The Quiet Scandal of College Teaching
In 1925, student delegates from twenty colleges met at Wesleyan University to discuss a growing concern on America’s campuses: the poor quality of teaching. They decried dry-as-dust professors who filled up blackboards with irrelevant facts while students doodled, read novels, or dozed off. At larger schools, “section men” — soon to be known as teaching assistants — led aimless discussions or simply lectured, in a dull imitation of their elders. What was the point of going to college, the students assembled at Wesleyan asked, if you didn’t learn anything in class? “It is not that college boys have ceased to have a good time on the campus,” wrote a correspondent from the Boston Globe, one of several national newspapers that covered the conference. “It is rather that an increasing proportion of them are wondering what college is all about and why they are there.” The keynote address was delivered by James Harvey Robinson, a historian and one of the founders of the New School for Social Research, who dismissed most college teachers as “insufferable bores.” He urged the students to “stand up and kick” against poor instruction, because “college belongs to them.”
Belongs, indeed. In a higher education system financed mostly by tuition dollars, the customer is king. Colleges and universities have become full-service lifestyle stations, competing for students and catering to their every material need. Become your best self, the brochures proclaim; find the real you. But if you look at the pictures, you will see that everyone is somehow finding their best selves in really nice gyms, dormitories, and dining halls. Of course, there is enormous variation across our 4,700 degree-granting institutions; almost half of the student population attend community colleges, for example, which are almost never residential. But every school must fill the coffers and balance the books. And the best way to do that is to advertise “the experience” — that is, the fun you will have in those beautifully appointed spaces — or the opportunities they will provide to you down the road.
I, too, had a lot of fun in college, which opened doors to the Peace Corps, high school teaching, graduate school, and the professoriate. Yet it also opened my mind to strenuously different ways of seeing the world. Surely, college should be about something more than a four-year party that sets you up for a decent-paying job; it should improve the way you think, by exposing you to rigorous and imaginative instruction in the classroom. That is what the students who gathered at Wesleyan a century ago agitated for, and I think they were right.
It is hard to find that dissident spirit on our campuses right now. To be sure, students “stand up and kick” — to quote Robinson — about a wide range of issues, especially those related to race. Over the past five years, they have demanded compulsory diversity training for faculty, multicultural centers for minority students, limits on campus police, and much else. But they have not demanded better teaching. During the recent pandemic, students at dozens of schools petitioned for tuition discounts on the altogether reasonable grounds that Zoom classes were not as good as the regular kind. But there was no organized protest to improve virtual instruction or to replace it with in-person classes once that became possible. My own university invited students back to campus last spring but continued to teach them virtually. And most of the students seemed fine — or more than fine — with that. They got the college experience, albeit a socially distanced one. And they could take classes in their pajamas, interrupted only when their Wi-Fi went down or when their tech-challenged professors hit the wrong button.
I did the best I could, teaching all those faces in all those boxes, but it was not good enough. As a wide swath of surveys confirmed, students thought they were learning less in online classes than in face-to-face ones. That was especially true for low-income and first-generation students, who more often lacked reliable internet connectivity or a quiet place to work. To their credit, some institutions provided grants and other kinds of emergency assistance to these students. But the worries over “equity” were not matched by a broader concern about the overall quality of education that our institutions were delivering to everybody. Our campuses get riled up whenever someone alleges that a certain group does not have equal access to the educational goods of the university. But whether the university itself is good at educating does not seem to exercise us at all. “Nothing can straighten out the college question except good teaching,” declared a student leader in 1924 at Dartmouth, one of dozens of schools to witness protests over poor instruction. “Everything else is besides the point.” Today, college teaching is mostly besides the point. Almost nobody stands up and kicks about it; instead we sit on our hands.
This complacency has one over-riding cause: the research revolution, which began in the late 1890s and was kicking into full gear by the time of the Wesleyan conference. First at larger universities and eventually at smaller schools, institutions organized themselves around the production of knowledge. Replacing the avuncular ministers and doctors who taught at the nineteenth-century colleges, a new generation of specialists came to dominate the professoriate. They were “doctors,” too, but of a different type: they had earned a Ph.D. by performing original research in the laboratory or the archive. Whether they could teach was besides the point, as William James noted glumly in 1903. “Will anyone pretend for a moment that the doctor’s degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be a successful teacher?” asked James, who taught psychology and philosophy at Harvard but did not possess a Ph.D. in either field.
