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Putting
Teaching To the Test
For
all its prominence as a research university, Yale maintains a powerful
reputation as an institution dedicated to undergraduate teaching.
But who does the teaching and how well are becoming more hotly debated
as the price and the competition increase.
October
1996
by Annie Murphy Paul
Calvin
Trillin '57—the writer, humorist, and former Yale Corporation
member—remembers that as a "boy from the Midwest" arriving
in New Haven in 1953, he was "bowled over" by the professors
he encountered
—especially Maynard Mack of the English department. Mack, recalls
Trillin, was one of a group of professors who were known as "the
spellbinders" because their lectures were so engrossing. "They
had to give their classes in the Law School auditorium, because
that was the only place that could hold all the people who wanted
to hear them," says Trillin. "A lot of the students who
came weren't even enrolled in the class." As a junior, Trillin
was able to take a seminar with Mack, and he vividly remembers the
professor's teaching of Shakespeare. "Mack was just smarter
than everyone else," recalls Trillin, "and could explain
it all better."
Since 1887, when the
growth of Yale's graduate and professional schools justified a claim
on the title "university," Yale has instead preferred
the designation "university-college," reflecting its aspiration
to offer the best of both such institutional types: the resources
and scholarship of an international research university, and the
intimacy and attention of a small liberal arts college. Few questioned
the label 40 years ago. Evenas Mack (now a professor Emeritus)
was leading Trillin through Hamlet and Macbeth, Cleanth Brooks and
Robert Penn Warren were constructing a "New Criticism"
of English literature, James Tobin was analyzing the effects of
patterns of saving and spending on the market, and Lars Onsager
was doing the ground-breaking work in theoretical chemistry for
which he would later win a Nobel Prize.
Today, Yale's long tradition
of teaching remains intact, especially in comparison with other
large research institutions. (That was acknowledged most recently
in the number-one ranking conferred on Yale last month by U.S.
News & World Report in its annual survey of the nation's
best colleges.) But some worry that the place that nurtured Mack
and Trillin may be threatened by complacency. Says Yale College
dean Richard Brodhead: "A place like Yale that values undergraduate
teaching has had to work very hard to keep it a priority."
Tight budgets, mounting competition with other universities, changes
in age discrimination law, and the increasing use of graduate
students in the classroom have made teaching of the kind that
Trillin experienced an ever-more precious commodity. As the price
of a Yale education continues to rise—this year's term bill is $28,880—parents
and students alike may well wonder: Is it worth it?
Chief
among their concerns is the perception that professors now spend
more time on research than they do on teaching.
It is not an idle worry. Indeed, the emphasis on scholarly productivity
that was already part of the academic scene in Trillin's undergraduate
days has only intensified. The increasing globalization of academia
and the flow of information facilitated by computers have helped
make scholarship, rather than teaching, the basis of any university's
national and international standing. Yale's reputation as a place
to receive knowledge depends more than ever on its faculty's ability
to advance that knowledge, an endeavor that demands increasing amounts
of time and resources. And while the University still insists that
all of its faculty teach undergraduates, its expectations must stay
in line with those of peer institutions. "If Yale were to demand
significantly more teaching from its faculty, it could really hurt
us in the competition for the best scholars," says political
science professor Rogers Smith.
Not surprisingly, perhaps,
the number of classes taught by Yale professors has declined over
the past 40 years, largely to make time for research. Nor is scholarship
the only drain on professors' time. A lengthening list of professional
duties—committee service, conference attendance, dissertation advising—also
competes with the classroom. Greater competition for fewer resources
has forced many faculty members in the sciences and social sciences
to spend more time on grant proposals, and less on undergraduate
teaching and advising.
Sarah Samson '97, a
history major, says that she's been disappointed by the lack of
close faculty-student interaction at Yale. Although she's had no
trouble getting professors to answer specific questions, she says
that she has not been able to find what she really seeks—a mentor.
"Yale is a great place to be if you know exactly what you want:
It's all there for the taking," she says. "But it's harder
to find someone who will get to know you and help you find out what
you're interested in. Professors just don't have the time."
Samson appears tobe
in the minority, but as the demands on professors' time multiply,
faculty must often rely more heavily on the assistance of graduate
students, giving rise to another worry about contemporary college
education: that parents are being asked to pay more than $100,000
to have their children taught, not by Yale's academic stars, but
by other students. Brian Fischkin '98, a political science major,
complains that most of his T.A.-led discussion sections are "a
waste of time" and actually "detract from the focus and
message of the lectures." Says Fischkin: "Teaching assistants
often don't have a strong enough grasp of the subject matter to
be teaching it to anyone else."
