Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [65]
New Skills for a Changing Workforce
As I have said, implementing the transformation of America’s higher education system will require creating new possibilities for research and publication and recalibrating the balance between research and teaching by forming faculties that are more flexible, creative and productive. Reform is dependent on recognizing the implications of the inequitable distribution of wealth between elite colleges and universities on the one hand and, on the other, institutions with very limited resources. While a significant redistribution of financial assets is hard to imagine, a redistribution of intellectual and cultural capital is possible—and necessary—for the future health of higher education. Professors at wealthy elite schools have light teaching loads and ample time and support for research, but educators at most public and private schools labor under arduous working conditions with burdensome teaching responsibilities that leave them little time to keep up in their fields, to say nothing of conducting research and writing for publication. Though most graduate programs give students a rigorous specialized education, this training does not prepare people for a workplace in which there are few, if any, positions in the field they have studied. Ironically, many graduate programs still convey a system of values that privileges research and publication at the expense of teaching. In research universities and even many colleges, status is measured not only by how much a person publishes but by how little one teaches. A friend recently told me that when, a few years ago, he received a prestigious teaching award while he was working at an Ivy League university, a senior colleague advised him not to list the award on his résumé because it would demonstrate that he was not a serious enough scholar. When teaching is neither valued nor rewarded, its quality inevitably suffers.
The problem, then, is both the quality and the quantity of teaching—some people are teaching too little and others are teaching too much. Faculty members with lighter teaching loads are supposed to be conducting research and publishing original work, but only a few are truly productive; faculty members with heavy teaching loads do not have enough time to read books, let alone write them.
The emphasis on research and publication in the hiring, promotion and tenure of faculty members is a relatively recent phenomenon. As I have explained, when the job market dried up in the early 1970s and scores of people were pursuing each position, the publication of articles and books became an easy way to discriminate among the candidates. That was a mistake that led to the current imbalance between teaching and research. Publishing became desirable even if you had nothing worth saying. All this publishing led to the founding of more journals and the expansion of university presses, which, in turn, made it easier and easier to publish. Universities and many colleges began to measure their prestige by the quantity of the scholarly production of their faculties, not necessarily the quality. As publication became a symbol of achievement, ambitious colleges and universities adjusted teaching loads downward to enable faculty members to spend more time on their research and writing. The underlying assumption was that all faculty members not only can but actually do conduct original research and publish their results. The data do not support that assumption. In fact, very few professors remain productive throughout their careers, and many publish little or nothing after receiving tenure.
The two institutions where I have spent my professional career are typical of most top-tier schools in this respect. At Williams and Columbia, the standard full teaching load is two courses a semester or four courses per year. Each course meets once a week for two and a half hours, twice a week for seventy-five minutes or three times a week for fifty minutes. The Williams semester is twelve weeks and the Columbia semester is fourteen weeks.
This means that the