside activities, if it is truly professional, can impart authority and realism to their teaching.

Comparisons are frequently drawn between today’s teachers and those of the past, usually to the disadvantage of contemporary teachers. I am skeptical of these comparisons. I suspect, moreover, that at least some of the glamorous teachers of the past, who won applause for their classroom manner and their charming eccentricities, may have lacked the creativity, precision, and depth of scholarship that today are regularly expected of the scholar-teacher along with the gift for inspiring students.

The purpose of teaching in the modern university is not merely to fill the student’s mind with known facts, theories, and modes of thought; it is also, and more important, to stimulate him to teach himself, to learn by teaching others, to think creatively, to want to seek answers to questions as yet unexplored, and to learn the arts of doing so. I know of no better way to do this than to give him the opportunity to work with and under faculty members who themselves are engaged in seeking such answers — and who can, in consequence, impart a sense of intellectual adventure.

I have worked in a university environment for nearly forty years, and at no time, despite the involvement of faculty in a far wider range of activities, have I witnessed so much creative attention to teaching as there is today. I am sure that in the institutions I know, undergraduate education is stronger than it was when I was a student and when undergraduate teaching was the principal activity of the faculty. I am also sure that a rapidly growing number of teacher-scholars are finding a new mode of being creative in their efforts to devise innovations in the teaching process. I know from firsthand experience that leading universities have been making sustained, diligent efforts to recognize and reward creative teaching.

WHAT are some of the specific innovations and improvements in teaching of which I have spoken? Because I know them best, I draw examples mainly from science and engineering.

First I would cite the curriculum reform movement which has produced the “new physics,” the “new math,” and so on and is now spreading to other fields. This revolutionary improvement in American education is not only invigorating and upgrading the quality of teaching in pre-college schools; it is now enabling, and indeed, forcing the colleges to advance the level of their studies and to give really creative attention to the reformation of their curricula. The striking fact is that this curriculum movement is being led by research scholars in the universities who have been joined by imaginative teachers in the pre-college schools. This team is rendered more powerful by the fact that the scholar has gained from his research the insights, the judgment of relevance, and the sense of taste and precision that enable him to impart scholarly integrity to the beginning curriculum. He also brings to the classroom the contagious and constantly renewed love of his subject which so frequently marks the research scholar.

Allied to this curriculum reform are the brilliant new college texts and other teaching materials which are the work of leading scientists resident in institutions deeply engaged in research. I point to undergraduate college science programs coming from Cal Tech, Berkeley, Illinois, Harvard, and M.I.T. I point to the innovations in undergraduate engineering education at Case, Stanford, Carnegie Tech, U.C.L.A., M.I.T., and a number of other engineering schools. I point to the Science Teaching Center at M.I.T. and to Educational Services, Inc., both innovative institutes for the improvement of teaching, launched as a result of university concern for the betterment of teaching. I point to some of the output of these institutes such as the brilliantly lucid films for teaching fluid mechanics and the new materials which present semiconductor technology adequately to engineering students, each project being sponsored by a national committee of research-gifted engineers. Faculty members of high research competence in the universities lead the development of these improved aids to teaching. And in these same institutions there is a continuous preparation and introduction of new subjects springing from research and new technology. In some engineering schools nearly half the subjects now being taught were not in existence a decade ago.

There is another kind of contribution which research makes to teaching. The presence of large research laboratories enables professors to bring young engineering students into fruitful contact with real-life engineering work, in the way that medical school professors bring medical students into teaching hospitals.

Undergraduates in both science and engineering increasingly have opportunities to gain research experience because, thanks to sponsored research, there are enough large projects to make this possible. In a number of institutions we find undergraduates, graduates, postdoctorals, and professors all working together in a single research laboratory. This involvement of the undergraduate in research is imparting new depth and power to undergraduate education. This kind of team research experience also increases the personal contacts between student and staff.

Another important commitment by senior faculty to undergraduate teaching is in the freshman seminars to be found at Harvard and M.I.T. and, I am sure, at numerous other institutions. These seminars offered to freshmen by experienced faculty members provide first-year students with extraordinary opportunities to work with outstanding research professors and to gain insights into professional subjects that might not otherwise be available to them until much later in their college careers.

A criticism frequently heard is that senior faculty members are so busy with their research and other outside activities that the undergraduate seldom has the benefit of studying with the “great names.” He is subjected, they say, to inferior teaching by graduate assistants and junior faculty. He thus loses the supposed benefits of attending a great university. Obviously, the number of “great men” — that is, those with long-established reputations—is always limited on any campus. In the universities I know anything about, the majority, if not all, of these professors share in undergraduate teaching. Inevitably their classes are large, because of the demands of the students, and thus they must be aided by teaching assistants to help overcome the impersonality of the large lecture hall.

As for the assignment of junior faculty and teaching assistants to beginning undergraduate courses, there is no reason to assume they provide inferior teaching for such courses. They may be more conversant with the latest developments in a wide field of study than the senior faculty member, who commonly becomes more specialized as his research interests narrow. Teaching assistants can bring to the classroom and laboratory an understanding of the undergraduate because they themselves were only recently undergraduates.

