Thursday, June 4, 1998
Professors torn between teaching, research
ACADEMIA: Tenure system hurts students by overemphasizing duties
of TAs
Naive, star-struck freshmen arrive at the gates of UCLA looking
forward to growing in wisdom and grasping at the pearls gushing
from the lips of dozens of the most famous scholars in the
world.
Little do they realize that the closest they might get to one of
these prestigious professors is the balcony of Royce Hall. Many
undergraduates, frustrated by the depressing sense of anonymity and
tedium experienced in massive core classes skip lecture and watch
the video later. UCLA, for those of you who haven’t already
noticed, has a lot to learn when it comes to teaching.
While students at Pomona smugly remark to their UCLA friends
about how frequently they enjoy pasta dinners with their
professors, the humble UCLA undergraduate only has stories of some
incompetent teaching assistant (TA) who can hardly speak English to
offer in comparison.
Those UCLA undergraduates who enjoy close relations with their
professors are a rare breed; honors and junior seminars, senior
theses and graduate classes grant attention-seeking undergraduates
the privilege of a few hours a week with those semi-divine
figures.
Most undergraduates, too timid to summon up the courage to visit
the notoriously under-attended office hours, will breeze through
their college careers taught mainly by inexperienced graduate
students. They will be lucky if even a couple of professors greet
them with a salutatory smile as they pass in the street.
The reasons behind UCLA’s enormous failure to offer tutelage to
its students are manifold. The bloated size of the university often
hampers the ability of professors to spend time with all their
students. UCLA has grown so large that it is not feasible for
professors to invite their students over for cocktails every other
weekend.
But the old adage rings true at UCLA: "God helps those who help
themselves." Ambitious undergraduates always have the opportunity
to visit office hours and correspond with professors via e-mail.
Students can therefore determine the amount of attention they
receive from their professors.
What they cannot change is the seemingly poor style of teaching
that has evolved at UCLA (I admit that this is not always the fault
of the professor or his or her TA). Blame the tenure system. The
unfortunate contradiction of the tenure system at UCLA is that it
allows the university to continue its unmatched tradition of
prestigious scholarship yet rewards professors who pay little
attention to their teaching.
Essentially, undergraduates and professors alike are attracted
to UCLA for the unmatched position the university holds in
academia, and yet, as soon as they arrive they find that the
tenured professors devote themselves to intensive research while
the students despairingly search for a competent graduate student
to teach them what they didn’t learn in lecture.
This contradiction is, unfortunately, almost inevitable. In
order to sustain its reputation, UCLA must continue to hire only
the most able scholars in the field and pay no heed to teaching
ability.
The core of the problem lies with the situation of the junior
faculty at UCLA, not with who actually wins the tenure battles.
Even if it is true that UCLA has no choice but to tenure scholars
over teachers in order to maintain the reputation that initially
attracted students to UCLA, that does not mean that junior faculty
must be consigned to their miserable lot.
Junior faculty members hold much of the teaching responsibility
at UCLA, must work slavishly in order to publish tenure-winning
books and are almost always forced out after seven years when they
fail to win tenure. Even as junior faculty are expected to do most
of the undergraduate teaching, UCLA sends them the message that
they will lose their jobs if they do not concentrate on
publishing.
The best teachers at UCLA are often junior professors who
display an extraordinary devotion to their students and cultivate a
wonderful lecture style. The extensive time they commit to
students, however, cuts into their publishing schedule, and thus
these professors must bid farewell to UCLA until they have
established a worthy reputation as scholars rather than
teachers.
Undergraduates have seen countless excellent teachers depart –
untenured – from UCLA, because they have expended their energies on
teaching instead of writing. A new crop of junior faculty members
arrives, and the whole process begins again. The only grace
students find in this system is that when beloved junior faculty
members leave, their replacements are often fine teachers in their
own right. However, those replacements soon leave as well.
When junior faculty members realize that UCLA wants them to
publish rather than teach, undergraduates end up paying the
penalty. Then not only the tenured professors, but also the junior
faculty hand over their students to graduate students.
At a university which prides itself on selecting the brightest
students in America, it is shameful that graduate students hold so
much responsibility for teaching. Yet few tenured professors have
the time to teach undergraduates when they would rather be teaching
graduates and doing research. And junior faculty members who
willingly spend time and energy teaching rather than publishing are
committing academic suicide.
The contradictions of tenure at UCLA are baffling. We come to
UCLA attracted by its resources, its beauty, but above all, by its
prestigious faculty. But that faculty does not commit its energies
to undergraduate teaching because on its list of priorities, we
come last; everyone has better things to do than teach
undergraduates.
When the university finds professors willing to make their
students a high priority, it would be wise to make the most of the
opportunity.
Inlender is a second-year psychobiology student. You can reach
him at [email protected].