A Loss of Community, and of Educated Graduates : Education: UC is failing to teach its undergraduates, and it is the faculty--which directs educational policy--that has brought failure upon itself.

The education of undergraduates at the University of California is failing. Entry-level courses are taught by entry-level teachers. Advanced, upper-level classes are narrowing in scope and discipline. Teaching assistants are divided in loyalties between the students they teach and completing their own graduate degrees. Senior faculty are often absent from the scene, unavailable in office hours, with little interest whatsoever in teaching undergrads. Administrators are often the only segment of the campus with loyalty to the future of the university--and their loyalty is bought.

Half the freshman class is deficient in English or in math. Once they make it through that first year of English composition, many UC students rarely write again, preferring multiple-choice exams to papers. There are all too many courses to oblige them with limited demands and little homework. Students graduating from the university are divided between a talented elite and those who never learned to study, read or think with the kind of care necessary for the challenges of the coming century.

Much has been written recently about these problems, but little thought is given to their underlying cause. Educational policy is the province of the faculty in the UC system. Faculty members have brought failure on themselves.

Under growing criticism from legislators concerned with undergraduate instruction, the professoriate across the nation has recently bestirred itself to action with a flurry of committees and reports. Increased emphasis on classroom evaluations in weighing faculty promotion is one suggestion. Mentor pay for outstanding undergraduate instructors is another. But such reforms are likely to make things worse. It’s a case of myopic vision, focusing on individuals rather than the quality of education overall. What is needed is a long-term change in the operating philosophy of the research university. Instead, the faculty have kept their interest focused on a matter of concern to them: the process of promotion.

Faculty at research universities currently see themselves as piecework scholars, independent entrepreneurs working to exalt themselves by their own individual attainments. Words of praise are rarely given for a teaching job well done--teaching is too interactive to garner the glory research brings. The highest salaries are paid because of publishing, not because of teaching. Such is the philosophy of the publish/perish syndrome. Measuring excellence by publishing has produced piles of publications reaching heavenward, elevating reputations on the quantity of pages written, for faculty whose dossiers are often deeper than their research is profound.

Faculty committees make decisions over the future of careers, advancements and promotions, and the easiest way to make decisions is to count. This same principle is now being applied to teaching. At typical UC campuses, multiple-choice teaching-evaluation forms are handed out in classes shortly before the end of term. The anonymous results are transcribed by secretaries, made available to faculty and filed away in dossiers. Every other year or so, when a professor comes up for review, the compiled data is sent to a committee as part of the evaluation. As teaching scores are tabulated, quantitative figures dominate, though the numbers that result are as dubious as Scholastic Aptitude Test results. It’s just another version of the publish/perish syndrome.

Substantial questions can’t be asked on general forms--about what was learned and understood in a class on Plato, for instance. Questionnaires emphasize classroom performances, the showmanship of teaching. Was the teacher liked? And that data can be rigged. A sociologist who studied evaluation of teaching reports that faculty who give unannounced spot quizzes invariably fare poorly, while those who hand out pizzas just before exams do well on evaluation forms. It is naive to think that faculty bent on self-promotion will prove indifferent to the terms of their evaluation and not use their considered skills to persuade students into thinking they are learning, even if they’re not.

The other aspects of instruction are too time consuming to be measured by committees: the comments written on student papers by professors, office hours utilized for education, midday coffee conversations, the wide range of reading required to teach lower-level courses. Then there is the question of student preparation--whether they too have done their work in assignments read and written. Teaching is a two-way street. Some experts have suggested teaching profiles be collected by using a variety of data, including outside examiners, classroom visits and in-class videos. Even though those are promising suggestions for improving education, that sort of information would overwhelm committees bent on evaluation.

There is a difference between reviewing dossiers to see whether teachers measure up and promoting excellence in teaching. It’s hard to think of another profession where the practitioners can be so untrained in the communication skills they need to know. Faculty often enter college classrooms without any real knowledge of teaching skills. There are effective alternatives to the standard lecture format, but most faculty members have no familiarity with other ways of teaching, beyond how they were taught as students.

The secret to good teaching is caring that the students learn and caring for the subject matter. But caring presupposes a community exists among the scholars, the learners and the teachers. That’s the central problem: There isn’t one.

The concept of community has been undone by faculty who see themselves as individuals seeking glory, rather than the glory of a campus dedicated to a common goal. Once the teaching of undergraduates became a secondary task subservient to research and graduate work, the community fragmented.

Students today see themselves as collecting credits for degrees. Faculty see themselves primarily as researchers. Administrators see themselves as regulators. It’s a triumvirate of forces driving off in different directions .

What is conspicuously missing from the UC system--and from research campuses across the nation--is the sense of belonging to a common enterprise, from freshmen to advanced professors all working together toward mutual understanding.

The future of the research university lies with restoring undergraduate education to the center of the enterprise. The point is not to replace research with teaching, but to get the two to complement each other.

One way this can happen is for faculty to change the way they read. Most faculty at research institutions focus all their reading time around the particular projects they are writing on--preparing footnotes, as it were. The result is tunnel vision. Few spend time sampling other fields, reading more widely than their own sub-specialty, the kind of general reading that enters classrooms easily and promotes intellectual exchange among faculty and students.

Without that kind of reading, faculty members have nothing much to say to one another or to students. Administrators have little time to read at all: They are too busy bureaucratizing. A true community of scholars--students learning and teachers teaching--makes for a better philosophy of education. The closer a community is knit, the more likely all will do their jobs.

And if faculty performance must be measured, it would be far more effective to measure it according to a Japanese philosophy, at a level higher than the individual alone, by program and department, college, school, campus. Individuals should not benefit unless the enterprise they serve is doing well, their department, the campus as a whole. Then faculty and students might see themselves evaluated as members of a common community, where there are no losers on a winning team and no winners on a losing one.