The assignment of faculty to teaching, and their distribution among graduate and undergraduate courses, must be done with an eye to the most effective use of available talents. To assign senior men, whose reputations have been built on a combination of good teaching and their research contributions, to full-time teaching jobs would clearly destroy their effectiveness and limit their potential contributions. To deprive graduate students of the opportunity to work as teaching assistants to senior faculty would be to fail in one of the university’s important functions: to provide an apprenticeship training opportunity for these future teachers.

The quality of undergraduate education depends in part on the time and thought given to the design and preparation of curricula and courses. As one of my colleagues puts it, the composing of a fine curriculum is as demanding as the composing of a fine symphony, and this arduous and artful work should be done thoroughly before the teacher and student come together in the classroom. Senior faculty who may not come into face-to-face contact with all undergraduates all the time may nevertheless contribute profoundly to their education by designing sound curricula and teaching materials.

In our graduate schools, of course, research and teaching are interwoven, and the enlarged research resources of American universities have given the United States graduate schools unexcelled anywhere in the world.

While I believe that the availability of federal funds for research has, on balance, served to strengthen our universities and to aid their central mission to teach, it is unquestionably accompanied by potential complications, if not dangers, for the universities. Since it has come to be, as the principal source of university research funds, such a potent trustee in relation to the university system, the government has a great responsibility to refrain from policies and procedures, especially in terms of its contracts and grants, which are corrosive to the spirit and life of the university. The universities for their part must be unremittingly vigilant in adhering to their academic ideals and in protecting freedom of inquiry. The nation has a right to insist on this, and critics do a service in so demanding.

I do not believe the record supports the contention that large funds for research — from government, foundations, and corporations — tend to weaken teaching. A growing percentage of the students who win fellowships for graduate study and gain admission to the leading graduate schools come from the undergraduate schools of the researchactive universities.

So far almost all the federal funds for university research have been allotted to the sciences, engineering, and medicine. If this large-scale involvement with the federal government were harming teaching as much as the critics claim, one would expect these fields to be less well taught or more neglected than other disciplines where federal funds are not available. There is no evidence that these fields have suffered relative to fields uncomplicated by government support. On the contrary, the incidence of teaching reform and advance seems greater in those disciplines which have substantial federal support. And I cannot refrain from noting that in several institutions that I know well, a great strengthening of the humanities and social sciences has occurred concurrently with a growth in sponsored research.

THE critics to whom I reply have concentrated mainly on what is wrong with university teaching. To balance out, I have concentrated on a sampling of what is right. Obviously a true balance lies at some point in between. There are vast reaches of humdrum obsolete education in America. There is a desperate need for more innovation in teaching and for more institutions which encourage creativity in teaching as well as in research. We need more members of university faculties {in addition to those in the schools of education) who are working to improve the teaching of their disciplines both in pre-college schools and in college. We need more faculty members in our colleges and universities who are aware of the many improvements in teaching in pre-college schools and who build on this in their college teaching.

There is also need for improvement in the status of the undergraduate and for more attention to the individual student. I am sure that it is possible to find some professors excessively preoccupied with research who shortchange the students and who by their outside activities fail in their obligations to uphold university ideals. A few institutions have had trouble with their priorities and have accepted federal grants and used them in ways that have detracted from both undergraduate and graduate teaching. These occasional excesses, however, should not be used to indict all universities.

American universities today are confronted by the hazards of hyperactivity, of rapid change, and of spreading their efforts too thin. Much now depends upon their achieving a wise balance of effort and a right choice of emphasis. Faculties must discipline and pace themselves in the face of the multiplying calls for service which fall upon them. They must accept a commitment to teach as compelling as their commitment to research. They must give first and unswerving commitment to the education and central status of their students.

Institutions must also learn to live with federal support, for both research and other activities, and have the courage to reject it if need be and to fight any threat to their integrity, their aims, and their freedom. To meet all these requirements will be difficult, and fumbles and imbalances will inevitably occur as the system adapts to change and growth, but the current vitality and adaptability that I see in our university system seem to be better insurance of success than would a more inward-turning, conventional, and placid academic life.

There are those who still think of the university as a monastic institution where staff and students, in a spirit of academic isolationism, pursue a kind of purist learning undiverted by contemporary events and free from economic and social entanglements. I stand with those who feel that our great universities and their faculties and students must adjust to “radically new relationships,” especially those which involve the participation of the scholar in the contemporary tasks and social movements of our society. We must bend these involvements to the advantage of education. Actually, the university, American style, can no longer hold itself aloof from social responsibility. This is the revolutionary change that has taken place in America in the relationship of the university to society. Lest I be misunderstood, let me hasten to say also that these same universities must and can be places where those scholars, young and old, who so choose can lead a monastic, unengaged, scholarly career and be protected, encouraged, and honored, and where they can find, if they choose, an environment kept as free as possible of distractions and pressures.

This enlarged role is attended by risks, but it is the glory of our evolving university system that it does not, out of fear of these risks, shrink from widened responsibilities. I hold that universities with this vitality and commitment can provide a better education than those which isolate themselves from contemporary society and ignore its needs.