Of the many expectations that society has of the modern university, the most important is that it will teach well. In interviews conducted by then-President Frank Rhodes of Cornell and a group of colleagues, business and government leaders were asked to identify their concerns about higher education in the early 1990s. There was considerable praise for the accomplishments of American universities; but among the criticisms, two predominated.
The first had to do with the perceived failure of universities to hold back costs and restrain the growth of tuition. The second focused on a conviction that the primary mission of undergraduate education had fallen into neglect.
Nothing could be more destructive of the prestige of higher education than a growing sense on the part of the public that attention to teaching has slipped. Nothing is more restorative than the legends that grow around inspiring, imaginative and influential teaching. And even in a world in which research seems to get most of the attention, faculty members feel deeply rewarded if they sense that they have made a difference in the lives of their students.
Far from being dedicated careerists, the students entering college in 1993 wanted to improve their minds more than their incomes. On a long list of objectives considered essential or very important to them, those most often listed in the annual ucla survey of the nation's freshmen were to raise a family; to become authorities in their own field; to develop a philosophy of life; and to help others in difficulty. Students entering the more selective colleges and universities tended to rank these objectives higher; for such students, "learning more about things" was almost twice as important a reason for going to college as was "making more money."
As they approach their first encounters with university faculty, then, these able, highly motivated students have some firm ideas about what they want to happen. In contrast to the popular view, they do not believe that they are pulling in at an intellectual service station. Occupational preparation is not what they're after; they hope for close contact with thoughtful faculty members who can help them develop as individuals.
But it is plain that many faculty members do not arrive at the university eager, or even prepared, to take up this kind of responsibility. Indeed, it appears that many of them regard it as entirely outside their domain. In this respect, there is a real, and troubling, confusion about what constitutes the nature and extent of faculty work. The public and the entering students believe that faculty will be engaged primarily with teaching; not only lecturing but mentoring and counseling as well. In contrast, many of the faculty members believe that their own scholarly work will absorb much, perhaps most, of their time and their intellectual energy.
Higher education in the United States has always been perplexed about whether the university should "teach values." Recent pronouncements, especially from the political right, have taken the academy to task for what is often called "moral relativism" -- a refusal to take clear stands on what are seen as the fundamental values of our society. This charge actually sweeps up a netful of concerns about the modern university environment: It is too pluralistic (for example, in its failure to require courses in the great works of Western culture); it is too soft and permissive (in its campus rules about drugs and sex); it too readily gives in to the demands of minority students (or women, or gays) to have their "communities" recognized or honored.
This debate is unlikely to end very soon. Indeed, there is some reason to hope that it won't. It has put into play strong and conflicting views about the purposes of higher education and the role of university faculties, and through its challenges, it has encouraged their resolution on campus and their recognition off campus. The controversy is heightened by -- in fact, probably would not exist without -- the enormous changes in the student bodies of our most selective colleges and universities. It was hard not to notice, at the time of my wife's 25th reunion at Stanford in the spring of 1993, that ethnic minorities constituted only a tiny percentage of her class. In fact, six African Americans graduated in that year of Martin Luther King's assassination. But in the freshman class that enrolled during her reunion year, only about half the students were "nonminority."
Such environments are conducive to clashes over values, because everybody brings different values to the campus. Differences surface all the time without much encouragement, generating one "teachable moment" after another. But with all this struggling and sorting out going on in the community, what is the faculty member's role?
The troubling question, and a source of much confusion, is whether we teach values or teach about them. To offer courses that simply advance a particular position would be bad policy and bad pedagogy. There has, after all, been a history of the development of these ideas. There is also a record of social experiment. We have access to both, and they are the raw material for serious academic study. To analyze the ideas of Locke, Hobbes, Mill and Rousseau, to compare societies with varying commitments to freedom and obligation -- that is the way to form one's own values securely. They can't be short-ordered; they aren't McThoughts. Rather, they have to be formed through laborious analysis, through the intellectual equivalent of gourmet cooking.
Letting students work this out for themselves requires almost exquisite restraint on the part of the teacher/scholar -- a careful curb on the natural desire to display one's own convictions. A central purpose of teaching, as of scholarship, is to help students acquire that kind of detachment. Plainly, one of its enemies is too much passion for a particular point of view. That does not mean, of course, that personal belief is out of bounds. Personal and even passionate commitment to the subject is an important source of resonance between teacher and students. But as to analysis and to the development of theory, some distance is essential.
Another argument for restraint in advocacy has to do with fairness. In this context as in others, the teacher brings formidable powers to the teacher-student relationship. It is almost too easy for a professor to persuade, to impose personal views on those whose state of expectation and relative lack of experience may make them vulnerable. The charismatic but careless professor, with a gaggle of adoring but uncritical followers, is a fairly uncommon but nonetheless troubling campus landmark. In the late 1960s, it was both more common and more troubling.
