COLUMN ONE : For Profs, Teach or Perish? : Tight budgets, overenrolled classes and anger over high tuition have put pressure on university faculty to focus more on teaching and less on research. It won’t happen without a fight.

To illustrate the way the moon would move without gravity, astronomy professor Alex Filippenko spins doughnuts on strings over his head until the pastries fly off. He tailors his wardrobe to his lectures, choosing T-shirts emblazoned with drawings of Saturn, the Keck Observatory or Galileo. His stargazing parties for students sometimes turn into all-nighters at telescopes in Northern California mountains.

The UC Berkeley astronomer’s enthusiastic ability to entertain and inform enormous lecture classes has won him teaching awards. His classroom skills underscore his belief that teaching deserves more respect and attention than it receives at a university more renowned for its faculty’s research prowess.

But Filippenko worries that an emphasis on teaching could go too far, detouring him from research on supernovas, the stars that explode with remarkable brightness. If professors are required to teach too many classes or if scholarship standards for tenure begin to fall , he might look for a job elsewhere.

“I think we have a duty to the citizens of California to teach and teach well, but I’m not going to dilute the quality of my research efforts,” said Filippenko, 34. “I feel there have to be places like this that stress research, and I think we’ve built up a great name for it here. That greatness took a century to build up and it could go down quickly.”

Such reflections on the mission of the university’s faculty are more frequent in these days of tight budgets, parent and student anger over high tuitions and academia’s embarrassment at spending and research scandals. The recession’s devastating effect on campus budgets makes research seem more of a luxury when students complain that they are shut out of overenrolled classes.

Partly as a defense against critics and partly as real reform, plans to make teaching a higher priority are afoot at campuses nationwide. And debate on the issue is getting louder.

“The pendulum had swung so far in the direction of research--to the exclusion of teaching at some institutions--that some kind of correction was perhaps inevitable,” said Jack H. Schuster, a Claremont Graduate School expert on higher education. “I don’t think balance should be understood as a 50-50 split at research institutions. But it should be something more than 95% research and 5% teaching.”

At the University of California, where full professors generally are required to teach only one or two undergraduate courses a quarter--and where they earn an average annual salary of $75,810--the issue of how much teachers should teach seems ready to explode. Last year the Legislature asked UC to raise the average teaching load by one or two courses per year, a move supported by student leaders and some UC regents. Hoping to avoid any across-the-board mandates, UC campuses are offering freshmen and sophomores more small classes and seminars taught by full professors.

At the Berkeley and Santa Cruz campuses, teaching assistants say they teach more than 60% of the undergraduate sections. Their strike, which began Nov. 19, has focused more attention on professors’ work habits.

“Whenever the university is out recruiting, they talk about all the Nobel Prize winners, as if you can come to Berkeley and take classes from Nobel Prize winners. And that’s just not the case. Those types of professors are usually not teaching undergraduates,” said UC Berkeley senior Tim Yeung, a business major and campus activist. “So I think there are a lot of disillusioned students who thought they were going to get this world-class education and find it’s not really happening. They’re getting TAs (teaching assistants) or junior faculty.”

The unhappy choice ahead will be between restricting student enrollment or raising teaching loads, said Karl Engelbach, an official of the California Postsecondary Education Commission. “Eventually, we will have to deal with that policy question,” he said.

As part of the new pro-teaching movement, legislators and university governing boards in Virginia, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio, Nebraska, Colorado and other states have begun seeking a better accounting of professors’ hours as a possible first step toward increasing classroom duties.

In a 1988 study by the U.S. Department of Education, professors at research-oriented universities reported that they worked 50 to 52 hours weekly, of which about 40% was spent on teaching, about 30% on research and the rest on administration and other duties. (Skeptics said professors tend to include cocktail parties, magazine reading and museum visits as professional duties.) The average salary for full professors at doctorate-granting universities nationwide was $65,190 in 1991, according to the American Assn. of University Professors.

To encourage better classroom performance, many schools, such as Stanford University and USC, give large cash awards for excellence to a few teachers each year. Others, such as UC campuses and Cornell University, have changed their policies on promotion and tenure to give more weight to teaching abilities. Some, including the universities of Colorado and Michigan, are helping experts on Flaubert and physics learn how to improve classroom presentation.

Syracuse University in Upstate New York and a few other schools require professors to compile much more evidence of good teaching in the form of so-called teaching portfolios, which include videotaped classes, evaluations by students and peers, and a review of course outlines and exams.

Still, critics note, choosing which professors receive tenure--and the implicit promise of a lifetime job--remains dominated by research performance. Academic culture remains heavily focused on big grants and the publication of articles in obscure journals, they contend.

“Clearly, the issue of research vs. teaching is not likely to be resolved by establishing a teacher of the year award or by admonishing faculty to take their teaching and mentoring responsibilities more seriously. More fundamental change is needed,” said Prof. Alexander Astin, director of UCLA’s Institute on Higher Education.

Reform will be difficult, Astin said, because the basic goals of many large schools are “to become as rich and famous as possible” through research. “As a result, undergraduate education takes a beating,” he said.

Astin’s surveys of 25,000 undergraduates at 260 colleges in the late 1980s showed student alienation was highest at schools where professors most strongly feel the pressure of “publish or perish.”

In an influential 1990 report, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching asked U.S. professors whether tenure was difficult to achieve without publishing. The percentage who strongly thought so doubled to 42% over the previous 20 years. At research institutions, the number rose from 44% to 83% over the two decades; even at liberal arts colleges, the percentage soared from 6% to 24%.

Similar results were found last year by Syracuse University’s Center for Instructional Development in a survey of more than 23,000 professors at 47 campuses nationwide. A strong majority favored a balance between research and teaching undergraduates but reported that their campuses required ever more research.

The reason is clear. Research grants can be the lifeblood of large universities, accounting for 15% to 40% of overall budgets. Moreover, research funds allocated for overhead help pay for a portion of everything from library books to maintenance.

Alleged misuse of those funds--including spending money on a yacht and on antique furniture for the campus president’s house --led to a federal investigation into research overhead at Stanford in 1991. The inquiry resulted in a $23-million reduction in the money Stanford receives for overhead from the government, forcing the school to slash spending in such areas as intramural sports and the doctoral program in music. Stanford President Donald Kennedy resigned after apologizing for the embarrassment.

A congressional report issued in September intensified scrutiny of research universities, finding that a shift of faculty from classroom teaching to expensive research projects over the last two decades contributed to escalating tuitions.

Faculty leaders, labeling the report’s conclusions false, counter that the country benefits from supporting teachers on the cutting edge of their fields. Much of the work on an AIDS vaccine, for example, is being conducted in university labs, while many eminent writers, historians and economists work in the halls of higher learning.

“I’m not convinced that there is some grave imbalance between teaching and research,” said Linda Ray Pratt, a poetry professor at the University of Nebraska who is president of the 50,000-member American Assn. of University Professors.

“There is a failure to recognize that the number of hours I’m doing research and preparation or reading literary criticism affects the quality of the hours I spend with students,” she added.

UC Berkeley’s Filippenko, who earned his doctorate in astronomy at Caltech, agrees: “I think that someone who’s involved in the research can bring some of the day-to-day excitement to the field much better than someone who just teaches from a textbook.”

Others argue that research universities should not be compared to the rest of academia.

“The University of California is not a liberal arts college. It is not a community college,” UC President Jack W. Peltason said. “Those other places do their job and do it well, but our job is to have a faculty that not only teaches chemistry, but does chemistry, that not only teaches about American government but also investigates about American government.”

Still, in 1991 a systemwide UC faculty task force called for a major shift away from the “vicious circle” of chasing research grants and publishing research papers. In response, the administration announced changes last summer in the nine-campus system’s promotion and tenure policy, giving more weight to reviews of teaching, although not as much as the task force advocated.

At Stanford, the debate over teaching vs. research broke out several years ago when then-President Kennedy advocated a plan to encourage better teaching. In a speech to the faculty, he suggested giving less weight to prolific writing for academic journals and counting textbook writing as scholarship.

Some faculty members, however, reacted angrily to Kennedy’s proposals. They maintained that they were doing a good job teaching undergraduates, and the idea that promotions should be increasingly based on instructional skills struck them as more suitable for a community college than a home of Nobel laureates.

“It was as if doing research is a bad thing. And the fact is, doing research is a wonderful thing for the United States and Silicon Valley,” said Bradley Efron, a tenured professor of statistics at Stanford. Professors’ basic research on computer chips and symbolic logic at Stanford helped make the nearby Palo Alto and San Jose area into a high-tech center envied around the world.

“The fallacy is that you can always do one more thing and you do everything better,” Efron added. “You can’t keep loading up the car with gadgets. . . . If you think we’ve got to teach more, we’re going to do less research.”

Although Kennedy is gone, some of his initiatives are in place--such as annual bonuses of $10,000 or $15,000 given for excellence to six Stanford teachers last spring through a $5-million gift from philanthropist Peter Bing.

Michael Lewis, a Stanford junior from Chicago, welcomes such changes. He complained that many professors share arcane research with undergraduates, often at the expense of basic knowledge. He recalled a psychology professor who told his class in detail about his work in computerized memory but was unable to connect that to the study of basic brain processes.

“I agree it’s nice to know the new information, especially on the graduate school level. But for us a lot of generalities get neglected for the research,” he said.

Complaining that they were not getting value for their money, Syracuse University students formed an organization a few years ago to urge improvements in undergraduate education.

“If a professor views being in a classroom as a chore, something he has to do before he gets back to research, it affects students. And I think that happens a lot at the university. It’s not like it’s hard to miss,” said Matthew Fischer, a senior who is a leader of the Syracuse group.

Fischer praised economics professor Jerry Evensky, a popular teacher and textbook author who narrowly won tenure in 1991 in what many regarded as a test of Syracuse’s new teaching emphasis. “He made economics accessible to the average student,” Fischer said. “Those solid communications skills are a plus. And a sense of fairness doesn’t hurt, or a commitment to being in the classroom.”

Facing declines in enrollment and tough price competition from state schools, Syracuse’s administration has adopted many of its students’ ideas, winning the school a reputation as a leader in the return-to-teaching effort.

Syracuse officials report spending $2 million to add freshmen and sophomore classes and to reduce class size. Much more attention is being paid to aspects of teaching when considering promotion and tenure. Teaching assistants are being trained more thoroughly. And the 18,500-student campus likes to describe itself as something new in academia--”a student-centered research university.”

“This is not hype,” said Syracuse Chancellor Kenneth Shaw. “These are not words to please parents. The students are with us for four years and you can’t hype somebody with words forever. We are trying to make learning our focal point and I suspect there isn’t a research university in the country that couldn’t do a lot better in this area.”

UC astronomy professor Filippenko sees good teaching as providing benefits beyond the classroom. His students “are the future taxpayers of California,” he said. “If they think science is an awful thing, with a whole bunch of people practicing science who don’t want to give their knowledge to the community, why should the community support us?”

Higher Pay, Less Time in Class

Higher salaries are linked to less time spent teaching, according to a 1987 study based on responses from full-time, tenure-track faculty at four-year institutions nationwide. Weekly Teaching Hours: Annual Salary 6 or fewer: $50,927 6 to 8: $43,191 9 to 11: $38,060 12 or more: $36,793 Source: Study of Higher Education, Penn. State University, for National Center for Education Statistics.

How Professors Spend Their Time

Full-time faculty from across the nation reported in 1987 on the percentage of their time spent on teaching, research, administration work and other activities. They are divided by type of institution.

Type Examples % of Time % of Time of school Teaching on Research Public Research UCLA, Univ. 43% 29% of Michigan Private Research Stanford, USC 40% 30% Public Cal State Northridge, 62% 11% Comprehensive Cal Poly Pomona Liberal Arts Occidental, Vassar 65% 8% Public 2-Year L.A. City College, 71% 3% Miami-Dade

Type Examples % of Time on Other of school Administration Public Research UCLA, Univ. 14% 14% of Michigan Private Research Stanford, USC 14% 16% Public Cal State Northridge, 13% 14% Comprehensive Cal Poly Pomona Liberal Arts Occidental, Vassar 14% 13% Public 2-Year L.A. City College, 10% 15% Miami-Dade

Source: U.S. Dept. of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.