Over the last thirty to forty years, higher education in America has viewed contributions to research as an essential part of its mission. Professors are expected to participate in shaping their scholarly fields, and students are expected to learn not just the wisdom of the past, but how to produce knowledge in the present. At large universities, though, the research function often seems to dwarf the dedication to undergraduate education. At several of the Ivies and other schools that compete for academic prestige, senior faculty often have little to do with teaching those preparing bachelor degrees, and graduate students or other part-time instructors wind up taking on the bulk of college teaching. The tenured professors work mostly with graduate students, preparing them for careers that, too, are expected to center on research.
In recent years the folly of this system has become increasingly evident: there are few tenure-track jobs for the graduate students being trained to work in the most specialized domains, and undergraduates are often left to wonder how courses taught by these narrowly trained specialists are supposed to connect to their lives after college. As smaller institutions emulated the research universities, the publish-or-perish mentality became a core part of faculty culture, with specialized journals publishing for small groups of colleagues offering the most professional prestige.
There has recently been plenty of strong criticism of the cultivation of esoteric research in higher education. Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus have argued that universities are wasting resources and failing students, in part because of the premium put on faculty research rather than teaching. Hacker and Dreifus have been teaching in New York for decades, and they have also been prolific authors. But in their recent book, Higher Education?, they argue that schools have been distracted from their core educational mission by adding on the obligation to contribute to scholarly fields.
Mark C. Taylor, Wesleyan graduate, long time professor at Williams and now Chair of the Religion Department at Columbia University, has recently published what he calls a "bold plan" to respond to the contemporary crisis on campus. Noting how the focus on research has driven a wedge between faculty and student interests, he diagnoses "the identification of specialization with expertise." Narrow specialization should be the great enemy of educators because it leads to silos of inquiry with little opportunity for surprising intellectual exchange. But specialization has gone hand in hand with professional prestige, something that schools have been chasing for decades.
Taylor's main argument is that our overspecialized colleges and universities are increasingly divorced from the hyper-connected world defined by "webs, not walls." Networks of interconnectivity rather than isolated expertise are defining our world, and higher education will become obsolete if it doesn't plug into these new forms of knowledge creation. (I've taken my comments here from my review of the book in the LA Times.)
How are these critiques relevant to the future of liberal learning in this country? The search for prestige through specialization, whether it takes place in athletics or the English department, can often take place at the expense of a well-rounded experience for undergraduates. However, the "virtuous circle" of teaching and research can powerfully affect both the form and content of higher education to benefit students. The key is being able to show the relevance of the research to undergraduates. Many of my Wesleyan colleagues have been deeply affected in their scholarly work by what they learn from students in the classroom. Similarly, our students know that we continue to learn with them through the work we do in our fields... we are not just imparting information to them that somebody else imparted to us.
Some of best teachers at America's liberal arts colleges are also the most serious and original researchers, and all of us remain dedicated to undergraduate education even as we produce scholarship for specialized audiences. So, even though I think Hacker, Dreifus and Taylor are right to worry about severe overspecialization (with its associated bureaucracy) in certain fields, I think they might say more about the positive feedback loop that can connect the classroom and the archive, the science lab and the lecture hall. And we should note that these contemporary critics of education are themselves also researchers, and this hasn't seemed to undermine their professed love of teaching.
Whether it is in economics or in religious studies, art history or computational biology, we want our faculty and students to translate the specific things they learn into terms that have broader relevance. I recently saw a great example of this in a poster session for young biochemists. Sure there was specialization, but there was also an understanding of what is at stake in the experiments and an ability to describe the work for the non-expert. Showing a wonderful talent for translating their efforts in terms even I could understand, students explained to me their work on RNA, on modeling the structure of particular carbon based molecules, and on the translation of proteins. My head was spinning, but they showed me what was at stake in the work they were doing.
