I promised to be more regular in posting on this site. Here is a copy of the email I sent to our Provost after her visit with the philosophy department this week.
Dear Dr. Sheer,
Thank you for visiting us to share views about where ECU is going. I thought I’d take a few minutes to try to restate what some of us see as the problem with plans to turn ECU into a high-powered research institution. I speak only for myself and not for Umit and Rodney, though in some ways what I will be saying echoes their thoughts.
The quality of our students is quite a bit lower than that of students at most high-powered research institutions. As our discussion revealed there is no realistic prospect of raising ECU’s admissions standards to anything like Chapel Hill levels. In fact, as you point out, it will be a challenge not to lower them. So the kinds of students we have now are the kinds of students we will have for the next ten years and any rational plan must recognize that as a fact.
Being a high-powered research institution means asking faculty to spend more time doing research and less time teaching. No one should ignore the fact that more time for research means less time for teaching. The question is: is it wise or appropriate to continue to transfer faculty time and effort away from teaching? In high-powered research institutions typically a large proportion of the teaching is turned over to graduate students in order to free up the regular faculty for research. Another way faculty resources are freed up for research is by building and filling large lecture halls so that more students can be taught with less investment of faculty time. This standard operating procedure works tolerably well under two conditions: 1) the undergraduates are reasonably good students and can learn independently with little help from the faculty, 2) the graduate students doing the face-to-face teaching are of high quality.
Unfortunately at ECU neither of these conditions obtains. Our undergraduates are not independent learners and the students admitted to our graduate programs are of marginal quality as well. To move to the high-powered research institution model is, in my opinion, irresponsible. The result will be, and to some extent already is, educationally disastrous. There is plenty of talk among faculty about how those who once regularly assigned papers are now moving to multiple choice tests. Larger classes means that fewer faculty have attendance policies. The decline in educational quality is largely invisible but it is real and it is the result of administrative policies that promote research over teaching. I hope you will seriously consider resisting the drive to turn ECU into a research institution.
Thanks again for your time and attention,
Richard Miller
Associate ProfessorPhilosophy
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5 comments:
Richard, as I apply for full-time teaching positions, I find myself torn by a related question: part of me wants to go off to a research institution where I can pursue my own interests, but I feel also feel called to teach. That is, teaching is the more important component of my identity, and research is really secondary.
Setting aside the practical questions aside of how ECU might attract different students, how do you see your identity as a Quaker philosopher around this question? Were ECU to successfully make this transition (which sounds unlikely), would you feel the need to go to a more teaching-oriented school?
Craig,
I don't see me leaving ECU unless I were to see the Possibility of moving to a Quaker school like
Guilford College. I think what is going to happen at ECU is that we will continue to try to transition and in the process push faculty to do more research and less teaching. I do like to spend time thinking about philosophy but not with a high priority on publishing. To publish alot it helps to write short and relatively shallow papers about XYZ criticism of one interpretation of one line of argument recently advanced by ABC. I recently finished the revisions on the paper I gave at Earlham this summer and sent it out to PPR. If I could get some philosophers interested in my idea of doing philosophy with the conscious intention of devising concepts that would be better designed for use that would interest me, but publishing papers just for the sake of ego doesn't appeal to me.
Richard and Craig,
Thank you for your comments. I too struggle with these issues. We, collectively, and whether we like it or not, seem to have structured things such that research and teaching are largely isolated activities, and in such a way that giving oneself over to one comes at the expense of the other. And in our careers we are forced to choose what it is we will serve. Moreover, on most scorecards, the “researcher” is taken as the true academic, who teaches only out of sad necessity, and the scholar who loves to teach and values teaching is appreciated, but for what he/she is: a second class citizen in the academic world. And this goes for institutions too (at least in Canada, perhaps things are a bit different in the U.S.): the research university is the real university, with the best faculty and best students, whereas the weaker professors have to settle for teaching the weaker students. Wo unto you who value teaching! Wo unto the stronger students, who have to teach themselves!
