Academically Adrift

So I read the book and attended the Johnson Center workshop. My main beef with the book is that the authors seem intent on confirming every preconceived bias people have of higher education. Students go to college primarily for social reasons rather than academics and they don't spend enough time studying. Faculty focus too much on research and not enough on teaching. Administrators worry more about the US News rankings and providing students with all the comforts of Club Med rather than strengthening the academic program. Some of this is undoubtedly true, but too often the authors make the claim (e.g. about faculty focusing on research) and don't bother to substantiate it.

The empirical results are confusing. The last third of the book is tables of regression results, but they are reported in an inconsistent fashion so I don't know what they actually say. Are the numbers below the estimates standard errors or T statistics? They look like T statistics, but why is there an asterisk indicating significant at the 5 percent level for one coefficient with 4.2 in parentheses but no asterisk for one with 4.5 in parentheses?

The study is based on a sample of 27 or so schools, but the authors don't tell us what they are. It looks like only a small number of them are small highly selective liberal arts colleges like Gettysburg; many seem to be large state schools. This matters for us at Gettysburg, because most of the alarming results don't apply to the most selective schools in the sample. Apparently our class of schools is not doing a terrible job of getting students to learn, though of course we could do better.

The JCCT&L workshop was just fine. It was energizing, got me thinking about how to improve the learning environment in my classes. The organizers put on a fine show. But here's the problem. Suppose our goal is to increase the amount of learning that the average student achieves at Gettysburg College. One way we do this is to improve the way we teach, another is to create a more academically focused environment at the institutional level. Workshops like this might help by giving faculty who are interested in exploring new teaching techniques some tools and resources. But the benefits are likely to be marginal: I already teach pretty good, demanding classes (usually). I and the other attendees at the workshop are not really the problem. The low-hanging fruit in this endeavor, it seems to me, are the faculty members and departments that currently are not challenging our students. Fix those problems and we might see some real progress.

Who am I talking about? I'll never tell. But when I talk to smart students in Economics they will tell me horror stories about particular professors in particular (other!) departments. Like the professor who told her students at the beginning of the semester that they were pretty much guaranteed an A or a B as long as they showed up to class. I've had students tell me that the five minute conversation I just had with them over lunch on the last day of class had more intellectual content than any course they'd ever had in Department X. I've had senior majors in Department X tell me that they regret having chosen that major because they never felt challenged. I know of departments where senior faculty regularly teach classes with just a handful of students because they create such a hostile environment in class. I know of very popular professors who are popular precisely because their courses lack any kind of intellectual rigor.

So, how about we try to change the practices of those professors in those departments? In theory the Provost has all sorts of tools he could use to make faculty accountable. Unfortunately we have a really crappy evaluation system: senior faculty are evaluated only every three years, so they can get away with murder for too long. The ratings are too coarse and subjective. I would imagine it is very difficult for a chair to slap a colleague with a "needs improvement" on teaching unless there's a real smoking gun, and at any rate the difference between "needs improvement" and "meritorious" is completely subjective. I'm pretty sure the teaching practices that Department X considers "meritorious" would be considered "NI" in Economics, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? And suppose a faculty member gets a bad evaluation. What is the consequence? He or she will still get the standard cost of living adjustment and only misses out on a couple hundred bucks in merit pay.

If we really wanted to make some inroads on learning and the intellectual climate, the Provost would open a can of whup-ass on certain departments and faculty members. I say if you don't perform, you see a reduction in your salary. Is there anything in the AAUP guidelines that prevents a school from demoting a faculty member? Sorry, you used to perform like an Associate Professor but now you're acting like an Assistant, so that's your rank now. I hope that one of the outcomes of the credit hour committee's deliberations will be that we as a faculty settle on a fairly concrete set of criteria for what types of assignments and activities make a Gettysburg College course worth a full credit. I will bet that when we present a list of the kinds of things that every course needs to contain, three quarters of faculty here will see that they already do this but the other quarter will scream bloody murder. Let them scream sez I - it's high time all the faculty on this campus taught the kinds of engaging and demanding classes that those of us in the JCCT&L workshop provide on a regular basis.