Research Should Be Subordinate to Teaching
Getting that backwards is the root cause of the prestige crash facing academia
Matt Yglesias has a post up with the provocative title “American higher education is adrift,” and I’m honestly a little surprised I haven’t seen more people yelling about it. Maybe it’s just that everyone who ought to be provoked by it has already written him off as not worth reading and responding to. I’m in a bit of a mood to lob grenades, though, so I’ll offer a provocative Take of my own.
Like most of Matt’s stuff, his academically adrift piece has got bits where his analysis of the situation is seriously off base, but also places where I think he’s put a finger on something real. I also tend to agree with him that the recent precipitous drop in esteem for higher education is a major problem for the field, with roots that run deeper than just the Trump II administration dicking around with rules and funding.
The main thing I think Yglesias is right about is that there’s a significant tension within American higher education that isn’t very clearly articulated. It’s a thing I spend a lot of time feeling around as well, most recently in this post about the gap between educating and credentialing, which I think is the same issue Yglesias is pointing to when he writes:
One issue here is that, while American society as a whole is pretty interested in the undergraduate-education function of universities, it seems to me that professors mostly aren’t.[…]
None of the professors who I’m friends with hate teaching or look down on it or secretly despise their students. But the question of what does a great undergraduate education look like just doesn’t loom that large for them. It’s a job that they do, and they are happy to do it. But what they’re interested in, intellectually, is their own research.
I think that’s absolutely dead-on particularly about the most prestigious tier of institutions. And it’s the real reason why political activism and culture-war sideshows are a major problem—the issue is not so much any specific ideological disagreement as it is the message that the thing you’re (nominally) charging families $90,000/year for is not your top priority.
This difference in interests is also what drives quotes like this from a Harvard Crimson article about reductions in grad school admissions:
Philosophy professor Edward J. Hall — who leads undergraduate studies for the department — said a possibility is that “faculty will need to start teaching sections.”
“I think faculty are going to have to step up and just increase the amount of teaching they do,” he said, calling the situation “serious and desperate.”
I saw this getting dunked on in a bunch of places, and deservedly so. There’s a nice ironic twist to this coming close on the heels of another round of Doctor Discourse, with the inevitable invocation of the history that makes Ph.D.’s the original “doctors,” unlike those arriviste medical types. In medieval times, you see, the degree granted permission to teach (docere in Latin), an activity that many of the people insisting on their right to put “Dr. […], Ph.D.” in their social-media handles work strenuously to avoid1.
The separation between teaching and research functions is most extreme at the most elite institutions, but it extends pretty far down the prestige ladder these days. It’s pretty common to find professors at all levels of academia saying that the fix for higher education is to hire more faculty so all of us can teach less. Which is the sort of argument that you need to have a Ph.D to not recognize as galactically stupid from a PR standpoint.
The point where I maybe disagree most strongly with Yglesias is in his (at least implicitly) questioning the idea of combining the teaching and research functions as we do:
A traditional view suggests that one useful aspect of undergraduate education is to directly expose bright teenagers to top researchers who do cutting-edge academic research. It’s not entirely clear to me that this is true, but it’s a plausible hypothesis and one that we’ve run with for several centuries now.
There’s also a newer idea that the government should be a major source of funding for scientific research and, in part due to mid-20th-century happenstance, most of that research funding is funneled through existing universities rather than autonomous research institutes. As research funding has come to be a tool for coercing private universities into following a political agenda, it’s probably worth asking some questions about the overall logic of that setup.
I think that, while it isn’t frequently articulated all that well, there’s actually some very sound logic to the general practice of connecting research to education. True education consists not just of passing on a collection of facts, but teaching students how to learn: to be able to go into a new situation, identify a problem, analyze it to find a possible solution, and advocate for that solution. There’s no better training in how to do that than engaging students in research, in whatever discipline: doing experiments in a lab, simulating them on a computer, interviewing people in the field, reading manuscripts in an archive, making art in whatever medium.
But— and this is the point where I probably disagree most strongly with many of my colleagues— that logic fundamentally requires the research function of a university to be subordinate to the teaching function. That is, the reason to do research at a university is to benefit of the students, not the faculty. I think there’s absolutely an argument to be made for having faculty spend less time on classroom teaching in exchange for spending more time working with students in a research context. We should not, however, be taking faculty out of the classroom so they can spend more time pursuing their own interests without involving students at all.
