Inside Academia

Professors, Politics, and Policies

Steven M Cahn

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781978801523
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on decades of experience as a renowned teacher, advisor, administrator, and philosopher, Steven M. Cahn diagnoses problems plaguing America's universities and offers his prescriptions for improvement. He explores numerous aspects of academic life, including the education of graduate students, the quality of teaching, the design of liberal arts curricula, and the procedures for appointing faculty and considering them for tenure. Inside Academia uses real cases to illustrate how faculty members, deans, and provosts often do not serve the best interests of schools or students. Yet the book also highlights efforts of those who have committed themselves and their institutions to the pursuit of academic excellence.

 

1

How Professors View Academia

In 1968, when I was appointed to the faculty at New York University, one of my first assignments was to teach a large section of Introductory Philosophy. The class had over one hundred students, and the huge room in which we met had both a back door, where most of the students entered, and a front door, where I came in. Those two doors symbolized for me the different perspectives of students and faculty members.

Many of the former come to college assuming that, as in elementary or high school, they are the primary focus of attention. Their supposition is that how they perform in the classroom is crucial to academic life, and that the grades they receive are of deep concern to their teachers.

The faculty, however, take a different view. For them, scholarly pursuit comes first, while any class is secondary. They consider research to be the core of the academic enterprise. Other activities on campus, whether involving students, administrators, or staff, are peripheral, important only insofar as they contribute to the faculty’s efforts to achieve professional advancement.

This goal is typically pursued by publishing in professional journals, authoring or editing books with university presses and similar publishers, participating in academic conferences, and presenting lectures at colleges or universities. Such activities help build a strong academic reputation, leading to more prestigious invitations, appointments, and honors.

Even faculty members who have few academic accomplishments regard themselves as experts whose pursuit of knowledge, whether by writing, reading, or thinking, is the essence of academia. Although they may never complete any research, when asked about scholarly projects, they always claim to be working on one. Only a neophyte would admit, “I don’t have any.” Indeed, scholarship is recognized as so important that if a faculty member is asked to take on a departmental or institutional responsibility, the one negative reply that is invariably accepted runs along these lines: “I’d be happy to help, but I have an article I need to finish.” That explanation points to a duty that supersedes all others.

When asked by a stranger what they do for a living, professors identify themselves not as teachers but as physicists, economists, literary critics, and so on. Their primary commitment is to their discipline, not their classes.

Indeed, few faculty members would not welcome a reduction in their instructional hours, known in the jargon as a “load.” Research, incidentally, is never referred to as a “load” but as an “opportunity.” Thus a professor might tell colleagues, “Good news. My teaching load has been reduced, so I’ll finally have time for my own work.”

Of course, faculty depend for their salaries on tuition dollars, but this reliance on the presence of students is of minor concern to professors. After all, teaching and advising students take away from time better spent on the faculty’s own specializations.

How do faculty view the administration? While deans and provosts usually have high salaries and large offices, the faculty typically consider them subsidiary, former full-time professors whose scholarship may have tailed off but who have volunteered to think in an orderly manner about institutional policies. To be sure, they oversee budgets and enforce regulations, but their activity is not considered the heart of the academic enterprise. Indeed, their success is viewed as dependent almost entirely on whether they make life run smoothly for the faculty.

Presidents, on the other hand, come from any walk of life, whether law, business, politics, the military, or academia. Frequently they lack significant scholarly accomplishments that would give them standing with the faculty. Instead they possess the ambition and demeanor to be the voice of the institution. They look outward toward the community and government rather than inward toward the faculty and students. Although usually having only limited participation in the inner workings of academia, they are regarded by the public as crucial to life at their schools. Yet because they often have little impact on scholarly work, their presence may be barely noted by the faculty.

As for staff, they range from those involved in admissions, financial aid, and fund-raising, to administrative assistants, campus police, and maintenance personnel. While some of these people possess a deep understanding of their school and have devoted many years to its well-being, they are viewed by the faculty as merely supporting players, useful perhaps, but not essential.

The overall outlook of the faculty is captured in a story told about future president of the United States General Dwight D. Eisenhower when for a brief time he was president of Columbia University. At a ceremony welcoming faculty members back after summer break, he repeatedly referred to them as workers at the university. Finally, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist I. I. Rabi spoke out: “Please, General, do not address us as if we were employees of the university—we are the university.”¹ To grasp that comment is to understand how the faculty see themselves and their institutions.

2

Graduate School

Why do so many faculty members share the same viewpoint on academia? Because they all attended graduate schools that convey the same advice: specialize, publish in professional journals, and do not be distracted by other demands.

From the day first-year students go to graduate departmental orientation, they are asked about their planned specialization. The one reply sure to elicit guffaws from the faculty is: “I hope to become a teacher.” After all, luminaries publish; only lightweights merely teach.

A corollary is that while publishing is hard, teaching is supposed to be easy. As a faculty member once wrote to me, “Most new PhDs seem to be able to get the hang of teaching after a few semesters.” Only someone who attended graduate school would treat teaching in so cavalier a fashion.

Would anyone suppose that after a few semesters you could “get the hang” of teaching a large class of eighth graders the essentials of algebra, French grammar, or Shakespeare? The difficulties are so daunting that many who try are soon ready to quit in frustration. Why, then, would someone suppose that teaching physics, Russian literature, or philosophy to college students is easier? That view is a graduate school dogma, designed to downplay the skill and effort needed.

After all, if teaching is hard, then success would require concentrated practice, which would in turn take away from scholarship. Furthermore, teaching in graduate school would also be demanding, implying that instructors there have to think about pedagogy. Yet few do.

Indeed, the graduate level is where students are most likely to be subjected to neglect or mistreatment. The overall message is clear: teaching does not matter.

Here, for example, is a story told to me by an unimpeachable witness who took a course from a prolific scholar at one of the country’s leading graduate schools. This professor had originally distributed a syllabus, but as the semester went on, he fell further behind schedule. With three weeks remaining, he explained the problem to the class: “There’s no way we’re going to be able to finish all the books I had hoped we would.” At this point the class expected him to shorten the list, but he had a different solution in mind: “Why don’t we just cancel the rest of the classes?” And he did. The irony is that given the quality of his teaching, no one objected.

Many graduate teachers have found a variety of ways to discharge their pedagogical duties relatively effortlessly. One method is to teach courses that are extensions of the professor’s own research. That approach works because professors are allowed to announce topics of their choice, and the resulting conglomeration becomes the curriculum. The list may be unbalanced or of little use to those preparing for their careers, but such concerns are viewed as irrelevant.

For example, if a graduate professor is doing research on the German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), a comparatively neglected figure in the history of philosophy, the professor could announce as a proposed course “The Philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann.” Of course, students would most likely derive greater use from a course on Kant, Hegel, or Nietzsche, because those philosophers are taught far more often to undergraduates, but the Hartmann scholar would probably ignore that consideration. The strategy would almost surely fail, however, because few, if any, students would enroll in a Hartmann course, thus leading to its cancellation.

Others try a more sophisticated approach. One professor of musicology I knew was at work analyzing Die Feen (The Fairies), the earliest opera by Richard Wagner, unperformed in his lifetime and rarely produced. The professor, however, announced his course topic as Wagner’s operas. Many students enrolled, only to discover that the entire semester was devoted to Die Feen. Why did students not complain? Because in graduate school no student wants to offend a professor who may later be in a position to help or hinder a career.

Another strategy for the reluctant teacher is to find a department member willing to offer a team-taught course. The work is shared, and each professor has the luxury of turning classes into conversations with a colleague. If even this device is too demanding, a professor can invite other scholars from inside or outside the school to lead discussions. Such a colloquium can be framed as offering students the opportunity to hear different points of view, but the actual result is even less work for the professor supposedly teaching the course.

If such a joint approach is not feasible, professors can still avoid teaching by distributing chapters from one of their own manuscripts, then assigning students to help edit it. Is such work the best way to learn a field? The question does not even arise, because the motivation for the professor is to pursue research while fulfilling a pedagogical obligation.

When all other stratagems fail, members of a department can appoint each other to quasi-administrative positions, then claim that these assignments entitle them to be released from at least some teaching. Consider these titles, devised by one graduate program: executive officer, deputy executive officer, director of graduate studies, placement officer, qualifying paper coordinator, colloquium coordinator, and two climate advisers. I am not sure who is supposed to need advice about the climate, but I am reminded of the positions held by the pompous Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado: “First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Justice, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral, Master of the Buckhounds, Groom of the Back Stairs, Archbishop of Titipu, and Lord Mayor, both acting and elect.” You may wonder how many students this program admits each year. About a dozen. And the number is intentionally kept small, so that professors will not be burdened with too many students to teach or advise.

Even when a graduate instructor teaches a standard course in a standard way, the results are often unsatisfactory. The tendency is to toss out names, terms, and concepts regardless of whether everyone is familiar with them. One result is that students are cowed into hiding their lack of knowledge and developing the unfortunate trait of pretending to know what they do not, leaving them defenseless against others who engage in obfuscation.

That weakness explains the results of a famous psychological study known as the “Doctor Fox” experiment.¹ A distinguished-looking professional actor with an authoritative manner was selected to present a lecture to several groups of educators. They were told they would be hearing a talk by Dr. Myron L. Fox, an expert on the application of mathematics to human behavior. His address was titled “Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education.” The actor was coached “to present his topic and conduct his question-and-answer period with an excessive use of double talk, neologies, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements. All this was to be interspersed with parenthetical and meaningless references to unrelated topics.”

At the end of the one-hour lecture and subsequent half-hour discussion, a questionnaire was distributed to the listeners, inquiring what they thought of Dr. Fox. Here are some responses:

Excellent presentation, enjoyed listening.

Has warm manner. Good flow, seems enthusiastic.

Lively examples. Extremely articulate.

Good analysis of subject that has been personally studied before.

He was certainly captivating. Knowledgeable.

My favorite reply was offered by one participant who found the presentation “too intellectual.” Most important, all the listeners had many more favorable than unfavorable responses, and not one saw through the hoax.

Why not? Because graduate students have been taught the importance of always appearing knowledgeable. Their guiding principle: ignorance is ignominious. As a result, graduate students become reluctant to ask elementary questions and instead nod knowingly even when a supposed expert is misguiding them. Such passivity is especially unfo...