Why Professors Can’t Teach

Jonathan Zimmerman (Penn), Why Professors Can’t Teach, Washington Monthly, Sept./Oct. 2024: 

In 1949, the graduate dean at the University of Minnesota imagined that he had fallen asleep and woken up in 1984. The first thing he saw was a newspaper. It mentioned none of the “Orwellian horrors” that George Orwell had predicted in his novel. Instead, a banner headline blared “AMERICAN COLLEGE TEACHING REACHES A NEW HIGH,” with all-caps subheads that read “IMPORTANCE OF COLLEGE TEACHING NOW RECOGNIZED BY ALL” and “SKILL OF NEWLY TRAINED COLLEGE TEACHERS IN CLASSROOM AMAZES COMMUNITY.”

These phrases capture the perpetual dream of college-teaching reformers for the past century or more: to make undergraduate instruction into a truly professional enterprise, on par with research. But their reach has always exceeded their grasp. In the 1920s and ’30s, they introduced student evaluations; in the 1950s, seminars and televised lectures; in the 1960s and ’70s, ungraded classes and self-paced modules. Yet teaching remained a lowly endeavor, in status as well as quality: Hired mainly for their publications, many professors were woeful instructors. The problem was already apparent in 1903, when William James—who taught at Harvard for many years, despite never earning a PhD—wrote the most-quoted critique of college teaching: “Will anyone pretend for a moment that a doctor’s degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be a successful teacher?” By mid-century, when the Minnesota dean wrote his missive about 1984, calls to reform undergraduate instruction had already assumed a predictable rhythm. Committees would be formed, statements would be issued, and most professors would continue to teach in the same dull, uninspired manner. In 1957, another university dean wrote that the pattern reminded him of a snow globe he had owned as a child: You shook it up and the flakes scattered, but they soon settled down exactly as before.

So it’s easy to be skeptical about the “Great College Teaching Movement,” the latest effort to improve instruction in higher education. For the past decade, several state university systems have established broad-scale initiatives to recognize—and upgrade—teaching. The leading force in this campaign is the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE), cofounded by a former New York City educational official, Jonathan Gyurko, in 2014. Gyurko holds a PhD—from Columbia University Teachers College—but he’s not a standard-issue academic; instead, he is trying to alter the standards that academics use to judge each other.

Prior efforts to reform college teaching relied almost entirely on moral suasion: If you prick people’s conscience, the theory went, they will change. But nothing will really change, Gyurko says, until faculty have a clear incentive to get better. So ACUE has designed an online training course, which has been completed by 26,000 professors on 450 campuses. Some of them have received stipends; others are awarded new titles, like “distinguished teaching scholar.” Most importantly, perhaps, research has already demonstrated that students who take courses from an ACUE-accredited professor are more likely to complete them. So universities also have a clear financial reason to invest in teaching, which wasn’t as apparent in prior eras. Gyurko acknowledges the long history of failed reforms in this realm, of course. But “this time,” he insists, “it’s different.”

I hope he’s right. Yet it’s hard to imagine a real revolution in college teaching unless the big players get behind it, from the outlets that rank colleges to the governments that fund them. ... [T]he college classroom remains a black box, which almost nobody in power wants to open. Maybe they’re afraid of what they might find inside. ...

The overall reputation of higher education in the United States is at a new low, as a Gallup survey confirmed last year. And it has plummeted among every constituency: young and old, Democrat and Republican, white and nonwhite. Colleges “rely on public confidence to maintain their viability,” a Gallup researcher said, discussing the survey. “If you have a society of people who say, ‘I’m not confident in higher education for a variety of reasons,’ it would follow that folks would stop engaging with that institution and enrolling and paying tuition dollars to those universities.” Message to faculty, and to the leaders who manage them: If you want to hold on to students—and to their tuition checks—teach them better. The job you save might be your own. ...

We can improve college teaching if we, as a nation, decide it’s worth improving. We won’t achieve the kind of revolution envisioned in 1949 by the Minnesota dean who wanted the importance of college teaching to be “RECOGNIZED BY ALL.” But we will surely get better, and that will be good enough.

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