Should college professors teach more? Specifically, should professors at public research universities devote more time to teaching undergraduates, and less to research?
In two states this, um, academic question has become a political controversy, one likely to crop up elsewhere. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican presidential candidate, has proposed a tuition freeze and budget cuts that would reduce the University of Wisconsin’s revenues by 13%. “Maybe it’s time for faculty and staff to start thinking about teaching more classes and doing more work,” he said when discussing how the university could function with less money.
In North Carolina, state senator Tom McInnis, also a Republican, has introduced legislation that would require all professors in the University of North Carolina system to teach eight courses per academic year. (Tenured professors currently teach an average of five, according to the Daily Tarheel.) In a statement criticizing the reliance on graduate student teaching assistants, McInnis said, “There is no substitute for a professor in the classroom to bring out the best in our students.”
Genuine Ignorance or Spite?
Predictably, educators are livid. Walker’s proposed cuts “will absolutely savage” UW’s “infrastructure and quality of teaching and research,” one Madison history professor said. A UNC Charlotte physicist, Greg Gbur, argued the “charitable” explanation was that McInnis is motivated by “genuine ignorance” about the amount and value of professors’ work. (Another possible explanation is that he’s motivated by spite and ideology.) Slate’s Rebecca Schuman adds that mandating an eight-course teaching load would “accomplish nothing less than the wholesale obliteration of the public research institution.”
These heated reactions suggest the weakness—political, financial, and logical—of the status quo. In an open letter to McInnis, for example, Gbur goes through a detailed explanation of the time needed to teach an undergraduate course: preparation, delivery, testing, grading, office hours. His conclusion? Teaching four courses a semester would be impossible without … working 40 hours a week.
The calculation omits some details, however. For one thing, the arduous 40-hour workweek unfolds, for professors, over a less arduous 36-week work year. Throw in the lifetime employment guarantee of tenure, and most civilians paying taxes and tuition to support public universities are going to find professors’ terms of employment enviable, not exploitive.
What about ‘Adjunctification?’
Furthermore, teaching four courses a semester is not unusual in institutions primarily devoted to undergraduate education rather than research. In particular, American colleges of all types have come to assign more and more of their teaching to untenured adjunct professors hired, on a course-by-course basis, from the vast reserve army of underemployed Ph.D.’s.
Many adjuncts teach four or more courses per semester, sometimes at more than one institution, and even then struggle to pay the rent. Jonathan Rees, a Colorado State University-Pueblo historian wrote, in response to the McInnis proposal, “As long as we [tenured and tenure-track professors] accept the idea that it’s OK for our adjunct colleagues to toil away with four or more courses and no living wage, we don’t have a leg to stand upon when they inevitably try to do this to the rest of us.”
Gbur’s threat—the eight-course teaching load will force many UNC professors to “pull up roots and look for employment elsewhere”—is not credible. The existing professoriate is complicit not only in what Schuman calls the “adjunctification” of college teaching, but in the perpetuation of redundant graduate programs, which turn out doctoral recipients who have little hope of ever landing tenure-track professorships.
As a result, there is not a single faculty opening, no matter how remote the location or obscure the institution, that does not draw dozens of highly qualified applicants. (Schuman has written that 150 Ph.D.’s apply for every opening in her field, German literature.) Professors and administrators can choose to either close down or maintain unnecessary graduate programs … but they can’t go on producing an excess supply of scholars and insist that the rest of the world treat this abundant resource as if it were a scarce one.
Tuition Supports Light Loads
What about the “flagship” public research universities, like UW Madison and UNC Chapel Hill? Won’t heavier teaching loads render untenable the model created by Daniel Coit Gilman, who turned Johns Hopkins into America’s first research university almost 140 years ago by insisting that teachers make the best researchers, and researchers the best teachers? Schuman points out that the McInnis bill applies to “all” UNC professors. As a result, she says, it will compromise the work of researchers finding cures for cancer, new treatments for burn victims, or doing cutting-edge work in molecular biology and engineering.
Her parade of horribles is selective, though. There’s not a single mention of the scholarly work undertaken by professors in social science and humanities departments. This omission reveals a vulnerability: if McInnis were to change his “all” to “some,” scholars in fields where the research does not yield clear or even comprehensible benefits would struggle to demonstrate why the flourishing of life in America requires the unabated flow of tax and tuition dollars to spare professors from teaching undergraduates 40 hours a week.
Most voters, in other words, have no trouble making a distinction between curing cancer and publishing an article in the Journal for the Study of Peruvian Folk-Dancing. Even if Gilman’s research university model is crucial for the former, we are not compelled to revere the way it sustains the latter. As Megan McArdle has argued, original scholarship in many hyper-specialized liberal arts fields is valuable only to a handful of other scholars in the same field. “Basically, these people are supporting an expensive hobby with a sideline business certifying the ability of certain twenty-year olds to write in complete sentences.”
