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Putting Teaching to the Test
For all its prominence as a research university, Yale maintains a powerful reputation as an institution dedicated to undergraduate teaching. But who does the teaching and how well are becoming more hotly debated as the price and the competition increase.
October 1996
by Annie Murphy Paul
Calvin Trillin ’57—the writer, humorist, and former Yale Corporation member—remembers that as a “boy from the Midwest” arriving in New Haven in 1953, he was “bowled over” by the professors he encountered—especially Maynard Mack of the English department. Mack, recalls Trillin, was one of a group of professors who were known as “the spellbinders” because their lectures were so engrossing. “They had to give their classes in the Law School auditorium, because that was the only place that could hold all the people who wanted to hear them,” says Trillin. “A lot of the students who came weren’t even enrolled in the class.” As a junior, Trillin was able to take a seminar with Mack, and he vividly remembers the professor’s teaching of Shakespeare. “Mack was just smarter than everyone else,” recalls Trillin, “and could explain it all better.”
Since 1887, when the growth of Yale’s graduate and professional schools justified a claim on the title “university,” Yale has instead preferred the designation “university-college,” reflecting its aspiration to offer the best of both such institutional types: the resources and scholarship of an international research university, and the intimacy and attention of a small liberal arts college. Few questioned the label 40 years ago. Evenas Mack (now a professor Emeritus) was leading Trillin through Hamlet and Macbeth, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren were constructing a “New Criticism” of English literature, James Tobin was analyzing the effects of patterns of saving and spending on the market, and Lars Onsager was doing the ground-breaking work in theoretical chemistry for which he would later win a Nobel Prize.
Today, Yale’s long tradition of teaching remains intact, especially in comparison with other large research institutions. (That was acknowledged most recently in the number-one ranking conferred on Yale last month by U.S. News & World Report in its annual survey of the nation’s best colleges.) But some worry that the place that nurtured Mack and Trillin may be threatened by complacency. Says Yale College dean Richard Brodhead: “A place like Yale that values undergraduate teaching has had to work very hard to keep it a priority.” Tight budgets, mounting competition with other universities, changes in age discrimination law, and the increasing use of graduate students in the classroom have made teaching of the kind that Trillin experienced an ever-more precious commodity. As the price of a Yale education continues to rise—this year’s term bill is $28,880—parents and students alike may well wonder: Is it worth it?
Chief among their concerns is the perception that professors now spend more time on research than they do on teaching. It is not an idle worry. Indeed, the emphasis on scholarly productivity that was already part of the academic scene in Trillin’s undergraduate days has only intensified. The increasing globalization of academia and the flow of information facilitated by computers have helped make scholarship, rather than teaching, the basis of any university’s national and international standing. Yale’s reputation as a place to receive knowledge depends more than ever on its faculty’s ability to advance that knowledge, an endeavor that demands increasing amounts of time and resources. And while the University still insists that all of its faculty teach undergraduates, its expectations must stay in line with those of peer institutions. “If Yale were to demand significantly more teaching from its faculty, it could really hurt us in the competition for the best scholars,” says political science professor Rogers Smith.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the number of classes taught by Yale professors has declined over the past 40 years, largely to make time for research. Nor is scholarship the only drain on professors' time. A lengthening list of professional duties—committee service, conference attendance, dissertation advising—also competes with the classroom. Greater competition for fewer resources has forced many faculty members in the sciences and social sciences to spend more time on grant proposals, and less on undergraduate teaching and advising.
Sarah Samson '97, a history major, says that she’s been disappointed by the lack of close faculty-student interaction at Yale. Although she’s had no trouble getting professors to answer specific questions, she says that she has not been able to find what she really seeks—a mentor. “Yale is a great place to be if you know exactly what you want: It’s all there for the taking,” she says. “But it’s harder to find someone who will get to know you and help you find out what you’re interested in. Professors just don’t have the time.”
Samson appears tobe in the minority, but as the demands on professors' time multiply, faculty must often rely more heavily on the assistance of graduate students, giving rise to another worry about contemporary college education: that parents are being asked to pay more than $100,000 to have their children taught, not by Yale’s academic stars, but by other students. Brian Fischkin '98, a political science major, complains that most of his T.A.-led discussion sections are “a waste of time” and actually “detract from the focus and message of the lectures.” Says Fischkin: “Teaching assistants often don’t have a strong enough grasp of the subject matter to be teaching it to anyone else.”