The question answered itself. Faculty were hired and promoted based on their research potential and achievements, not whether they could successfully educate the students in their charge. Indeed, a reputation for skilled teaching could be the kiss of death to an academic career. “Many college professors are suspicious of a colleague who appears to be a particularly good teacher,” a dean at Ohio State admitted in 1910. “There is a rather widespread notion in American Universities that a man who is an attractive teacher must in some way or other be superficial or unscientific.” If callow undergraduates could understand what you had to say, the argument went, how significant could it be?
In the 1920s, the undergraduates struck back. University enrollments skyrocketed, fueled by overall economic prosperity and — especially — by the revolution in gender norms: consigned mainly to women’s colleges before that time, female students flooded into the larger universities. That meant ever more crowded lecture halls where students strained to hear the professor so they could copy down what he said before spitting it back on a test. You didn’t have to be John Dewey to know that this was not a good way to learn. Echoing a quip attributed to Mark Twain (although there is no record of him saying it), students routinely described college as the place where the professor’s lecture notes passed to the student’s notebook without passing through the brains of either.
Others denounced the instructional system as “Fordized,” a ruthless human factory that mass-produced students just as Henry Ford built cars. In campus editorials and demonstrations, they demanded smaller seminar-style classes, independent tutorials with professors, and a range of other reforms to “personalize” their education. They also developed and distributed evaluation forms about their professors, a bottom-up student movement that was later appropriated by college administrators. Professors almost uniformly resisted such ratings, which brought a sharp rejoinder from the Cal-Berkeley student newspaper. “The Academic Senate is naturally concerned with the privileges of the faculty, but we are just as naturally concerned with the rights of the students,” it declared in 1940, after the Senate refused to endorse student evaluations. “Who is to protect them against poor teaching?”
The next great wave of growth in higher education arrived after World War Two, when the G.I. bill brought millions of new faces into American college classrooms. Half of American students in 1947 were military veterans, who did not suffer poor teachers gladly. “If pedagogic desks were reversed and the veteran in college now were given the opportunity to grade his professor, he would give him a big red ‘F’ and rate him as insipid, antiquated, and ineffectual,” one journalist wrote, taking note of veterans’ complaints about boring lectures, useless discussion sections, and so on. Nor did faculty members shy away from criticizing their own. In 1951, an English professor at the University of Detroit published a list of the “Seven Deadly Sins of Teaching”: failure to prepare, sarcasm, dullness, garrulity, tardiness, digression, and belligerence. A University of Missouri professor reduced the list to four bad-teacher types: Ghost, Wanderer, Echo, and Autocrat. The Ghost discouraged discussion and exited class right after the bell; the Wanderer rambled from one topic to another; the Echo simply repeated what was in the textbook; the Autocrat treated students as if they were inmates in a prison.
As in the interwar years, students demanded smaller seminars and discussion sections to leaven the anonymity and tedium of large lecture classes. But when the University of Chicago psychologist Benjamin Bloom played back recordings of seminars to student participants, asking them to reconstruct their experience, fewer than half recalled any “active thinking” at the time. In the era of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, moreover, professors and students were often reluctant to share political opinions in class. Universities responded by offering courses and training sessions to improve classroom dialogue and instruction. But most faculty members eschewed such activities, which they associated with early-childhood teaching and especially with the low-status, much-maligned schools of education that prepared America’s K-12 instructors.
So the universities moved in the opposite direction, creating gigantic televised classes that could — at least in theory — expose the “best” professors to thousands of students at the same time. By 1959, over a hundred colleges and universities provided nearly five hundred televised courses to half a million students around the country; at one institution, Penn State, more than one-quarter of the students were registered for at least one TV class. But the televised revolution fizzled over the next decade. Students found TV courses dull and impersonal, “giving the feeling that I was looking thru a window at the class,” as an Ohio University student explained. Likewise, faculty who taught TV courses said they missed face-to-face interaction with their students. They also feared that television would introduce a new spy in the form of “Cyclops, the one-eyed mechanical man,” as a worried professor wrote. Television was easy to record, capturing words that could be used against a teacher later. It also brought in wider audiences, who were in turn more likely to raise political objections to something that was said in class.
