The Problem with Academia: Part III

Call me a radical, but I believe the most important job of colleges and universities should be teaching students.  Given that the vast majority of the teaching is done by professors, I believe professors should devote a significant amount of energy to teaching and improving their teaching skills.

At too many institutions, though, that is not the case.  At larger and at more prestigious institutions, teaching usually takes a back seat to research.  Frequently, especially at the larger institutions, the graduate students are more effective teachers than the highly paid faculty.  Yet, even for the graduate students, there is little reward for teaching excellence.  At most, if they get good evaluations, they can include them in their job applications to be professors.  However, that won't help them at the larger or more prestigious universities.  Do you see a disturbing pattern here?

However, that pattern does not end there.  At the smaller institutions that do care more about teaching, they also tend to place far greater emphasis on "preparing students for the job market".  They do this because otherwise they won't get students.  Parents today are demanding that their children receive "marketable skills" so they can quickly and easily get a job after college.  The institutions know that if they don't cater to this, then they won't get students.

Herein lies the problem.  The steps taken to "prepare students for the job market" don't actually prepare them for the job market.  It is based on a very shallow and underinformed understanding of the job market economy.

Let me explain it this way.  The perception is that two of the most "marketable" majors are in business and engineering.  It is probably true that you are more likely to quickly get a job out of college if you major in one of those areas.  However, once you get the job, you are going to be somewhat trapped.  Studies have shown that people in those majors, while they get jobs quickly, advance within their companies far more slowly.  This is because, due to demands made my parents and students, the students in college are taught how things work at the time they are in college.  As business practices and technologies change, their training is now useless.  This is because too often students in these areas are not taught how to think and learn how to do things for themselves.  As things change, they are left in the dust.  They are far more likely to lose their job 15-20 years after graduating from college.

Now let's look at a couple of "impractical" majors: literature and philosophy.  If I am an employer and I have a job that requires a lot of writing, I hire a lit major.  I don't hire a business major, even if she took a "business writing" class because she won't be able to adapt her skill to different situations.  Literature majors, however, learn to write by reading excellent writing.  They have far more capacity to adapt their skills to different situations.  Good writing is good writing.  It is much easier to teach a good writer to adapt to a given style than to teach someone competent in a given style to be a good writer in another style.

Similarly, if I am an employer and I have a position for which there is really no specific college training available, but does require intelligence, I hire a philosophy major.  I hire a philosophy major because, at the very least, a philosophy major knows how to learn and think critically.  She can see problems that others don't and come up with solutions that others might not think of.  Philosophy majors are highly adaptable.  They know how to think.

This, in my opinion, is one of the biggest problems with a lot of college training today.  Students are not taught to think.  They are trained to memorize and regurgitate information in given contexts.  They are not trained to problem solve or adapt to new situations.  This may help them get an initial job, but when the job changes, which it inevitably will, they are stuck, lost, and getting passed up for promotions by those humanities majors who were mocked in college for being impractical.

I think this is why employers are so much more ready to hire students from elite colleges.  You can safely assume that these students at least know how to think critically.  They get trained to do that in many of their classes.  There is no guarantee of students receiving that type of training at the local state school.  It is, frankly, unfair to the students who do not have access to the elite colleges.  It is a disservice that those of us who serve them at these we buckle under to the demands of the parents and students to "just give them what they need to know".  In reality, we should understand that what they need to know is to develop the skill of thinking, not merely vocational training.

The Problem with Academia: Part II

In part 1 of this series, I spoke about the "cult of the new" in academic publishing.  You are rewarded for saying something new rather than something interesting or thought provoking.  This cult of the new leads itself to acedemic work that is either concerned with minutia or saying ridiculous things.

Today's post is related.  I will talk about the hiring and promotion processes in academia.  It can be summarized this way: the more you publish, the higher your pay will be and the more likely you will be promoted.  (In part 3 of the series, I'll talk about why this isn't good for students.)

The system is not universal.  The rules are different for large and/or elite universities as compared to smaller or less elite ones.  But, professors get paid a lot more at large and elite universities.  Speaking for the top-10 program where I earned my Ph.D., in order to get hired in the first place you had to have at least 10 peer reviewed  articles published in "tier 1" journals or have a book published by a respectable university academic publisher.  Once you have the job, in order to get tenure, you have to have an additional (beyond what you had when you were hired) 30 articles or two books in the next six years.  I know that may sound like a long time, but I assure you that it isn't.  Most assistant professors at these institutions are putting in a minimum of 60 hours per week, 50 of which are spent doing research.  But this is what you have to do to get the higher paying, presigious job.

Personally, at my non-elite smaller university, I get paid about the same as a public school teacher with a similar level of experience.  I also want to note, for the record, that I put in 60 hours per week and maybe 5 of those go to doing research.  If I, for my future job, wanted to make a better salary, I would need to produce a lot of publications (which means writing about things no one really cares about or making up ridiculous stuff).  Then, once I got the job, in order to gain tenure (job security and a pay bump), I would have to publish a lot more.

At smaller and less prestigious institutions, though, they don't care about publishing as much.  What they do care about depends heavily on the individual institution.  Some schools will count mostly your teaching evaluations.  Others will go with "collegiality" (i.e., do they like you).  A handful will take into serious consideration "service" (working on a lot of university committees or in the community, thus making the institution look good).

Almost every university, in hiring, takes into consideration the categories of scholarship, teaching and service.  What each of those categories mean to the institution and how they are weighted depends heavily.  The more prestigious jobs that pay better overwhelmingly consider scholarship to be significantly more important.  The less prestigious jobs that pay less gernerally take more account of teaching.    So, to give a preview of what's coming in part 3, as a professor I am rewarded, at least in prestige and salary, by largely ignoring my students.  That, I believe, is a problem in academia.