A spotlight was turned on that concern last January, when a group of Yale graduate students threatened to withhold undergraduates' grades if the administration refused to negotiate with them as a union. Although the efforts of the group, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO), failed to achieve its goal of union status, its agitations—including a January 10 rally at which 137 people were arrested—called national attention to its complaints. GESO members argued that graduate students at Yale are overworked and underpaid, that they spend more classroom hours teaching than full-time faculty members—to classes that are too large—and that they get little or no teacher training. Many of the group’s claims were vigorously contested by the Yale administration. Dean of the Graduate School Thomas Appelquist says that graduate students do only a fraction of the teaching in Yale College, and Dean Brodhead adds that “section sizes are actually at a historic low.” But some professors, while deploring the group’s tactics, were privately sympathetic to GESO’s protests. “We have gone too far in the direction of graduate student teaching,” concedes Gaddis Smith, the Larned Professor of History. “The faculty needs to be teaching more.”
Smith, a member of the Class of 1954, says that in his own undergraduate days at Yale he was never taught by a graduate student. And he notes with evident concern that graduate student teaching at the University has increased at least tenfold since the early 1970s, when the use of teaching assistants was significantly expanded. Graduate students are now regularly employed to teach the sections that were once led by junior faculty or administrators with PhDs; they are often responsible for teaching introductory foreign language and mathematics classes; and some graduate students, along with an increasing number of “off-ladder,” nontenured faculty, even teach their own seminars.
While some senior professors, like Gaddis Smith, are willing to take on more undergraduate teaching, others see in the faculty’s vehement reaction to the recent grade strike an entrenched resistance to the idea. “The faculty felt that its own self-interest was threatened by the GESO strike,” says Rogers Smith. “Professors don’t want to have to do more teaching and grading.”
Rogers Smith agrees that undergraduates should be taught by more professors and fewer graduate students, but he thinks the switch can be made without a marked expansion of faculty teaching loads. Smith would eliminate very small classes (with fewer than five students) and very large ones (with more than 300 students) from the curriculum, reducing the need for teaching assistants and allowing professors to teach students more efficiently. In the place of small seminars and large lectures, he would institute classes of 30 or 40 undergraduates, taught and graded entirely by faculty members.
Another way to reduce faculty reliance on graduate students, says Smith, would be to hire more professors—but for the moment that seems unlikely. President Richard Levin and Provost Alison Richard are committed to eliminating Yale’s current $4 million operating budget deficit by 1997, and to executing a scaled-down version of the faculty “restructuring” proposed by Benno Schmidt, Levin’s predecessor. Schmidt’s controversial plan to cut Yale’s faculty by 11 percent over 10 years helped hasten his departure in 1992, but since then the Levin administration has quietly begun implementing its own program, intended to reduce the Faculty of Arts and Sciences by 6 percent. That goal may be met by the end of this year.
Schmidt’s stringent budget-cutting resulted in what amounted to a hiring freeze during the last years of his administration. (His subsequent commitment to hire new professors with a portion of Lee Bass’s $20 million helped ignite the controversy that led to the gift’s return.) Such constraints have eased somewhat: In this year alone, 13 new full professors were hired. But a recently enacted Federal law has held up other efforts to replace aging senior professors with a larger and more diverse junior faculty. Since the law, which prohibits mandatory retirement on the basis of age for tenured faculty members, took effect in January of 1994, perhaps 30 senior professors who would have left upon reaching the University’s previous retirement age of 68 have instead remained on Yale’s payroll. Their salaries could have paid for several dozen new assistant or associate professors. “There are too many old people still teaching,” says John Blum, himself a retired Sterling Professor Emeritus of History. “We need more young people in there, and we need to be able to hire more women and minorities.”
Blum proposes a revision of the tenure system to address the problem of professors who fail to pull their weight, whether in research or teaching. He would offer faculty members a series of contracts over the course of their working lives at the University: one five-year contract when they start out, then two ten-year contracts during the prime of their careers, then a final pair of five-year contracts, with the possibility of annual renewals thereafter. Each agreement would be renewed if the faculty member continued to research—and teach—well. This “bell curve” of contracts, as Blum calls it, would guarantee professors much of the academic freedom that tenure now provides, while still granting the University a measure of control over its work force.
