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Who’s Teaching Whom?
More than most of its peer institutions, Yale is known for making undergraduate education a priority. But a recent report by an organization of graduate students claims that the use of teaching assistants and adjunct instructors is diminishing the quality of teaching in the College. Are Yale undergraduates losing access to the university’s world-class faculty?
Summer 1999
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
For years, Yale has counted its commitment to undergraduate teaching as one of its defining characteristics. Prospective students, alumni, and donors are frequently reminded of the dedication of Yale’s professors to teaching in the College, a trait that sets Yale apart from many other major research universities, where the attention of senior faculty is weighted toward research and graduate students. The importance of this distinction to Yale’s self-image—and public image—was made apparent this spring when a war of numbers broke out between the University and a graduate student activist group over just how much of the work of teaching undergraduates is done by its faculty.
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“The idea that the University depends on graduate student labor is wrongheaded.”
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On March 29, the Graduate Employee and Student Organization (GESO) released a report claiming that only 30 percent of classroom instruction in Yale College is performed by “ladder faculty,” a term that refers to professors with or without tenure. Part-time and adjunct instructors do another 30 percent of the teaching, the report said, with graduate students accounting for the other 40 percent. The report did not escape the attention of the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education; history professor John Mack Faragher told the Times that “we have allowed ourselves as an institution to get into trouble.”
But the University responded quickly with its own numbers, which Yale College dean Richard Brodhead noted in a letter to the Times were “virtually the reverse of the numbers cited” in GESO’s report. Brodhead’s letter said that ladder faculty taught 67 percent of undergraduate courses, while adjunct instructors taught 26 percent and graduate students only 7 percent.
Whose numbers are more accurate? It depends on what you want to measure. GESO, an eight-year-old group of graduate students that seeks to become an officially recognized union, is counting what it calls “contact hours” with undergraduates. To reach a nearly opposite conclusion, Brodhead (and Provost Alison Richard, who wrote a longer letter to the Yale community rebutting the report) counted courses according to who was the “primary classroom instructor” in the course.
Richard’s letter criticized GESO’s method for “giving a false account of the experience of the undergraduate,” but the same could be said for the University’s version, which minimizes the role teaching assistants play in large lecture courses. Says political science professor Rogers Smith, “I don’t like GESO’s numbers or the University’s numbers. I teach a course with 200 students in which I lecture for 75 minutes twice a week. There are 12 sections led by TAs that meet once a week. GESO says I’ve taught for two-and-a-half hours and graduate students have taught for 12 hours. The University counts it as all my teaching. So I just have to say ‘a plague on both their houses.’”
Any attempt to get at the “real story” about who is teaching undergraduates is complicated by the differences among departments and programs. Students in the sciences typically have more contact with TAs than do those in the humanities, since TA-led labs are an integral part of the science curriculum. And since foreign-language instruction is most often assigned to non-ladder “lectors,” students in those departments graduate having had an inordinate number of contact hours with adjunct faculty.
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“Political science and economics have had to rely more on non-ladder faculty.”
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Beyond those differences is the variation in student preference for small classes or large ones. “It is exceedingly difficult to describe a 'typical' or 'average' undergraduate educational experience,” wrote Richard in her response to the GESO report, “because one of the great strengths of a Yale education is that it can take so many forms.”
Regardless, the GESO numbers struck a nerve in a University that prides itself on the accessibility of its faculty. Even if GESO’s methods exaggerated the extent of the situation, the report stirred some faculty and other observers who believe the University does have a problem. “Too much of the instruction in Yale College is done by graduate students and non-ladder faculty,” says Jerome Pollitt, a recently retired professor of the history of art who served as dean of the Graduate School from 1986 to 1991. “When I first came to Yale in 1962, there were very few graduate students who taught. Most people were taught by ladder faculty members or by non-ladder PhDs who taught full-time.”
In his Yale Book of Numbers (1976) the late Yale historian George Wilson Pierson noticed a change in the works. “The drift away from a full-time professional teaching faculty.would be quite unmistakable, and perhaps disturbing,” Pierson wrote.
At the same time, cash-strapped graduate students were beginning to teach more in order to make ends meet as traditional sources of funding dried up. By 1989, this phenomenon led Pollitt and then-Yale College dean Sidney Altman to appoint a committee to study graduate teaching. Led by history of art professor Jules Prown, the committee produced what became known as the Prown Report, a document that recommended that the University provide better financial support for graduate students and reduce the reliance on graduate students as teachers. Ten years later, the first recommendation has arguably been fulfilled: While GESO members grumble about the size of the stipend, all graduate students are now fully funded; they pay Yale nothing for their education. But the second recommendation has not: the number of teaching assistants has tripled over the last 20 years, while the number of professors has declined by 5 percent.
Pollitt feels that things have changed for the worse during his 37 years at Yale. “We used to say smugly that Yale College is not Harvard,” says Pollitt, referring to Yale’s reputation for superior undergraduate teaching. “But now the Yale experience is more like Harvard and other research universities.”
“It does seem that graduate students are teaching an awful lot, and I think more than is desirable,” says Jules Prown. “But the idea that the University depends on graduate student labor is wrong-headed.” Prown thinks TAs are used too often in medium-sized courses (30 to 50 students) where they aren’t really necessary, but where a professor thinks the teaching experience would be good for the graduate student. “My experience has been that the teaching fellow gets in the way of relationships with students,” says Prown. “There are times when I’d really rather do it myself.”
Sidney Altman, a Sterling Professor of Biology and Nobel Prize winner, says that teaching loads vary by department. “It’s my impression that in the humanities and social sciences, there’s as much contact with students as there’s ever been,” he says. But because the competition to attract faculty in biology is fierce, his department must offer smaller teaching loads than in years past. “But graduate students are not in charge of any course in our department,” says Altman. “That hasn’t changed.”
