Continued Misunderstanding of the Function of Higher Education

In my free time my favorite thing to do run. I think I was drawn to research for many of the same reasons that I love running. You need to be somewhat crazy, you have to put in long hours of work for only small personal victories, only people who do the same thing as you, in order to excel you have to good at a number of seeming unrelated activities, and finally at the professional ranks you have to answer to people who have little understanding of the inner workings. Earlier this week I went to the Boston Marathon to watch my wife run (a PR in 3:17:23). As a spectator of the marathon, even though I was only watching people run 26.2 miles in 2 to 5 hours, I was actually watching the culmination of hours, months and even years of hard work and preparation. At the professional level, the men and women race winners were each awarded $100,000 for 2 hours of effort and similar to other professional sports, many mistakenly believe that they are only compensated for their time in the limelight. In run training, you have to combine hours of volume training, hours of race pace training, hours of speed work, hours of strength and form training as well as cross training, active recovery, proper diet and sleep. So instead of $50,000 an hour, if we only count the days elapsed so far this year, the athletes likely only made $76 an hour.

In my other field, in the past week, two examples of people with little understanding of higher education made a similar mistake in only paying attention to the limelight and forgetting everything else behind the scenes. In Iowa, a legislator introduced a bill that would have the professor with the lowest ratings in teaching fired while in North Carolina an education bill would mandate 4-4 teaching for all faculty. While the bill in Iowa died in committee the idea behind it shows almost no understanding of the role of faculty. Just as the two hours on the marathon course are just a sliver of what makes a marathoner, the three hours per week in one particular course are just a sliver of what makes a professor a professor. I value the importance teaching and have worked hard to gather feedback from my students throughout my career teaching but I am sympathetic to professors who struggle in the classroom. However while student evaluations are one of the only ways that teaching ability is assessed, this article discusses some issues with student evaluations and suggests that they may not be the best way (check out the comments as well).

In North Carolina, Senate Bill 593—“Improve Professor Quality/UNC System” would “ensure that students attending UNC system schools actually have professors, rather than student assistants, teaching their classes.” The bill asks professors at the research institutions of North Carolina to teach 4 courses a semester and ignores the fact that if tenured faculty are not teaching courses, its likely adjunct professors. Again while 12 hours in the classroom per week may not seem like much, its just the tip of the iceberg with lecture preparation, grading, and meeting with students. But this focus on teaching at Research I institutions ignores the fact that professors at these institutions are supposed to be creating knowledge in order to pass on that knowledge in the classroom. In my six years at research focused universities (Iowa, York and Toronto) I have met very few professors that were openly hostile towards teaching with most enjoying teaching (in the broader sense, including time outside the classroom). However, almost all of the professors that I know teaching 1-2 courses a semester have almost no time as it is. Few take time off, few sleep regular hours and few have hobbies outside teaching. Asking them to teach 4 courses but place the majority of their evaluation on their research will lead to research professors in North Carolina to leave in droves with no one looking to take their place (despite the huge oversupply of candidates).

If anything I think these two bills suggest that higher education needs to do a better job of communicating its role in society. College is not just a place for job training, so in order to avoid further commodification of higher education we need to not only communicate the importance of our research, but our teaching and engagement.

Edit: 4/27/15 One day after I write this, this article is published on the future of the American Research University. This passage echo's my sentiments above:

"Those of us leading or working in research universities, especially public ones, face the urgent imperative to articulate and give full-throated explanations of the extent to which university research not only brings economic and social betterment (through new medicines, policies, products, jobs, etc.) but also is crucial to the educational mission. It drives discoveries that can be commercialized to enrich innovators and their backers, and it ensures that those innovations will be deployed to sustain the vitality of our economy, our society, and our human values. Research is also a good in itself across the full set of disciplines and fields that constitute university life; it is an aptitude and skill that students, both undergraduate and graduate, learn in college that can be of lifelong value; and it is a force that generates new knowledge — and new modes of teaching and learning."