At Stanford in 1971, the University charged a member of the English Department faculty, Associate Professor H. Bruce Franklin, with professorial misconduct; the president proposed that he be fired. This case, at the end of which Franklin was discharged, was important in testing University procedures and the institution of tenure. The interesting outcome for the purposes of this discussion, however, has little or nothing to do with the charges or the countercharges. Most of the arguments presented in the lengthy public hearing dealt with the rights of faculty members. Largely ignored in the decision, because they were not pertinent to the specific charges, were some even more significant issues in the area of faculty responsibilities.
In the course of testimony about various events, it became clear that Professor Franklin's seminar course, which was listed in the catalog as dealing with the work of Melville, often met at the site of various political "actions," and that the subject matter often had no detectable relationship to Melville. Neither Professor Franklin nor his supporters showed any embarrassment over this; nor did they attempt to argue, for example, that Moby Dick is about political revolution and not merely about whaling. Rather, they thought that the times and the issues simply justified changing the program to serve their own beliefs and ends. That sort of thing was not uncommon at the time, and I have no doubt that it unsettled and may even have permanently damaged an institutional consensus about academic responsibility.
An even more troubling aspect of bias in the classroom returns us to the fact that the academic relationship is one of inherently unequal power: The professor is not only the older person, but the person with authority. Here, where the struggle is over ideas and opinions, the deployment of authority may not have such clear outcomes as in, say, playing favorites in grading, but because it is both subtler and more pervasive, it is a much more significant threat to the health of the academy. Nothing is more demoralizing to students than the impression that their evaluations will depend on their acquiescence in the personal views of their mentors.
No university can or should write rules against the expression of opinion, or even bias, on the part of faculty members in the classroom. A healthy exposure of ideological differences often yields the best kind of learning. Two criteria, however, should be met before a faculty member imposes personal views in the classroom. First, such views should pass a germaneness test; there should be an arguable relationship between the professor's views and the subject matter of the course. Second, the professor should disclose any biases.
One other aspect of teaching deserves special attention. It has to do with how professors conduct their teaching, in private and especially in public, and how they express their feelings about this dimension of their academic duty. Of the complaints that I have received about faculty in this regard -- and this covers seven years as a department chair, one as provost and a dozen as president -- the majority have to do with attitudes and behavior toward students, rather than with grading, quality of lectures, and so on. A characteristic flaw (not common, but persistent) that emerges from these critiques is a form of arrogance, of indifference to the feelings and the need for support that most students bring to academic encounters. Experiences like the following perhaps best give the flavor:
1. A professor of chemistry tells a group of students in the introductory course he is teaching that he isn't enjoying the course any more than they are -- he has, after all, little interest in teaching people who are just headed for medicine anyhow;
2. An instructor in a seminar class, when asked a question that seems off the point, holds the student up to ridicule by inviting others to opine on what the question could possibly have meant. The questioner is humiliated, and the other students feel that they have been forced into becoming co-conspirators;
3. A student's final paper in her social science class is returned by the instructor with a grade of C but no general assessment of the paper's faults or virtues. There is a marginal note beside one paragraph: "This reads as though it had been written by a sophomore in high school."
These examples, each as real as it is sad, do real damage. No one should suppose that it is a faculty member's obligation to nurture each student's ego; indeed, strong and even harsh criticism may be called for. But it must be given with respect for the exercise and for the student's feelings, and with the clear purpose of bringing about improvement.
Perhaps the fundamental thing to be said about the teaching of undergraduates is that its importance is suddenly being more widely recognized. At the same time -- and it likely is no coincidence -- consider how exciting and experimental the best teaching has become. In all kinds of places new things are being tried, and the relationship between teacher and student is being revolutionized by technology. Teachers of creative writing edit their students' work on computer monitors, and the latter view the changes in their dorm rooms. Questions about course material come in on e-mail and get answered in real time. Cyberspace is no substitute for personal contact between teacher and student, but it does make possible a level of interaction that would otherwise be inconceivable.
Much of the innovation in teaching is being accomplished by young faculty members. It is a welcome and exciting development, but we cannot help worrying about the futures of those who make such commitments while still untenured. We cannot yet assure young academics that their departments will be as interested in their teaching as in their research. But times are changing. The day may not be far off when teaching performances are routinely reviewed by peers, when senior academic visitors conduct teaching "master classes" as well as give research seminars, and when candidates are told that teaching is important by department chairs who really mean it.
Donald Kennedy, University president emeritus, is Bing Professor of Environmental Science.