I am myself convinced that this way of sorting things out (which is itself something of a caricature; with a certain truth without being true) is itself a perversion of what should be and might be. Without substantial success (for I’m as caught up in the system as anyone else), I have sought ways to draw my teaching and research together so that these activities are mutually reinforcing rather than antithetical to one another. I want to stimulate students and have them stimulate me; that to me is the point of the university. And I try to not be seduced by the prejudice that it is the research rather than the teaching that really counts. (I sometimes wonder whether this is not a propaganda perpetuated by university administrators who are more interested in attracting research dollars than they are in being faithful to students, whose tuition dollars are taken for granted, and whose education is readily sacrificed to the goal of more prestige for the university.) I try to remind myself that, while I have benefitted greatly from the specialized work of high-powered scholars, those who were most influential on me were not the jet-setters on speaking tours, but those professors who were present for me day after day, with office doors open, who had time to talk and work and think with me. Fortunately I do not have trouble getting this by my own (largely tuition driven) institution, which is more focussed on teaching than research (without ignoring the latter) - but in such institutions the reverse can occur, and research can be considered a luxury: encouraged, even insisted upon, ... as long as it doesn’t cost much, or take much away from teaching. But I find that without substantial and real time for research and writing my teaching becomes stale; when I feel myself getting bored I am sure that students will be too.
It seems to me that an overemphasis on either research or teaching ends up being detrimental to both, and to everyone: professors, students, and likely also the communities that we are supposed to be serving. But as the “choice” between the two seems to be built into the system, perhaps we need a re-think of the system itself. Perhaps we need a way of structuring academic work and the institutions that specialize in it that does not create for us this soul-splitting dilemma. That shouldn’t be too large a task for a Quaker/Philosophy blog!
Jeff Dudiak
Jeff,
I agree that teaching and research reinforce each other. Someone devoted 100% to teaching will dry up after a decade or so and have nothing new to offer students. Paradoxically by overly concentrating on teaching they will become a bad teacher. There is less of a danger of this in research. In most fields total focus on research just leads to better and better research. For a top-flight chemist I think the less time they spend in the classroom the better their research will be. But for philosophy I think that the roots of good philosophical research are nourished by teaching. The effort to try to explain philosophy to undergaduates is healthy. Among fellow philosophers one can get by with bandwagon arguments that will just make no sense at all to undergraduates. What I mean is if the work of XYZ is very trendy and discussed in all the journals, one can support a premise of your argument simply by saying "As XYZ has shown." Journal referees won't call you on it because you have supported the premise with "scholarship." But undergrads are not so easily fooled. They wouldn't know XYZ from their Aunt Matilda so one feels compelled instead to actually try to support the point with an argument and not just a scholarly reference. Another way that regular teaching tends to wring the BS out of our research is that we can't hide behind jargon in the classroom the way we can hide behind it in a published artilce. The brighter and more energetic of our students will demand that we define the terms in some meaningful way. Again journal referees will let the jargon go especially if it is properly documented with a nice footnote.
By the way I think American universties really do conform to the stereotype you mention. It's more truth than caricature unfortunately.
Bottom line is that ideally everyone should strive to be both a teacher and a researcher. We should be resisting this drive to divide the faculty up into star professors who do research and drudge professors who teach. I think that the public, to the extent that they see what is going on, is on our side and would resist this tendency too.
I really appreciate this discussion. When Richard says "but for philosophy I think that the roots of good philosophical research are nourished by teaching," I find myself very much agreeing.
One of the things I so like about teaching philosophy is that we in philosophy can have students read original source material. Philosophical writing is so rich that you can approach it at different levels. While in the classroom you are helping the students to understand it at a basic level, as you re-read it in preparation for class you can be working at the same text at a deeper level that is connected with your own research. I am almost always taking research-related notes as I prepare for class.
When I first started teaching, I was overwhelmed by all that there was in a text, and how it was impossible to show all of that to the students, but then I realized that some of what I was learning in my teaching was really for my research and not my students, while other things I was learning were for my students. Like Richard said, our students do call us to high standards of clarity, and that has been good for me and for them!
Now I am better at distinguishing between what my students need to hear, and what I need to save for my academic writing. Still I find myself pouring too much into a class session sometimes, especially if a student's question has sparked for me a new way of thinking about the material. When I catch myself getting too technical, I then apologize and tell the students, "ok, sorry about that -- I needed to work that one out for my own understanding -- but if this ends up in my published writing, I'll thank [or credit] you!" I think they appreciate being witness to this process of how thought gets further clarified and extended, even if they cannot follow it all exactly. I know I did appreciate these moments as a student. To catch a glimpse that there was more to this than I could yet comprehend was exhilarating and inspiring to me as a student. I think that at least some of my students feel this way too.
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