Letters: May 20, 1966

Excellence in the Classroom

Sir: TIME'S beautiful, stimulating and heartwarming cover story on great teachers [May 6] was an editorial jewel. It will undoubtedly stimulate teachers throughout the country to seek new levels of excellence in their own classrooms.

ALLEN A. RAYMOND

President and Publisher

Grade Teacher Magazine Darien, Conn.

Sir: The scandal of poor teaching is infinitely greater than you suggest. There is so much of it, the worst of it so awful, that house cleaning is imperative if our "quest for excellence" is not to become a bad joke. Tenure is a license for laziness and incompetence. Ph.D. degrees should have to be revalidated every ten years; excepted should be only those who publish significant results of their independent research, which, incidentally, should take care of the "publish or perish" nonsense. Also, the graduate student part-time instructor is much more valuable than you make him appear. He is an economic necessity; without him, many important elementary courses could never be taught at all. And he is often a truly excellent teacher.

RANSOM TAYLOR, PH.D.

Associate Professor of German

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, N.C.

Sir: TIME is wrong to think that tenure lowers the level of teaching; it raises it. Any institution that does not judge competence within seven years is not likely ever to do so. Forcing a decision leads to weeding out deadwood that might otherwise remain on sufferance. More important, without tenure academic freedom would be unrealizable; teachers with unpopular ideas could be dropped at any time.

Louis CROMPTON

Department of English

University of Nebraska Lincoln, Neb.

Sir: Berkeley's Schorske might be described in the words of Gibran in The Prophet: "The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness. If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind."

JEFFREY M. LULOW

Austin, Texas

Sir: It is a good thing Professor Miner likes to teach only small classes; this restricts the number of students receiving misinformation from him. Anyone who has read anything on evolutionary theory published in the last 20 to 30 years knows better than to make such remarks about the saber-toothed cats. Thirty-five million years ago, during Oligocene time, the saber-toothed cat pattern was essentially frozen. In some cats, the length of the saber was proportionately as great as or greater than that of the culminating species in the ice age. Thirty-five million years is a pretty fair length of time for a model to be in style. Let us hope Professor Miner has a better background in sociology than he does in paleontology and evolution.

J. R. MACDONALD

Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology

L.A. County Museum of Natural History Los Angeles