A spotlight
was turned on that concern last January, when a group of Yale graduate
students threatened to withhold undergraduates' grades if the administration
refused to negotiate with them as a union. Although
the efforts of the group, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization
(GESO), failed to achieve its goal
of union status, its agitations—including a January 10 rally
at which 137 people were arrested—called national attention to
its complaints. GESO members argued that graduate students at Yale
are overworked and underpaid, that they spend more classroom hours
teaching than full-time faculty members—to classes that are too
large—and that they get little or no teacher training. Many of
the group's claims were vigorously contested by the Yale administration.
Dean of the Graduate School Thomas Appelquist says that graduate
students do only a fraction of the teaching in Yale College, and
Dean Brodhead adds that "section sizes are actually at a historic
low." But some professors, while deploring the group's tactics,
were privately sympathetic to GESO's protests. "We have gone
too far in the direction of graduate student teaching," concedes
Gaddis Smith, the Larned
Professor of History. "The faculty needs to be teaching more."
Smith, a member of the
Class of 1954, says that in his own undergraduate days at Yale he
was never taught by a graduate student. And he notes with evident
concern that graduate student teaching at the University has increased
at least tenfold since the early 1970s, when the use of teaching
assistants was significantly expanded. Graduate students are now
regularly employed to teach the sections that were once led by junior
faculty or administrators with PhDs; they are often responsible
for teaching introductory foreign language and mathematics classes;
and some graduate students, along with an increasing number of "off-ladder,"
nontenured faculty, even teach their own seminars.
While some senior professors,
like Gaddis Smith, are willing to take on more undergraduate teaching,
others see in the faculty's vehement reaction to the recent grade
strike an entrenched resistance to the idea. "The faculty felt
that its own self-interest was threatened by the GESO strike,"
says Rogers Smith. "Professors don't want to have to do more
teaching and grading."
Rogers Smith agrees
that undergraduates should be taught by more professors and fewer
graduate students, but he thinks the switch can be made without
a marked expansion of faculty teaching loads. Smith would eliminate
very small classes (with fewer than five students) and very large
ones (with more than 300 students) from the curriculum, reducing
the need for teaching assistants and allowing professors to teach
students more efficiently. In the place of small seminars and large
lectures, he would institute classes of 30 or 40 undergraduates,
taught and graded entirely by faculty members.
Another
way to reduce faculty reliance on graduate students, says Smith,
would be to hire more professors
—but for the moment that seems unlikely. President Richard Levin
and Provost Alison Richard are
committed to eliminating Yale's current $4 million operating budget
deficit by 1997, and to executing a scaled-down version of the faculty
"restructuring" proposed by Benno Schmidt, Levin's predecessor.
Schmidt's controversial plan to cut Yale's faculty by 11 percent
over 10 years helped hasten his departure in 1992, but since then
the Levin administration has quietly begun implementing its own
program, intended to reduce the Faculty of Arts and Sciences by
6 percent. That goal may be met by the end of this year.
Schmidt's stringent
budget-cutting resulted in what amounted to a hiring freeze during
the last years of his administration. (His subsequent commitment
to hire new professors with a portion of Lee
Bass's $20 million helped ignite the controversy that led to
the gift's return.) Such constraints have eased somewhat: In this
year alone, 13 new full professors were hired. But a recently enacted
Federal law has held up other efforts to replace aging senior professors
with a larger and more diverse junior faculty. Since the law, which
prohibits mandatory retirement on the basis of age for tenured faculty members, took effect in January of 1994, perhaps 30 senior
professors who would have left upon reaching the University's previous
retirement age of 68 have instead remained on Yale's payroll. Their
salaries could have paid for several dozen new assistant or associate
professors. "There are too many old people still teaching,"
says John Blum, himself a retired Sterling Professor Emeritus of History.
"We need more young people in there, and we need to be able
to hire more women and minorities."
Blum proposes a revision
of the tenure system to address the problem of professors who fail
to pull their weight, whether in research or teaching. He would
offer faculty members a series of contracts over the course of their
working lives at the University: one five-year contract when they
start out, then two ten-year contracts during the prime of their
careers, then a final pair of five-year contracts, with the possibility
of annual renewals thereafter. Each agreement would be renewed if
the faculty member continued to research—and teach—well. This "bell
curve" of contracts, as Blum calls it, would guarantee professors
much of the academic freedom that tenure now provides, while still
granting the University a measure of control over its work force.
While a small college
may be able to make its decisions about hiring and tenure on the
basis of teaching alone, a university—by definition a research
institution—must strike a balance between the two pursuits. And
when Yale hires, promotes, and grants tenure to professors under
its present system, it is almost entirely scholarship, not teaching,
that determines the decision. Those who make such choices say that
research must come before teaching as a matter of institutional
priority, but they also face some more subtle difficulties. "We
try to keep a balance between research and teaching, but evidence
of teaching ability is much harder to ascertain," says Richard
Hartigan, Eugene Higgins Professor of Statistics and chair of a
committee convened last year to examine Yale's hiring, promotion,
and tenure policies (Yale Alumni Magazine, Nov. '95). Especially
when evaluating a candidate from another university, says Hartigan,
"we have to rely on second- or third-hand evidence—an administrator's
report of students' reports of a professor's teaching—whereas
the scholarly evidence is right there before us."
Even
when the University promotes from within its own ranks, its traditional
respect for the privacy and autonomy of professors discourages the
evaluations common at other schools. "As
a professor at Yale, you'll never get a visit from the chairman
of the department, sitting in your class and watching you teach,"
says Gaddis Smith, adding, "We just don't do that sort of
thing." Joel Rosenbaum, a professor of biology, confirms that
in his department, "we don't ask professors to teach a class
in front of faculty—though perhaps we should."
Even if such "try-outs"
were required, they might not be helpful in the long run. As Peter
Brooks, the Tripp Professor of Humanities, points out, the real
value of teaching can be slow to appear. "Teaching assessments
always risk taking too short a perspective," he says. The ideal—but
impossible—way to measure teaching ability, says Brooks, would be
"to ask people 25 years out of college: Who really changed
your life?"
Students currently enrolled
at Yale, however, often share a more immediate concern: that Yale's
involved tenure process, which places heavy emphasis on superior
scholarship, drives talented teachers to seek tenure-track positions
elsewhere. "Just because you can write a lot of books doesn't
mean you can teach your way out of a paper bag," wrote Doug
Regula '96 to the Yale Daily News last spring in a letter protesting
the denial of tenure to a popular young professor.
Yet it is precisely
Yale's prestige as a research university, counter administrators,
that allows it to attract professors who are both exceptional scholars
and excellent teachers. And the attrition of junior faculty, while
distressing to those who lose an admired teacher to another institution,
creates an invigorating flow of up-and-coming scholars throughout
the University. In fact, some argue, Yale's status as a research
institution yields a number of underappreciated benefits for teaching.
According to many Yale professors, the time they spend in the library
and the laboratory substantially improves their performance in the
classroom. "Research feeds directly into teaching," says
Jonathan Spence, Sterling Professor
of History and one of the nation's leading authorities on China.
"Every lecture I give is affected by the reading I did the
week before, even if it's just an aside during class or a new article
I assign to a section." Biologist Joel Rosenbaum also argues
that research makes his teaching more dynamic. "After 30 years
of lecturing, I'm still up late at night preparing notes for my
class the next day," he says. "I don't keep notes from
year to year. When you do that, it's all over."
Students may benefit
even further from a teacher's research if they can participate in
such work themselves, assisting professors in the laboratory, helping
them write scientific papers, or performing their own experiments.
"Some of the best research happening at this university is
being done by undergraduates," says Mark Reed, a professor
of electrical engineering and applied physics. Out of his own grant
funds, Reed paid for one of his students, senior Dan Green, to continue
his research in New Haven over the summer. Green, who is examining
the electrical properties of the individual atom, says that independent
lab work has been an important part of his Yale education. "With
an experiment that you do for class, there's an answer, and you're
supposed to find it," he says. "When you do research,
nobody knows the answer yet, or even if there is an answer. You
learn what you know more completely on the way to what you don't
know." Reed, whom Green calls "eminently approachable,"
meets with his student every week to track his progress.
Graduate student teaching,
while it may have acquired a bad name in some circles, can actually
be a boon to undergraduates, at least at Yale. Richard Brodhead
notes that those unfamiliar with academia "often hear the words
'teaching assistant' and immediately assume the worst"—graduate
students who are inexperienced, indifferent, or barely fluent in
English. But Brodhead adds that the 100 or so T.A.'s he has employed
over the years to lead sections of his own literature classes have
been excellent teachers. "People forget," he says, "that
these are some of the most brilliant minds in the country, with
several years of graduate schooling already under their belts."
