In research universities, those faculty members who write and obtain grant proposals enjoy certain perks, including summer salaries, more travel, more space, and an extensive list of other benefits, great and small...Large introductory courses therefore become orphans cast out into the snow, sustained only by the good will of the transients who are their temporary custodians. To the successful researcher (in the financial sense) come fame, money, promotion, and prestige. To the good teacher comes the gratitude of his students...all the time I spend with these students I could be working on grant proposals. However, out of my 600 students, 114 are statistically at risk of not returning. If, through this personal attention, I "salvage" only five of those students, I will have recovered $250,000 in lost tuition. And I can do that every year. In my discipline, that is far more than I would ever be able to generate in grant overhead...Can faculty members be trained to be more effective teachers and so have an impact on retention? Absolutely. Instructional-development programs traditionally do just that. These offices are typically marginalized and token at research universities, without appropriate money, prestige, or appreciation. Faculty members typically have no official incentive to seek advanced training in teaching; in fact, they are often discouraged because of the disproportionate emphasis placed on research "productivity."
Student retention and poor teaching in introductory courses are chronic problems in higher education. But not all long-standing problems are the same. Some (we'll call them Type A) are essentially a matter not knowing how to solve the problem. Others (Type B) persist because people don't want to solve them.
Most big issues combine both elements, in unequal amounts. Breast cancer is a Type A problem; pretty much everyone wishes a cure could be discovered, and if it were, that would save millions of lives. Inequitable school funding is purely a Type B problem. Some states provide adequate funding to high-poverty school districts while others don't. Those that don't do so because selfish people who prefer to hoard their dollars at the expense of providing equal educational opportunities for all children have enough political power to maintain the status quo. It's no secret how to distribute funds equitably, they just don't want to. Other issues--substantially reducing the absolute level of carbon emissions from the nation's passenger and commerical vehicle fleet, for example--lie somewhere between, requiring a combination of scientific breakthroughs and political will.
Frank Heffner is describing a Type B problem. It's not that universities don't know how to change their incentive structures to give teaching more value, or how to help people become better teachers. They just don't want to. Which is not to say such a change would be easy, I'm sure it would quite difficult. But the reason it would be difficult is because the people who control the levers of power at universities want to keep things pretty much they way they are.
This matters for how we think about solutions. Type A problems are generally solved by resources and incentives focused on producing new knowledge. Type B problems, by contrast, are essentially political and values-based, and thus require politically-grounded solutions: public awareness, organizing constituencies, framing problems in terms of larger ideological agendas, changing the incentives that influence decision-making. And a favorite tactic if your self-interest makes you the source of a Type B problem is to pretend it's Type A, to say "Of course, something must done, and so we should invest in more research to identify new methods and best practices and perhaps if more resources were available etc. etc." This is a deflecting maneuver and should be understood as such.
1 comment:
I went to one of those small undergrad-only schools tht cares about teaching, and the results were striking. In particular, my department had a wave of retirements my freshman and sophomore years; the chair used this opportunity to hire a core of outstanding teachers and use them to staff the lower-division classes (which were core requirements, so the entire freshman class got exposed to the fabulosity that was my department). Result: the number of majors doubled or tripled practically overnight. And *that*, my friends, is how the game is played.
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