If that sideline business were a roaring success, there would be an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it argument against requiring liberal arts professors at public institutions to teach more and research less. But the business is far from successful. A survey of 400 employers conducted last year for the Association of American Colleges & Universities found that only 27% considered recent college graduates “well prepared” in the area of written communication. Similar proportions, between 24 and 29%, were impressed with graduates’ ability to analyze and solve complex problems; locate, organize, and evaluate information; think critically; and work with numbers and statistics.
On the bright side, the survey also found that solid majorities of college students about to graduate rated themselves very highly on every one of the qualities the employers found lacking. It appears that when young Americans spend several years in the presence of our professors, they end up with very little in the way of useful knowledge and skills, but a robust, unwarranted sense of entitlement. That’s a funny coincidence, one some professor should investigate during a sabbatical.
About a third of UW-Madison’s revenues come from overhead from grants IIUC. If professors stopped doing research, that money would dry up. How would it be replaced?
“Gbur goes through a detailed explanation of the time needed to teach an undergraduate course: preparation, delivery, testing, grading, office hours. His conclusion? Teaching four courses a semester would be impossible without … working 40 hours a week.”
This is hilarious.
Prep time of an additional course = 0 if faculty, as most would do, simply teach another section of a course they are already teaching.
Deliver time–yes. Teaching another 3-hour course means another (oh the humanity!) 2.5 hours per WEEK in the classroom.
Testing, grading–extra cost = 0 or VERY close. Why? Because 99% of the faculty give fill-in-the-dot exams. And that increasingly rare college prof who does give essay, critical thinking exams? At schools like UNC Chapel Hill, those exams are graded by grad students. Bottom line, the marginal testing/grading cost of 1 more course is zero.
Office hours—the likely outcome is that faculty would NOT increase office hours with the addition of 1 more course. Universities do not have rules that tie office hours to # of courses taught or to hours in the classroom.
Professor Gbur doth protest (and lie) too much.
Bottom line: large numbers of college professors simply do not want to be bothered with teaching.
I would also add, if Scott Walker had a clue about where money is really being wasted, instead of attack teaching and research — which presumably is the main purpose of the university — he’d be attacking the administrative bloat which pervades American higher education, undoubtedly UW included.
Fortunately his attack on UW seems to have boomeranged.
The fundamental question is whether or not professors at state universities should do research. The fact that some professors — a small minority — do work of dubious value does not answer that question. It only means that mechanisms should be found to address that problem — a problem arising from poor hiring and tenure decisions, not from the existence of research itself.
Since the Middle Ages, universities have been places of both teaching and research. A state can make a decision to eliminate research, but it should do so clearly and openly, recognizing that it is rejecting this Western tradition.
Eliminating research gives students more access to faculty, but it means that they are no longer learning from scholars, which was the whole idea in the first place. They are not learning from faculty actively engaged in the material (and, in some cases, getting to publish papers with their professors); they’re getting more high school, or glorified community colleges. Perhaps that is all that some students deserve. But we need to recognize this decision.
Of course, eliminating research means eliminating graduate programs, which can only function with active scholars as faculty. (Again, that’s the whole idea.) Perhaps some states wish to eliminate state-supported graduate programs. But, again, they need to recognize their choice and make it openly.
Boy, 40 hrs a week teaching, breaks spent prepping for the next term, summers spent doing scholarly work gratis. Actually, a course well taught takes more than 10 hrs per week, even if it’s been done several times before.
These schools are soon going to be out of the research business — there are plenty of other schools that want the dwindling federal research money.
I only hope that these politicians will get thrashed for their attacks on their states’ public universities. From what I hear, Walker is already fading in Wisconsin because of his attack on UW. Somehow, people are smart enough to know that this savage attack on their excellent state university is going to hurt the public that it has served very well for a very long time.
I for one will find it very hard to vote for Scott Walker, if the choice comes to that.
As a last remark, I have to wonder how many courses William Voegli has taught lately?
And, I’m happy to say, I dropped my subscription to his journal years ago. Good decision!
Perhaps the depression was getting the better of me, and I felt helpless to prevent
it. You sit up a little straighter and glance toward the driver’s side window.
Knowing when and more importantly, when not to step on the Gas is an integral part of Learning
to Drive.
Well stated and completely agreed!
The one thing I could add is that tenure and low teaching loads may be desirable for those working at the research frontier, to mitigate the personal risk this involves. But teaching the vast majority of undergraduates, including the best upper-division, is nowhere near the research frontier. Further, with sincere apologies, does the research frontier on Shakespeare or Goethe matter? And even further, without apologies, does the research frontier on Modern Film matter?