While a small college may be able to make its decisions about hiring and tenure on the basis of teaching alone, a university—by definition a research institution—must strike a balance between the two pursuits. And when Yale hires, promotes, and grants tenure to professors under its present system, it is almost entirely scholarship, not teaching, that determines the decision. Those who make such choices say that research must come before teaching as a matter of institutional priority, but they also face some more subtle difficulties. “We try to keep a balance between research and teaching, but evidence of teaching ability is much harder to ascertain,” says Richard Hartigan, Eugene Higgins Professor of Statistics and chair of a committee convened last year to examine Yale’s hiring, promotion, and tenure policies (Yale Alumni Magazine, Nov. '95). Especially when evaluating a candidate from another university, says Hartigan, “we have to rely on second- or third-hand evidence—an administrator’s report of students' reports of a professor’s teaching—whereas the scholarly evidence is right there before us.”
Even when the University promotes from within its own ranks, its traditional respect for the privacy and autonomy of professors discourages the evaluations common at other schools. “As a professor at Yale, you’ll never get a visit from the chairman of the department, sitting in your class and watching you teach,” says Gaddis Smith, adding, “We just don’t do that sort of thing.” Joel Rosenbaum, a professor of biology, confirms that in his department, “we don’t ask professors to teach a class in front of faculty—though perhaps we should.”
Even if such “try-outs” were required, they might not be helpful in the long run. As Peter Brooks, the Tripp Professor of Humanities, points out, the real value of teaching can be slow to appear. “Teaching assessments always risk taking too short a perspective,” he says. The ideal—but impossible—way to measure teaching ability, says Brooks, would be “to ask people 25 years out of college: Who really changed your life?”
Students currently enrolled at Yale, however, often share a more immediate concern: that Yale’s involved tenure process, which places heavy emphasis on superior scholarship, drives talented teachers to seek tenure-track positions elsewhere. “Just because you can write a lot of books doesn’t mean you can teach your way out of a paper bag,” wrote Doug Regula '96 to the Yale Daily News last spring in a letter protesting the denial of tenure to a popular young professor.
Yet it is precisely Yale’s prestige as a research university, counter administrators, that allows it to attract professors who are both exceptional scholars and excellent teachers. And the attrition of junior faculty, while distressing to those who lose an admired teacher to another institution, creates an invigorating flow of up-and-coming scholars throughout the University. In fact, some argue, Yale’s status as a research institution yields a number of underappreciated benefits for teaching. According to many Yale professors, the time they spend in the library and the laboratory substantially improves their performance in the classroom. “Research feeds directly into teaching,” says Jonathan Spence, Sterling Professor of History and one of the nation’s leading authorities on China. “Every lecture I give is affected by the reading I did the week before, even if it’s just an aside during class or a new article I assign to a section.” Biologist Joel Rosenbaum also argues that research makes his teaching more dynamic. “After 30 years of lecturing, I’m still up late at night preparing notes for my class the next day,” he says. “I don’t keep notes from year to year. When you do that, it’s all over.”
Students may benefit even further from a teacher’s research if they can participate in such work themselves, assisting professors in the laboratory, helping them write scientific papers, or performing their own experiments. “Some of the best research happening at this university is being done by undergraduates,” says Mark Reed, a professor of electrical engineering and applied physics. Out of his own grant funds, Reed paid for one of his students, senior Dan Green, to continue his research in New Haven over the summer. Green, who is examining the electrical properties of the individual atom, says that independent lab work has been an important part of his Yale education. “With an experiment that you do for class, there’s an answer, and you’re supposed to find it,” he says. “When you do research, nobody knows the answer yet, or even if there is an answer. You learn what you know more completely on the way to what you don’t know.” Reed, whom Green calls “eminently approachable,” meets with his student every week to track his progress.
Graduate student teaching, while it may have acquired a bad name in some circles, can actually be a boon to undergraduates, at least at Yale. Richard Brodhead notes that those unfamiliar with academia “often hear the words 'teaching assistant' and immediately assume the worst”—graduate students who are inexperienced, indifferent, or barely fluent in English. But Brodhead adds that the 100 or so T.A.’s he has employed over the years to lead sections of his own literature classes have been excellent teachers. “People forget,” he says, “that these are some of the most brilliant minds in the country, with several years of graduate schooling already under their belts.” Gaddis Smith calls the use of teaching assistants “a good trade-off” when paired with instruction from senior faculty. “What they lack in experience, graduate student teachers make up in energy, enthusiasm, and a greater rapport with students,” he says.