For his part, Dean Brodhead doesn’t believe there has been a significant change in the balance of teaching responsibility. There have always been large lecture courses, he notes, and teaching assistants have in fact added a new dimension of personal contact. “TAs in lecture courses have not replaced professors,” he says. “They’ve replaced anonymous graders.”
But even if graduate students aren’t shouldering more of the teaching responsibility, what about non-ladder faculty, the category that both sides concede is responsible for between a quarter and a third of undergraduate teaching? Nationwide, the role of tenured faculty in higher education is diminishing: According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, non-tenured instructors now account for half the faculty on college campuses, compared with about 30 percent 20 years ago. U.S. Department of Education statistics show that non-tenure-track faculty accounted for 28 percent of total faculty in 1995, up from 18 percent in 1975. During the same period, tenure-track junior faculty fell from 29 percent to 20 percent.
Some observers see this trend as an effort to exploit an oversupply of PhDs while eroding tenure, an inflexible institution that has become increasingly expensive. GESO’s report describes adjunct teachers as “a new form of 'migrant workers' who teach basic courses in the languages, composition, and history at multiple institutions for a flat rate of pay per course.”
But the adjunct category is a broad one, encompassing people who travel off the tenure track for a variety of reasons. In addition to 564 ladder-faculty professors, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (all the University faculty whose primary appointment is not in one of the ten professional schools) includes 73 visiting faculty; 16 adjunct professors, “mostly full-time and long-term"; 105 full-time lecturers; and 72 part-time lecturers. Most of the lecturers teach foreign languages, writing courses, and laboratories for science courses.
In many cases, adjunct instructors are people from outside academia who have special expertise that is useful to students. The College’s arts programs, including studio art, architecture, music, and theater studies, regularly turn to practicing artists who bring the energy of their work into the classroom. Other non-academics from inside and outside the University—including Yale’s chief investments officer David Swensen and author William F. Buckley Jr. '50—have also taught in Yale College.
The foreign-language departments see the greatest use of adjunct instructors—over half of what GESO calls “contact hours” in foreign languages are done by adjuncts, mostly lectors who teach full-time and have long-term contracts. Lectors usually perform language instruction rather than upper-level literature courses, a system that Brodhead says makes sense. “These people have a specialized body of knowledge,” he says. “The person who is expert in medieval French literature is not necessarily the person who’s best to teach first-year French.”
Still, there are areas at Yale where the situation is closer to the picture painted by GESO—of new PhDs doing a kind of academic piecework to fill in gaps in the faculty. In the political science department, for example, half of the undergraduate courses last year, including many upper-level seminars, were taught by adjunct faculty and graduate students. “It’s true that political science—and economics, too—have had increased enrollment, and have had to rely more on non-ladder faculty,” says Brodhead. “But we have to respond cautiously to these trends. We can’t throw a position that will last 40 years at one year of enrollment bulge.” The University announced last September that it would allow political science to hire up to six new faculty members to correct the imbalance, breaking a seven-year cap on the size of the faculty.
Critics say that using non-ladder faculty, especially on a short-term basis, short-changes students. “The key issue is one of permanence,” says GESO member Antony Dugdale. “Do these teachers have a commitment to Yale? Will they be here in two years? That kind of consistency is important to undergraduates. But most people in those positions are looking for work elsewhere.”
Jerome Pollitt says he has often had calls from students who took only one course with him and are looking for a recommendation. “I ask them if maybe there is someone who knows their work better, and they mention a lot of graduate students,” says Pollitt.
Such an experience brings up another aspect of student-faculty relationships. Yale’s tenured faculty may teach undergraduates, but GESO’s report suggests that “face time” with faculty is too low. Brodhead responds that when he asked a student advisory committee if they felt they hadn’t had contact with the faculty, “they stared at me as if I was insane.”
“I was surprised at how much time you get to talk to faculty,” says Theresa Silla '02. “They love interested students.” Emily Ray '99, who majored in Russian and East European Studies, agrees, but says that faculty accessibility is best in small majors like hers. “There’s a big split between the sciences and the humanities,” says Ray. “People who really want to have contact find a way, but I know some biology students who didn’t get within ten feet of a professor.”
If in fact there is a problem with the proportion of teaching being done by Yale’s faculty, what can be done about it? Forcing faculty to teach more is not an option, says Brodhead. “It’s true that teaching loads are lighter,” he says, “but that has become the norm everywhere. If we tried to change that, we'd find that all our faculty would leave the next day.”
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for change. “We try to study how graduate and undergraduate teaching is allotted and encourage adjustments,” says Brodhead. “In some departments, we’ve had conversations that have produced six or seven more seminars a year.”
Rogers Smith thinks that adjustments in the kinds of courses that professors teach could make better use of their time. He suggests fewer of the smallest seminars, fewer large lecture courses, and more courses in the range of 25 to 35 people, where students can be graded by the professor and where there could be more class discussion and contact with the professor.
Another option is to increase the size of the faculty, something the University is still reluctant to do after years of holding steady in order to erase a budget deficit. But now, the endowment is performing at record rates, and some say the University could spend more on faculty.
A recent letter signed by 27 faculty members calls on Yale’s departments to consider whether they are “over-relying on non-ladder instructors,” and, if they are, to “insist that the University furnish the resources necessary to create more faculty slots.” And while few faculty members or undergraduates feel the situation is as dire as the GESO report suggests, many believe the situation bears watching. All seem to agree that adjuncts, graduate students, and ladder faculty have rightful places in teaching Yale students. But maintaining the proper balance among the three—in the midst of a national trend toward the “casualization” of teaching jobs—may prove to be the University’s greatest challenge in the years to come.  |