All these patterns repeated in the 1960s and early 1970s, the third and greatest era of growth in American higher education. Between 1960 and 1964 alone, student enrollment rose from three million to five million; by 1973, it topped ten million. Before World War Two, no American university had more than 15,000 students; in 1970, fifty institutions did. That meant huge lecture classes as well as more courses taught solely by teaching assistants, who received little or no preparation for the job. It also triggered protests by students, who denounced “mass classes” (as the giant courses were called) alongside racial discrimination, nuclear proliferation, and America’s war in Vietnam. During the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, the student leader Mario Savio blasted not just the university’s repression of political expression but also the poor quality of its classroom instruction. Echoing student demonstrators in the 1920s, Savio said Berkeley was a “knowledge factory” that regarded students as “raw materials”; he also said the university treated them like IBM computer cards, a more contemporary technological metaphor. (Do not fold, bend, or mutilate.)
In 1970, a presidential commission on campus unrest connected the nationwide spate of violent protests that year — including eight thousand actual or attempted bombings and seven thousand arrests — to weak undergraduate teaching. College professors “have become so involved in outside research that their commitment to teaching seems compromised,” the commission found. Unrest was most common at the largest universities, which had “failed [students] in a larger moral sense” by herding them into enormous classes taught by disengaged faculty members or inexperienced graduate students.
Have we failed our students, in a larger moral sense? I believe that we have, in four ways.
First, we have not evaluated or incentivized teaching in a meaningful or intellectually defensible fashion. I taught for twenty years at New York University, where I was observed in the classroom by a supervisor exactly once — in my very first semester. I am now entering my sixth year at the University of Pennsylvania and have not been observed at all. What does that tell faculty — and students — about how much we value teaching?
Defenders of the universities will point to student evaluations, which have become ubiquitous across higher education. Colleges and universities fought them for years but eventually capitulated, reasoning that the institutions could provide a more comprehensive and statistically valid analysis than the student organizations that had rated professors since the 1920s. Not incidentally, the evaluations also provided a ready answer when a regulator, a donor, or a parent complained that colleges were not taking teaching seriously enough. Student evaluations can indeed tell us important things about a college teacher: whether she returns work on time, whether she makes herself available out of class, and more. What they cannot tell us is whether her course is academically sound. That is a professional judgment, rendered properly only by fellow experts in the field. When I wrote a book on college teaching, I did not submit it to students for their evaluation; it was instead vetted by specialists in the history of higher education, who decided if I had something important to say. But my own college teaching is evaluated by people who are typically taking their very first class about the topic. If we truly believed in the importance of teaching, we would subject it to peer review in the same manner as our research. We instead allow ourselves to be judged almost entirely by novices, which again speaks volumes about what we really value.
Predictably, their judgments reflect all the cultural biases in our society: students rank men more highly than women, whites more highly than non-whites, attractive professors more highly than less attractive ones. Worst of all, student evaluations have contributed to declining student workloads and runaway grade inflation. About forty-three percent of college letter grades in 2011 were A’s, up from thirty-one percent in 1988 and fifteen percent in 1960. Over roughly the same years, the average amount of studying by people in college declined almost by half, from twenty-four to thirteen hours per week. In a recent survey of undergraduates at twenty-four different institutions, half of the respondents reported that they were not taking a single course requiring a total of twenty pages of writing. You cannot blame all of that on student evaluations, of course. But the faculty’s best route to a high rating is to scale back assignments and hand out lots of good grades, and this cannot be good for the academic or moral development of our students. In a study in 2010 at the Air Force Academy, where a mandatory curriculum allows for convenient natural experiments, professors who gave higher grades received higher student evaluations — but their students did worse in subsequent classes. Professors who graded more strictly got lower evaluations, but their students performed better later on. In short, student evaluations do not protect against poor teaching, as the Berkeley newspaper imagined. If anything, they make it even worse.