Gaddis Smith calls the use of teaching assistants "a good trade-off"
when paired with instruction from senior faculty. "What they
lack in experience, graduate student teachers make up in energy,
enthusiasm, and a greater rapport with students," he says.
Indeed,
graduate students are often enlisted to give undergraduates the
close attention that professors would be hard-pressed to offer every
student: intensive
help with foreign languages and with the basics of writing, for
example. And the use of teaching assistants has allowed a weekly
section meeting to accompany most lecture classes now taught in
Yale College, an impossibility in the days when the sections were
led by junior faculty.
But no matter what rewards
undergraduates reap from Yale's student teachers or from its status
as a university, the value of a Yale College education ultimately
depends on the teaching of its professors. Peter Brooks, for one,
insists that Yale is dominated—even today—by a College-wide "culture
of teaching" that, as he sees it, ensures that such instruction
is a familiar part of the undergraduate experience. Indeed, every
member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is obligated to teach
College students. And while that commitment is more expected than
enforced, it is, according to most members of the faculty, rarely
skirted. "It's a point of honor among professors," says
Louis Dupre, the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of Religious
Studies and recipient of this year's William Clyde DeVane Medal
for excellence in undergraduate teaching. "You could get away
with doing less than you are expected to do, but many of us are
instead inclined to do too much." Adds Richard Hartigan, "No
one escapes teaching here, and no one's trying to."
Reflecting this emphasis
on undergraduate education are the proportions of the College and
the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Yale's graduate school
is small compared to those of most major research universities,
and getting smaller. (A 10 percent reduction of the school is gradually
being implemented.) "Undergraduates are our bread and butter,"
says Brooks, and attention to their needs absorbs the bulk of faculty
teaching time. In fact, according to psychology professor Peter
Salovey, "graduate students are sometimes envious of all the
energy put into undergraduate education here." The downsizing
of the graduate school can only sharpen the faculty's focus on the
College, for there will be fewer graduate classes for senior faculty
to teach, and fewer graduate students to act as teaching assistants.
Full professors will necessarily be picking up the slack.
Their
responsibilities include teaching not only large lecture courses,
but also the small, specialized classes known as seminars. As
in Calvin Trillin's day, seminars still dominate the course of study
for Yale juniors and seniors, but even underclassmen have opportunities
to work closely with senior faculty. The 50-year-old Directed Studies
program, expanded this year, offers freshmen the chance to study
the classics of Western Civilization with faculty from a number
of departments; many introductory humanities classes are divided
into classes of a dozen or fewer students. It's in these intimate
settings, say professors, that much of the learning in Yale College
comes about. "Lectures and T.A.-led sections have their place
in the undergraduate experience," says Assistant Professor
of English John Rogers, "but in seminars the connection between
teacher and student is much more immediate. Students can communicate
quickly to their teachers what's interesting to them, what they
want to pursue further, what they don't yet understand." Adds
Rogers, "It's extraordinarily rewarding to teach a seminar,
because the work you put into preparing for class pays off right
before your eyes."
That work, say many
professors, is as meaningful a part of their academic lives as their
research. "In my view, teaching is the most important part
of a professor's job," says Xavier Sala i Martin, an associate
professor of economics. "It's critical that new generations
of young people learn well—that they increase their human capital,
as we economists say." Even the most senior professors find
satisfaction in sharing what they know. Sidney Altman, a Sterling Professor and Nobel-prize-winning biologist, regularly teaches
first-year students.
Sometimes the affinity
for teaching comes as a surprise. Mark Reed had taught only rarely
before he arrived at Yale from Texas Instruments in 1990. "I
came to Yale to build a research career," says Reed. "People
here weren't sure how well I could teach." He soon saw a need
for engineering instruction directed at students without a science
background, and with his colleague Roman Kuc he designed a pair
of courses called "The Electronic Society" and "The
Digital Information Age." The new classes proved enormously
popular, last year enrolling a total of 700 students. "I didn't
know that I would get so involved in teaching," says Reed.
"But I found that I really enjoy it. I enjoy watching my students
learn."
That might not be the
case at another institution, say some professors. "Yale is
a wonderful place to teach because the students are so eager to
be challenged," says John Rogers, who last spring won the Sidonie
Miskimin Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities. "Their
demands motivate me more than pressure from a department chair ever
could. I want to teach them as well as they deserve to be taught." |
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