On Teaching and Research

Both are possible, neither is magic

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Last week, a grad student tweeted a take on the structure of academia that’s actually pretty common:

I don’t think research professors should teach. I think there should be teaching professors and research professors. It’s way too much to put on one person; and, in my experience, most research professors are not trained enough/have the time to truly improve their teaching.

(That’s a link and a block-quote because Elon Musk is in a snit about Substack so won’t embed tweets in the same way as the past…)

This was, predictably, pretty controversial in academic circles, so a lot of replies and quote-tweets circulated through my feed. As I said over the weekend, I have Thoughts on this, but they’re a bit complicated and ill-suited to sharing on Twitter while on a family vacation. I’m back in the office, though, and procrastinating on grading papers, so might as well take a whack at this…

The Twitter sentiment that comes closest to my actual feelings is probably this from Luke “Dante Shepherd” Landherr:

Unfortunately, there are many who support this approach to higher ed.

But to put it simply: academic institutions exist because there are students to teach. That's the entire reason these jobs exist. Teaching is not an obligation; research is a privilege.

The weakness here is that for elite higher education, the real raison d’etre of undergraduate education is to provide a tax exemption for the $53 billion hedge fund that is the Harvard endowment. But broadly speaking, I like where he’s coming from: the principal value to society of higher education is the education part: training students in the skills they will need to be successful in their careers and as citizens of a representative democracy. Outside of a tiny handful of institutions and a tiny handful of disciplines, the research mission is, frankly, pretty inconsequential for society as a whole.

The existing system that combines teaching and research into a single job seems to me to be a historical accident, a kind of a cross between an apprenticeship model in which a junior scholar would study at the feet of a senior one, and an elite-tutoring model where scholars would pay their bills by teaching basic skills to the children of wealthy families. The basic-education part of this massively expanded over the last couple of centuries thanks to an interest in more broadly educating society (and a huge growth in the amount of money available to pay for that). The research piece has grown a lot more rapidly in recent years thanks in part to the pathologies of modern academia I wrote about a few weeks back, where decades of a terrible job market has pushed a lot of people who want to do research out into jobs that used to be almost exclusively about teaching.

A fairly common response to calls like that in the tweet that kicked this off, to separate the two roles into different tracks, is that being engaged in research makes faculty better teachers. That’s not wrong, exactly, but it always feels a little overblown to me, particularly when talking about teaching students outside your immediate area of interest. There’s even a small piece of me that wonders whether scholarship informing teaching isn’t counterproductive in some fields (but that’s not the fight I’m looking for today…).

(Admittedly, I’m coming at this from the perspective of a discipline where the core content of our intro courses has been pretty well set for a century and a half and isn’t expected to change any time soon. That’s not a Bad Thing, mind, just a reflection of a hierarchical nature of science and the status of physics as a mature discipline.)

And as a practical matter, all too often invocations of the importance of research for teaching are deployed in service of attempts to do less teaching (so as to have more time for research). Which is an interesting rhetorical gambit, but a tricky needle to thread. Most of the time, it ends up coming off to me as an argument that what really matters is the research part of the job, which gets my back up a little. Because, as I said, I’m closer to Landherr’s position: “Teaching is not an obligation; research is a privilege.”

I don’t disagree that if I had fewer classes to teach I would do a better job teaching the classes that remained. But that has nothing to do with doing additional research and everything to do with having more time available to spend on the work of teaching— prepping classes, giving students feedback, etc. I could equally well improve my teaching by reducing the amount of administrative service I do, or spending less time with my family.

So, on the one hand, I definitely think we should place a higher value on teaching itself, and give it more respect. At the same time, though, I find myself disagreeing with another major thread of this recurring argument, which I think overstates the difficulty of teaching.

There’s a bit of a nod to this in the triggering tweet, with its reference to faculty being “not trained enough” to teach well, and a lot of the responses I saw hit that really hard. And this is a pretty common theme in discussions of graduate training generally: that students don’t receive enough instruction in how to teach classes.

Again, this isn’t wrong, but I think it’s a little overblown. Teaching is hard, and time-consuming, but it’s not esoteric sorcery. Anybody who’s gone through enough education to find themselves in a position to be teaching a class should have a decent idea of the basics just from having so much exposure to the student side. There’s an element of background work that isn’t necessarily obvious when you’re in a class, but most of that is stuff that’s hard to fully understand until you have to do it for yourself.

(I’m reminded a bit of a thing Ryen Russillo has said on his podcast a bunch of times about hosting a sports-talk radio show: that every guy thinks he could do the job, and they’re all right for one show. The smack-in-the-face part of it is having to do it for three hours a day, five days a week— not many people can do that. Teaching one class of a lecture course isn’t that much more work than giving a seminar talk, which every senior grad student should be able to do. Doing a new lecture three times a week for a whole academic term, though…)

This is not to say that there aren’t things you can do to keep refining your teaching, or new techniques to learn, or whatever. There absolutely are— I’ve been a professor for 22 years now, and I still read essays and articles about new developments in teaching, and go to faculty development events on campus, and that kind of thing.

The thing is, though, teaching and learning are individual enough that most of that stuff is useless. Useless to me, anyway— I have no doubt that it works very well for the people who are talking it up, but a lot of the time whatever they’re pushing requires resources we don’t have, or is tailored to a different student population than we serve, or just isn’t something I can imagine myself doing successfully. Which is fine, because that’s the nature of the job, as I wrote about recently— what works well for me won’t necessarily work well for a colleague, because we’re different people.

So I find myself being a bit skeptical that a larger amount of formal instruction in teaching methods and the like is actually going to make a huge difference in the quality of teaching at the college or university level. There’s an element of art to the whole thing that necessarily requires some amount of just trying stuff and seeing what works.

And, ultimately, it requires a level of buy-in from the person doing the teaching, who needs to want to get better. That’s ultimately where the problem lies: research faculty who are teaching badly aren’t bad because they haven’t been trained, they’re bad because they don’t want to be teaching in the first place. The ones who actually care will figure it out themselves, and the ones who don’t care can’t be forced to.

Which, again, kind of comes back to the Landherr tweet for me: Teaching isn’t an obligation; research is a privilege. To the extent that there’s a problem with faculty doing both, it mostly traces to getting that balance reversed.

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So, that’s this week in Takes That Will Endear Me to Precisely Nobody. If you enjoy this kind of thing, here’s a button:

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