Teaching: To Profess with a Passion

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One likely way to improve teaching would be to get the best minds back into the classroom. Universities cannot, and should not, ignore their duty to pioneer knowledge and put that knowledge to work off-campus, but a generation of bright, skeptical students rates attention too. It will take tough deans and presidents to check what Yale College Dean Georges May calls this "corruptive" influence of "the high priests of research in their white smocks." Ohio University's President Vernon Alden is doing it by promoting good young teachers, even without Ph.D.s or published research, over the heads of their elders to full professor rank.

Open Doors? Teaching could also be improved by leaders who simply open classroom doors and base promotions, in part, on what goes on inside. Yet even those teachers who cry most about not being rewarded for their teaching often consider their classrooms a sanctified place in which the outsider not only cannot comprehend the ritual but even defiles the proceedings by his presence. In reality, it is no great trick to determine whether a teacher speaks clearly, presents relevant material logically, conveys enthusiasm.

Cornell's Perkins contends that every new teacher should be monitored periodically by a full professor for at least three years. A faculty committee at Berkeley has proposed that teaching evaluation based on classroom visits by colleagues be made a formal part of promotion procedures. Harvard is taping the sections taught by many of its graduate teaching fellows, who then discuss the tapes with each other. Antioch and other colleges take movies of professors so that they can see their own visual impact—and the experience is often traumatic.

One beguiling way to sharpen teachers would be to return to the 13th century system of student guilds in Italy, where students paid, hired and fired the professors. That is hardly likely, but student critiques of professors and their courses are sweeping the campuses. Some 400 are either in operation or planned. Most are solely for the guidance of the individual teacher, but about 50 are published campus-wide—and these can be far more painful to professors than any judgment by their peers.

Harsh Judgments. The Berkeley critique, called Slate, says of Assistant Professor Robert Haller's English 142B: "The class is bored and he is bored. He takes an hour to say ten minutes' worth." Yale's complains that Political Science Professor David N. Rowe "is so firmly convinced of the absolute Tightness of his beliefs that he does not permit students to question or challenge him." Harvard's guide quotes a Cliffie who rates Chemist Louis Fieser as "only a little less articulate than my pet hamster."