What about teaching awards? Don’t they make all of us teach better, or at least work harder at it? That has been another refrain of the universities, which instituted a wide range of teaching prizes following the student protests of the 1960s. While I was at NYU, I was fortunate to receive its university-wide Distinguished Teaching Award. There was a lovely dinner, at which my dean called me to the podium to receive a medal and then, in her kind remarks, she proceeded to tell the audience about the books I had written! That spoke volumes, too. The reason I got that job was my research, not my teaching. And everyone knows that they can earn more by publishing another book or article — and receiving the higher base pay that comes with promotion — than they can by winning a one-off teaching award.
Recent history is littered with instances of professors who won teaching prizes and were denied tenure; the more you exert yourself in the classroom, the less time you have to produce the research that actually makes or breaks you. All of this was already apparent a half-century ago, when the classicist William Arrowsmith noted that teaching prizes, devised to enhance the low institutional importance of undergraduate instruction, actually confirmed it. “At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests,” Arrowsmith told the convention of the American Council on Education in 1966. “If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the-year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests. There is no other way of setting about it.”
One way to do it would be to institute real professional preparation for college teachers. But here, too, we have failed our students.
This is not a new problem. In 1947, Harry Truman’s President’s Commission on Higher Education issued a ringing demand to make higher education available to any capable citizen who wished to obtain it. But none of that would work, the commission cautioned, unless America also taught a new generation of professors how to teach. “The most conspicuous weakness of the current graduate programs is the failure to provide faculty members with the basic skills and the art necessary to impart knowledge to others,” it declared. “College teaching is the only learned profession for which there does not exist a well-defined program of preparation toward developing the skills which it is essential for the practitioner to possess.” As a Rice University professor quipped, a new college teacher was like someone who was briefed about an airplane’s engine and then told to fly the plane. “Tragedy for the pilot is almost inevitable; in the case of the young instructor, the tragedy befalls his students,” he wrote.
Actually, it was hell for everyone. In his brilliant and heartbreaking memoir, Becoming a Man, the gay author and activist Paul Monette recalled the tedium and anguish of TA-ing a Yale freshman literature class in the 1960s for “overgrown high-school jocks who thought literature was sissy stuff.” He struggled in vain to convince them otherwise. “To them it was just depressing and weird, and what did they have to know for the final?” Monette remembered. “Only four years older than they and painfully out of my depth, I felt skewered by their boredom as they rolled their eyes at one another, all of us counting the minutes till the bell rang.”
By then, some of the colleges had been shamed into providing graduate students with a few non-credit seminars or training sessions about classroom instruction. Like teaching prizes, however, these efforts tended to confirm the same problems that they targeted. The Harvard biologist Kenneth Thimann began one such session by reminding participants that “the young teacher must always keep in mind the importance of doing individual research which is essential to his career,” which was surely one lesson that Harvard doctoral students did not need to learn. But he also urged them to get as much teaching experience as they could during graduate school, when the stakes were lower. Thimann told the story of an American medical officer stationed in Japan, where he diagnosed a soldier in his unit with appendicitis. Having never performed the requisite operation, the officer captured a stray dog and removed its appendix; after that, he felt confident operating on the soldier. Likewise, Thimann said, doctoral students should experiment on undergraduates to prepare themselves for teaching jobs later on. The message was clear: teaching isn’t brain surgery or rocket science, but it does require practice. Just do it for a while, and you will get the hang of it. As a professor friend of mind likes to joke, he learned to teach the same way he learned to have sex: on the job.
Today, most universities have established a bit more formal training for rookie teachers. At Penn, for example, TA’s take a three-day workshop before we throw them to the wolves. That is an improvement on what came before, but it is hardly a ringing affirmation of the importance of teaching. To get a Ph.D., you need to spend many years immersing yourself in a discipline so you can — ideally — contribute an original idea to it. And to teach a group of undergraduates? A class or two will suffice. Most of these sessions are sponsored by centers for teaching and learning, the tragic heroes in this bleak winter’s tale. Nearly all our colleges and universities have established such offices, which provide programming and consultation for faculty members as well as training for graduate students. I have deep respect for what the centers do, but they are fighting an uphill battle. Indeed, the very need to create a separate unit devoted to teaching demonstrates its diminished status, even at small liberal arts colleges. “A Center for Teaching?” an emeritus professor at Colby asked incredulously in 1992, after the college established one. “I thought that’s what the whole college was.” It isn’t, and it hasn’t been for a very long time.