There are plenty of things to improve in American higher education, but we must be careful to preserve our ability to educate students broadly and deeply by engaging faculty in projects that are both scholarly and pedagogical. Specialization without the capacity for translation can undermine effective teaching. But many small colleges and universities do promote "intellectual cross-training" precisely because our professors remain active scholars, scientists and artists, exemplifying a love of learning that can be made powerfully relevant to their undergraduate students.
The precipitous decline in quality of education and grade hyper-inflation are already evident.
Your "Virtuous Circle" in Huffington got us thinking. You are quite right. Since we regard teaching as Job One, we should at least have looked for areas and ways where research could enhance instruction. Especially at the undergraduate level.
And then I remembered back to my time at Cornell, when I was engaged in a modest research project, and melded it with what a senior was doing as his honors thesis. Yes, I was the guiding spirit. And he contributed a lot of intelligent and imaginative work to good effect. A year later, I published it in a scholarly journal, under both our names. The young man went on to become a professor of political science at UCLA.
Should I have mentioned that in our book? Good point.
So, as you say, good teachers should be able to use their ongoing research as a learning experience, not least for liberal arts undergraduates. Even a class of twenty,
properly supervised, could make it a team effort. I would only add that it has to be designed differently, from the more elaborate projects in which graduate students are enlisted in a discipline.
Claudia and I are making notes for a new closing chapter to the paperback edition. In it, we will dilate on the many things we've heard and learned since we wrote the book.
Your good comments will be included.
Sincerely, Andrew Hacker, co-author with Claudia Dreifus, "Higher Education?"
Less than 20% of people learn well with the academic model-books, papers. discussion.
The main purpose of higher education is to have contact with extraordinary scholars people who live the life of the mind.
Lectures were once necessary before print when the lecture became a book.
Community colleges do a fine job for the practical and careers.
Research universities are intended for that 20% not for everyone.
Knowing about the more abusive tenured faculty usually keeps the kids out of their classes too -- I have seen classes where the prof was listed as "TBA" when they had already been assigned to a particularly unloved tenured faculty members.
In trying to keep this short, and to the point many may view our education as 'rack a tiers'. Now the lower tiers of our society have started home schooling and localized education to what the child or student wants to be while they are young. With that in mind, with carefull observations, that child is then supported with all the tools neccessary to accomplish their goal as an artist, doctor, or whatever. Everything else is taught around that, math, science etc...
In summary, the child is built from the inside out, not like a welfare cadillac ie, outside in. These new schools, also focus on what the children eat, and on teachers that are hired not only to teach, but to have [unconditional love] for their students.
Former President Reagan's top senior advisor on education [Charlotte Iserbyt] said it best, "If you ask the think tanks in education if the schools were for learning, they would laugh in your face". If educaters fail to see what they are doing, the system will collapse as it should.
There is one imperative right now, and that is to rebuild prosperity while we still have access to the required capital assets. Everything else takes a back seat. We need engineers, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and business managers who can lead that effort (but of course, it's almost too late to start training them now).
While we live in the past, the future is impatient.
Read more on the financial crisis here:
http://brainmindinst.blogspot.com/2008/12/financial-crisis-higher-education.html
You also might have mentioned the kids who only come on days their PO's visit, and the number of kids in gangs, which seem to ebb and flow from year to year... But you're right about the SPED kids, and underestimate (for me) the number of LEP kids.
Shocking when some of these kids don't do well on tests, huh?
(Fanned.)
"The tenured professors work mostly with graduate students, preparing them for careers that, too, are expected to center on research."
The vast majority of our graduate students do not end up at R1 (research-intensive) schools. They work at small liberal arts colleges, 4-year public universities, and community colleges. Research is clearly important and adding to a collective body of knowledge is an important goal. However, most college professors spend the majority of their time teaching and mentoring undergraduates. Unfortunately, we do too little to teach pedagogy, new instructional technologies, catering to different learning styles, one-on-one mentoring, etc, etc. K-12 teachers have to learn how to conduct themselves in a classroom before taking on their first class. When I started teaching undergraduates, I was thrown into a classroom with little preparation. That needs to change. We certainly need to preserve a research culture at our universities. But at the same time far more can be done to teach the teachers how to teach.