Professors: The Crassest Opportunism

One cause of the growing shortage of college teachers is a "crisis in values" that has infected a generation of young scholars with "the crassest opportunism in grantsmanship, job hopping and wheeling-dealing." So writes John W. Gardner, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in his annual report.

Many professors, says Gardner, think that "students are just impediments in the headlong search for more and better grants, fatter fees, higher salaries, higher rank." Catering to these professors, universities often relieve them of almost all teaching. "Needless to say, such faculty members do not provide the healthiest models for graduates thinking of teaching as a career." Gardner insists that professors and college officials must "behave as though undergraduate teaching is important." Typically, they might emulate the salary incentives and status benefits that a few worried universities, such as U.C.L.A., are offering to faculty members who are notably engrossed with teaching undergraduates.