Indeed, graduate students are often enlisted to give undergraduates the close attention that professors would be hard-pressed to offer every student: intensive help with foreign languages and with the basics of writing, for example. And the use of teaching assistants has allowed a weekly section meeting to accompany most lecture classes now taught in Yale College, an impossibility in the days when the sections were led by junior faculty.
But no matter what rewards undergraduates reap from Yale’s student teachers or from its status as a university, the value of a Yale College education ultimately depends on the teaching of its professors. Peter Brooks, for one, insists that Yale is dominated—even today—by a College-wide “culture of teaching” that, as he sees it, ensures that such instruction is a familiar part of the undergraduate experience. Indeed, every member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is obligated to teach College students. And while that commitment is more expected than enforced, it is, according to most members of the faculty, rarely skirted. “It’s a point of honor among professors,” says Louis Dupre, the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of Religious Studies and recipient of this year’s William Clyde DeVane Medal for excellence in undergraduate teaching. “You could get away with doing less than you are expected to do, but many of us are instead inclined to do too much.” Adds Richard Hartigan, “No one escapes teaching here, and no one’s trying to.”
Reflecting this emphasis on undergraduate education are the proportions of the College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Yale’s graduate school is small compared to those of most major research universities, and getting smaller. (A 10 percent reduction of the school is gradually being implemented.) “Undergraduates are our bread and butter,” says Brooks, and attention to their needs absorbs the bulk of faculty teaching time. In fact, according to psychology professor Peter Salovey, “graduate students are sometimes envious of all the energy put into undergraduate education here.” The downsizing of the graduate school can only sharpen the faculty’s focus on the College, for there will be fewer graduate classes for senior faculty to teach, and fewer graduate students to act as teaching assistants. Full professors will necessarily be picking up the slack.
Their responsibilities include teaching not only large lecture courses, but also the small, specialized classes known as seminars. As in Calvin Trillin’s day, seminars still dominate the course of study for Yale juniors and seniors, but even underclassmen have opportunities to work closely with senior faculty. The 50-year-old Directed Studies program, expanded this year, offers freshmen the chance to study the classics of Western Civilization with faculty from a number of departments; many introductory humanities classes are divided into classes of a dozen or fewer students. It’s in these intimate settings, say professors, that much of the learning in Yale College comes about. “Lectures and T.A.-led sections have their place in the undergraduate experience,” says Assistant Professor of English John Rogers, “but in seminars the connection between teacher and student is much more immediate. Students can communicate quickly to their teachers what’s interesting to them, what they want to pursue further, what they don’t yet understand.” Adds Rogers, “It’s extraordinarily rewarding to teach a seminar, because the work you put into preparing for class pays off right before your eyes.”
That work, say many professors, is as meaningful a part of their academic lives as their research. “In my view, teaching is the most important part of a professor’s job,” says Xavier Sala i Martin, an associate professor of economics. “It’s critical that new generations of young people learn well—that they increase their human capital, as we economists say.” Even the most senior professors find satisfaction in sharing what they know. Sidney Altman, a Sterling Professor and Nobel-prize–winning biologist, regularly teaches first-year students.
Sometimes the affinity for teaching comes as a surprise. Mark Reed had taught only rarely before he arrived at Yale from Texas Instruments in 1990. “I came to Yale to build a research career,” says Reed. “People here weren’t sure how well I could teach.” He soon saw a need for engineering instruction directed at students without a science background, and with his colleague Roman Kuc he designed a pair of courses called “The Electronic Society” and “The Digital Information Age.” The new classes proved enormously popular, last year enrolling a total of 700 students. “I didn’t know that I would get so involved in teaching,” says Reed. “But I found that I really enjoy it. I enjoy watching my students learn.”
That might not be the case at another institution, say some professors. “Yale is a wonderful place to teach because the students are so eager to be challenged,” says John Rogers, who last spring won the Sidonie Miskimin Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities. “Their demands motivate me more than pressure from a department chair ever could. I want to teach them as well as they deserve to be taught.”  |
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