Also consider this: a majority of college teachers are now adjunct or contract faculty. This is the third way we fail our students. If we really cared about their education, we would not slough it off on itinerant laborers. When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s, we were told that the old guard would retire and that we would get their jobs. That was right on the first count and wrong on the second one. Many professors did retire, but institutions replaced them by hiring adjuncts — at several thousand dollars per course — instead of new full-time faculty members. A fortunate few of us actually got hired onto the tenure track, which now feels like winning the lottery. Everyone else had to drive from campus to campus, picking up courses here and there and waiting for the real job (with a living wage, health insurance, and even a desk) that would never come. A quarter of part-time faculty rely on public assistance; some of them live in cars, and others have turned to sex work to make ends meet. In 2013, Pittsburgh newspapers reported the death of an adjunct professor who taught French for twenty years at Duquesne University. She never earned more than $20,000 in a year, so when her classes were cut she was rendered almost homeless. She died at 83, with no health insurance or retirement benefits.
You would think that an institution so exquisitely attuned to “social justice” would bridle at this radically unjust situation. But a professor quoting the n-word out loud from a James Baldwin book generates vastly more indignation than the systematic exploitation of adjuncts, which barely registers on the campus outrage meter. We have made our undergraduates into accessories to this crime, and it is not clear how many of them know or care about it. But they should care, because it harms their own education as well as the lives of their struggling instructors. Surveys have shown that adjuncts spend less time interacting with students than full-time professors do; they are also more likely to give multiple-choice tests, less likely to assign papers, and less likely to require multiple drafts of them. This is not because the adjunct faculty are lazy; it is because of the conditions of their labor. Many of them do not have offices, so it is hard for them to find space to meet with students. Most of all, they simply do not have enough hours in the day to perform the tasks that good teaching requires — planning lessons, grading essays, responding to emails, and so on — while commuting between several campuses and trying to publish research that might qualify them for one of the handful of tenure-track jobs that come up each year.
Nor do they have any job security, which might be the biggest injustice of all. If you are an adjunct, you can be let go at any time and for any reason. Maybe the enrollment in your course dipped, or a full-time faculty member decided she wanted to teach it. Or, perhaps, your school simply didn’t like what you had to say. In Virginia, an adjunct instructor who told his class that the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007 had been overhyped by the national media — because so many victims were white women — was fired the next day. An Iowa adjunct was dismissed for calling the Biblical story of Adam and Eve a myth; another part-timer in the state was not renewed after students complained that he had assigned them “offensive” course readings, including a book by Mark Twain. More recently, a New Jersey community college fired an African-American adjunct instructor after she went on television to defend a Black Lives Matter event that asked non-Blacks not to attend. That is a complicated position, and surely there are many reasonable objections to it. But now her students will not get to hear them, or her. She’s gone.
Which brings us to the greatest moral failure at our universities now: the narrowing of expression in our classrooms.
In a student survey released last year by Heterodox Academy, over half of the respondents said they were afraid to voice their opinions in class. White students were more reluctant to share their views on race; men were more reluctant to discuss gender; Republicans were less likely to speak about politics. Other research by the same organization shows that faculty — especially those who are centrist or conservative — are also biting their tongues, in class and outside of it. In a poll of 445 professors, over half said they believed that expressing a dissenting view at work could hurt their careers. People are especially afraid of getting slammed on social media and by university “bias response teams,” which allow anyone who believes they have been harmed by a comment to register an anonymous objection to it; this triggers an investigation by the institution, which is also charged with devising punishments for offenders. When asked why they did not share opinions in class, over one-third of respondents in the Heterodox student survey cited fears that they would be reported for violating a campus harassment or speech policy.
