Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [69]
One of the primary contributions of this program would be to elevate the status of teaching within universities and thereby begin to recalibrate the balance between teaching and research. Research conducted at major universities and a select number of elite colleges is, of course, critical to the expansion of knowledge and all the benefits it brings. But the unrealistic requirement that everyone engage in original research and publish his or her results creates needless pressure and leads to much work and many articles and books that are of limited use, while taking teachers out of the classroom. Many people who are unable to publish significant work or uninterested in doing so are nonetheless outstanding teachers, but they are discouraged and dispirited because they rightly believe that their contributions are neither valued nor rewarded properly. A prestigious high-profile national program would make a public statement about the importance of teaching.
But public gestures, no matter how grand, are not enough; master teachers should be paid as much as leading researchers and writers. This increase in compensation should be reallocated from the salaries of faculty members who neither produce noteworthy research nor teach effectively. The combination of increased incentives and national recognition should help to elevate the status of teaching in colleges and universities.
The students attending the NTA would come from public and private colleges and universities where faculty members carry excessive teaching loads and don’t have the time or resources for continuing education, research or publication. Candidates for the Academy would be selected by their home institutions and approved by the director and board. All participants would be given at least a one-year leave from their teaching responsibilities.
Private donations and corporations would pay for the construction and maintenance of the physical plant of the Academy as well as all administrative expenses. Home institutions would contribute the salaries and cover the living expenses of the presidential fellows. The federal government would pay the salaries and provide a cost-of-living stipend for faculty members studying at the NTA.
Though the Academy’s activities would be headquartered in Chicago, there would be an outreach program based at different colleges and universities scattered throughout the country. Both presidential fellows and faculty students studying at the Academy would spend one semester in Chicago, where they would take three or four courses. The courses would conform to the reorganized structure of college and university curricula. Two would focus on the field in which the faculty members teach, and two would be interdisciplinary classes that would bring together people working in different areas. For example, a professor of English might join colleagues who teach art history, political science and economics in a seminar that explores the different ways in which representation functions in literary texts, artistic works, political movements and financial markets. The purpose of all of these courses would be to give overworked faculty members the time and support to study and reflect, and thus to keep them abreast of the latest developments in fields relevant to their teaching.
These classes would be supplemented by cooperative programs with other educational and cultural institutions in the city, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago