Boost UC Teaching Status

The National Research Council ranks more than half of the University of California’s graduate programs among the country’s top 20 in the quality of their faculty and research. That’s an impressive achievement, but last week’s strike by hundreds of teaching assistants opens a door on a dark side of the university’s success. That dark side has to do with the wrongheaded notion that ironclad job protections--be it for TAs or for professors--automatically belong on the university campus. It’s an assumption that should be questioned.

UC has won much of its acclaim by giving the faculty plenty of time to conduct prestigious and often lucrative research and to publish frequently in high-status, low-circulation academic journals.

Like many research universities, the UC system has been able to grant this freedom to the faculty by asking teaching assistants to assume what had once been professorial work. Many TAs are doing far more than helping undergraduates with material that professors have already taught, far more than honing their teaching skills with guidance from professors. This term at UC Santa Barbara, for instance, the two largest lecture courses in the sociology department, with nearly 1,000 students between them, are being taught not by professors but rather by two advanced graduate students. These students are not helping professors by teaching discussion sections; they are teaching the core courses by themselves. While this is invaluable experience, it’s also a far cry from the mentoring relationship that the TA system was founded on.

Unionization also wouldn’t necessarily mean more money: TAs at the 12 universities nationwide with recognized unions actually have lower wages than what UC offers--$13,000 a year and a $2,000 cut in the TAs’ annual fees paid to the university. More important, TAs need to ask themselves what they would gain by becoming regular worker bees. That would endanger the academic vision of TAs as scholars being mentored in the discipline of pursuing and imparting knowledge.

But who can blame the TAs for seeking the sorts of protections their mentors have? They are in an environment in which tenure all but requires continuous publication and research; as long as the incentives remain paltry for teaching, professors will not want to do it. This is not a new problem, and the University of California is hardly alone. In 1992, the UC system announced new rules intended to assign excellence in teaching a larger role in faculty promotion. That TAs are teaching large undergrad courses by themselves says how little those rules did to raise the university’s regard for teaching.

Last spring, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released a report that documented how research, not performance in the classroom, had come to tower above all other factors in determining a professor’s status and salary. The report called for an overhaul of undergraduate education at research universities nationwide, and some universities are trying to make good on the challenge.

In October, Cornell University President Hunter Rawlings announced a complete overhaul of undergraduate education. For starters, he brought beginning chemistry students into graduate research labs and increased average course loads for faculty members. The UC system should put its feet on a similar path, perhaps establishing a twin track for tenure that reserves slots for very gifted teachers who would be relieved of the constant push to publish and attract research grants.

The teaching assistants’ strike has freshened our view of a long-standing problem at UCLA and the whole UC system. Any reassessment of the assistants’ role at the university should include new proposals to get professors fully engaged in undergraduate teaching. Otherwise, taxpayers, students and the parents who are writing the checks will continue to be shortchanged.