We have been here before, too. In the 1950s, a pall of fear and censorship fell over American colleges and universities. Back then, of course, people on the Left had more reason to worry: hundreds of professors were fired for alleged communist affiliations or for refusing to disclose them. But that understates the day-to-day toll of the Red Scare in college classrooms. “Now I no longer say what I think, but what I’m told to say,” one professor told a researcher. Topics related to communism and Soviet Russia were the most dangerous, even at smaller schools that proudly touted their liberal bona fides. “We don’t discuss Red China; instead, we discuss whether the student should wear shoes or not!” quipped a professor at the famously bohemian Antioch College. But many faculty members also avoided mention of the New Deal and other government social programs, which conservatives had tainted as “Red” in spirit. “Quite often I’m a little afraid to say anything about Social Security, etc. that may be interpreted as leftist,” a historian in Louisiana admitted. Students reported supposedly subversive comments by their professors to college administrators; indeed, a faculty member grimly observed that students were “the best Gestapo” on campus. “In American democracy it is our boast that we exalt the individual, provide for freedom of thought, cultivate the open mind, inculcate respect for differences of opinion, provide for freedom of the opposition, recognize the rights of the non-conformist,” one university official remarked in 1954. “But, as a general rule all of these procedures and noble ideals are violated or ignored in the college classroom.”
That is the case today, too, except fewer people decry or even admit it. When last year’s polls came out about student and faculty self-censorship, I did not hear a single major university leader bemoan the results. And now that Republican politicians are making hay over the matter, we are even less likely to acknowledge it. After Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a law requiring state higher education institutions to conduct surveys to see whether students and faculty “feel free to express beliefs and viewpoints,” an official with the American Association of University Professors deemed the measure “a solution in search of a problem.” In fact, it is a terrible solution to an all-too-real problem. DeSantis has suggested that colleges might have their budgets cut if they inhibit student speech, which could allow him to penalize any speech of which he disapproves; the measure also lets students record their professors during class and sue if they think that their “expressive rights” are being violated, a truly appalling specter to anyone who has actually taught in a college classroom. (Don’t like a professor’s politics, or even the grade she gave you? Sue her!)
But the answer is not to circle the wagons and pretend that everything is fine, when we know it is not. The noble ideal of free exchange is being violated or ignored in the college classroom, just as it was in earlier eras. Only now we are afraid to say that we are afraid. And if the professors do not speak up, the students will lose out. They are scared, too, and they are looking to us to set a different tone and example. I don’t begrudge the adjunct faculty for keeping their mouths shut: they have to eat, after all. But the rest of us have no excuse. Whenever I write a column denouncing fear and self-censorship on our campuses, I receive at least one appreciative email from a colleague. Sometimes they ask if I have received blowback; others will remark that I have guts, or another more intimate body part. My reply is always the same. I don’t have guts, or the other body part. I have tenure. What’s it for, really, except to say and write what is on our minds?
And what is college for, except to challenge the minds of our students? That was the question raised by the Wesleyan conference, a hundred years ago, and it is every bit as pressing today. We simply cannot fulfill our duty to our students unless we devote ourselves more rigorously to their instruction. Zoom will not save us, any more than television did in the 1950s; the internet has its uses, to be sure, but it cannot substitute for the real revolution that we need. That will require actual professional preparation for teaching and peer review of the same, plus a livable wage for everyone who engages in it. But it will also require us to raise our voices on behalf of freedom of thought, open minds, differences of opinion, and all the other small-l liberal values that have undergirded good teaching in all times and places. I know there are some students who believe we should restrict classroom inquiry and dialogue in the name of larger social goals, especially the struggle against racism. But those students are wrong, and we condescend to them when we refrain from saying so.
And maybe, just maybe, we can help inspire them to demand what is truly and rightfully theirs: an institution that puts undergraduate instruction first, above everything else. On a Zoom call during the pandemic, a student told me that she was despondent that Penn had brought students back to campus but was not teaching them in person. I told her that I felt the same way, but that my views didn’t much matter; the only ones that would count were, yes, those of the paying customers. If enough of them refused to send in their spring tuition until they got face-to-face classes, I suggested, they would get face-to-face classes right away. “Professor, this isn’t the ‘60s,” the student replied, smiling sadly. No, I thought, in some ways it is the ‘60s: the campus is again rife with agitations and causes. Why not this one? Students protested poor teaching in the past, I told her, and the future is up for grabs. She and her peers should seize it.
