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Teaching, on the other hand, should be a piece of cake. We send thousands and thousands of ambassadors to the California public, all across the state, starting with their first Christmas break, to tell friends and relatives that every meeting of every class was a great intellectual experience, that the comments on their papers were thoughtful, helpful and detailed, and that after only one semester of Italian they can order dinner, get the gist of the front page articles in La Repubblica, and even joke with their classmates a little! This must be what they say, because as everyone knows (well, all my colleagues know!) great researchers are just automatically great teachers…and the few who don’t say it, just don’t deserve us and the heck with them. Probably didn’t actually study much, right? Reader, what’s that…you know a UC undergrad who came home and didn’t say those things?
My recurrent nightmare is of such a student whose father asks on that first visit home, right after the first round of hugs, “so, what’s college like?”
“Well, it’s OK, I guess. I have a couple of really nice new friends, and I think my grades will be OK. But I couldn’t get into my two first choice courses. My physics GSI [graduate student instructor] tries really hard, but he’s Chinese and his English is really sketchy, and there’s a lot of stuff I just don’t understand, and with three hundred people in lecture we can’t really ask questions. I couldn’t get into my professor’s office hours two weeks in a row after sitting on the floor in the corridor for an hour. A lot of us just don’t go to class when they don’t take attendance because it isn’t really worth it. There’s one course I really love, every day we have these great discussions that really make me think. A bunch of us took the prof out to lunch, and she said she’s just an “adjunct”, whatever that is, and that she would have to get some other kind of job next year because it didn’t pay enough, we were really sad.”
That student’s father is the finance chair of her state senator’s campaign committee, and has a golf date with the senator next week.
OK, Mark, what can the president do about this? Well, here are a couple of ideas. Please, Ms. Napolitano, for our survival (never mind our growth and progress):
(1) Organize the business, performers’ and professional leaders’ committees hinted at above, not just alums, to make some real noise. We need people who are not on our payroll to show Californians why and how their university matters. A day a year for people to visit campuses and whisk through laboratories with cool bubbling equipment isn’t cutting it. These are people who can sell stuff that isn’t nearly as intrinsically cool as UC, from movies with Los Angeles being blown up, to organic chicken, to software with really elegant screen interfaces; they can sell us. But they can’t make any of their stuff without us and need to make that clear to voters and politicians.
(2) Order every chancellor to present, within a year, the multi-year research management program he or she will institute on his campus, the criteria his research development committee will use to evaluate progress and for midcourse corrections, and the outreach and marketing program it will incorporate [note: sales is talking; marketing is listening]. Make it clear to the chancellors that simply increasing research funding cannot be a primary indicator of success, and neither can a count of articles in academic journals. Make it clear to the public (and to us) that academic freedom is a core principle of the university under your leadership, and also that academic freedom does not mean a lifetime entitlement to think about whatever you find diverting.
(3) Order every chancellor to present a ten-year plan to rationalize the human resources scheme for faculty. How many PhD graduate students is each department admitting, how much of their time are they teaching instead of moving their research along, how long do they take to finish, and how many new PhDs are getting academic or other appropriate jobs; how many professional graduates are getting jobs in their field? The ten years should wind down the abusive exploitation of adjuncts (except in the few cases where non-academics have specialized knowledge useful for a program but not practical for academic appointment), with tenured and tenure-track faculty doing the teaching. This program also needs to include a bottom-up review of tenure practices and look at alternatives like five- or ten-year rolling tenure for at least some new faculty. What qualities of mind and practice are actually leading to tenure? Are we observing them properly in junior faculty? Are we taking enough risks with out-of-the-box colleagues? How is teaching really scored and weighted when we give promotions and tenure (see (4)?
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