My feeling is that we have, collectively, gotten the priorities reversed here. Too many of our institutions and practices treat academia primarily as a place for people who already have degrees to pursue research projects that are really only of interest to other people who already have degrees. The training of young people who will go out and put their expensive education to work in non-academic contexts is often a tertiary concern, behind both the professional interests of existing faculty and the training of future faculty.
There are, of course, any number of clever arguments for why research should be the top priority in higher education— faculty excel at clever argumentation, after all— but I don’t really buy any of them2. There’s the argument that research is generating new knowledge of benefit to humankind at large, but that’s really pretty thin. The vast amount of published research never gets read by anyone, and has negligible direct impact on human welfare3. The stuff with real impact could largely be handled with a smaller network of national labs and think tanks; indeed, at some of the most prestigious schools, it effectively is, thanks to the separation between undergraduate students and research faculty.
There’s also a common argument that engagement in their individual research keeps faculty up to date on their field, with benefits that then trickle down to their classroom teaching. I don’t find this a whole lot more convincing than actual Reaganomics, though. If the students aren’t involved in the process, I think the benefit to them is going to be very limited, and certainly not significant enough to offset things like larger sections and the use of contingent instructors to replace regular faculty in the classroom.
The appropriate justification for academic research at a scale approaching what we currently have is that it serves an educational purpose: by engaging students in a deeper way than ordinary classes it helps them develop their abilities to the highest. When we signal to the wider world that the top institutional priority is collecting undergraduate tuition and taxpayer-funded grants to subsidize faculty research rather than offering the best possible education to those tuition-paying undergrads, it’s not really a surprise that parents and taxpayers are starting to take a dimmer view of the entire enterprise.
Quite a while back, “Dante Shepherd” of the late, lamented Surviving the World webcomic had a summary of higher education that I think about a good deal. Paraphrased slightly, he said that faculty shouldn’t look at teaching as a burden distracting us from important research, but look at the opportunity to do research as our reward for doing the important work of teaching. In a very broad and systematic way, across a wide swathe of institutions, we’ve gotten that backwards, and I think that’s a big part of the prestige crash we’re seeing now. Probably a much more significant part than the culture-war political stuff everybody loves to yell about, and a problem that won’t be fixed by just toning down the political rhetoric for a few years.
So, yeah, that’s me winning friends and influencing people. If you want to see whether there’s more where that came from, here’s a button:
And should you feel so moved, the comments will be open:
I am not 100% sure I buy it, but I liked Megan McArdle’s story on a recent podcast about how Ph.D.’s insisting on being called “Dr.” used to be a low-status act because it indicated that you were in a position where it wasn’t obvious that you had the degree.
Which is a part of the reason I work where I do…
Beyond the people who get to list that paper on their CV, anyway.
I think this is one reason why I've often argued--to little effect--that while we are absolutely right that scholarship improves teaching (indeed, that good teaching requires it), we're wrong about how we define "scholarship" in this context. For most professors, scholarship means the active production and dissemination of knowledge in the form of conference papers, journal articles, monographs and so on. I think what it ought to mean is something wider: active engagement with your discipline, with your specialized interests, with wider fields of interdisciplinary knowledge where that might simply mean "participating in roundtables and workshops", "reading actively in a structured way in your areas of interest", "constantly reworking your syllabi with new materials that you've sought out", "going to lots of talks and presentations", "doing peer review" and so on. I sometimes see people who produce and disseminate research who don't seem in that sense to be very scholarly--e.g., they're not curious about what's going on, they're not thinking more widely, they're not really tracking new work except as a kind of defensive strategy against peer review, and therefore what they're producing doesn't feed back into what they teach. (Or they turn what they teach into a mere appendage of the knowledge they're producing.) Universities need to support active engagement with knowledge, which takes time and opportunity and funding. But that should largely be in service to what we teach and how we teach.
While I left academia for industrial research after my PhD, I still regularly interact closely with my peers that remained. One thing that I always find interesting is that a lot of the most successful researchers have large groups with 10-20+ students and don't actually spend their time doing research. More often, they spend their time writing proposals and editing manuscripts. No doubt they have their finger on the technical pulse and their students' and post-doc's projects, but I wonder how much of their "research" time is actually "asking the government for money" time.
When I compare to colleagues at the national labs or in similar positions as myself, we spend closer to 70%+ of our time doing scientific work, while also not teaching. The trade-off, of course, is that we are beholden to business needs when determining what to study.