RESEARCH AND TEACHING

College teaching receives helpful and protective criticism in a report from a survey being conducted by the American Association of University Professors. The report maintains that university teaching suffers by being put second to research. Contrary to what one would expect, it states, professors "working on the frontiers of knowledge in their own fields. . . cling tenaciously to traditional habits of thought when their work as teachers is concerned." According to the report, professors, in order to favor their own original work, disregard any consideration of teaching problems. The departmental system. It is concluded, is the "key log in the educational jam" "narrow departmental ambition" draws attention away from the more fundamental problems of teaching.

This report, striking as it does at several phases of the organization of the modern college, befogs the main issue. Teaching, to be sure, deserves the importance accorded it by the report, but the elevation of teaching standards is not to be accomplished by the method suggested. The standards of education cannot be raised by jerking the structure of research out by the roots, though this might seem the simplest and surest method. Research, though it may have been discredited by some uses made of it, forms the actual foundation of any higher educational institution other than a tutoring school.

The real solution of the problem lies not in removing the departmental system, not in relegating research to the background, not in disregarding teaching technique, but in an intelligent fusion of the three. A teacher carrying on research or living with those who do is intensely aware that his subject is a growing one; he is better able to communicate this important concept to his students. Research imparts an atmosphere of growth and progress to any institution. Furthermore, the man who has kept abreast of contemporary thought in his subject is able to select the aspects of the most ultimate value to the student intending to continue in that particular field. Thus the combination of progressive teaching and research points the way to the accomplishment of one of modern education's greatest tasks, the preparing of men to take part in work that is at once based on the past and rapidly proceeding into the future.