Teaching: To Profess with a Passion

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The bets are down: the U.S. is relying more heavily than ever on college education to shape its destiny. To get into college, kids claw for high marks even in grade school. Parents scratch for dollars, plunge into debt. State taxes soar. Yet how the bet comes out depends on solitary teachers in secluded classrooms—and the number of bored, hostile and inadequate college teachers adds up to something between a serious concern and an outright scandal.

Almost every college administrator is aware of what HEW Secretary John Gardner has termed "the flight from teaching." A massive drive is under way to "rediscover students" and "bring back teaching"—academe's typically bland admission that many colleges have lost sight of all those young bodies bulging their buildings.

Yet the true professor's impulse to teach, like the true physician's impulse to heal, cannot long be squelched, and every campus embraces men who are living models of what good teaching can be.

Burning Hot. In a student poolroom hangout on the fringe of the congested urban campus of the University of Southern California, Associate Professor of Business Administration Anthony Athos, a onetime auto-factory worker with "the lowest mechanical aptitude General Motors ever tested," peers over a pitcher of beer and explains that a teacher must have "that divine tension. You've got to be concerned—but not dedicated, which sounds as if you're doing something you think you ought to do. For me—Christ, it's fun!"

Athos, at 32, is an academic oddity who entered Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration from Gen eral Motors Institute without an under graduate degree, and he dates his own undedicated concern from "the day 1 stepped off the subway and came up into Harvard Square." At U.S.C., Athos has devised a course called "Organizational Behavior," now required of all business-administration majors, which raises ethical and psychological issues, and has made Athos what one colleague calls "the hottest commodity ever to hit our business school."

Cigarette in one hand, coffee cup in the other, Athos strolls into the center of his classroom's U-shaped rows of seats, and begins to toss out pointed questions in a disarmingly gentle voice. He poses, for example, the problem of how three older men feel when a boss promotes a youngster over them. To a student who argues that feelings don't matter, only success does, Athos says crisply: "I would like to suggest that you talk an ideology that you do not practice—even in this classroom." To another: "You think that the boss knows what he's doing because you identify with the boss, as you do in every other case." To a third: "Why do you say these other three guys are just lazy bastards?"