Professor's Multiple Roles Hinder Teaching

A few weeks ago a Professor of Philosophy rose from behind the dais at a House dinner to address the assembled undergraduates and faculty members. "The price of freedom," he said, "is loneliness."

The members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, comprising a community of scholars, has long advocated the virtue of freedom as almost all important. But far from being able to lead an unhampered and isolated life, a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has a growing number of commitments and responsibilities of a very this worldly nature. The life of the Harvard scholar is a complex series of stresses and strains between the scholar, teacher, administrator, member of Harvard, and citizen of the nation.

As the Chairman of one Department wryly commented, "Democracy takes an enormous amount of time." There are faculty meetings and committee meetings, interviews and investigations, secretaries and societies, communities and politics.

But the two major demands upon the professor came from his students and from his field. This is the classic tension or balance between the teacher and the scholar. Harvard has maintained since 1636 that the best scholar is the best teacher. Harvard was founded "to advance learning and perpetutate it to posterity."

The best known recent statement on this duality at Harvard came in 1939 from the President's Committee of Eight, "The University educates men for fulness of life and for usefulness in the world. It is at the same time a seat of learning, established for the advancement of learning...."

On a structural level, the duality can be seen in the Graduate Schools which are primarily concerned with preparing scholars and the college which is chiefly preparing men for the world. But neither the faculty nor the students have ever been convinced that the balance between the graduate level and the undergraduate, between the scholar and the teacher, is a comfortable one.

"In spite of the official University claim that a 'delicate balance exists between the University and the College, we have not found this balance..." the Student Council reported in 1948.

Even the idealistic Committee of Eight report dryly noted, "Between teaching and scholarship there is in principle no conflict whatever.... But the actual schedule of teaching may interfere." They do not really come to grips with the problem of office hours, living in Houses, eating with students, or even meeting students.

In March of 1956 a faculty Committee said that ideally a professor should spend half of his time on teaching and half on advancement of learning. It noted "this ideal seems distant and unreal to many..."

While the faculty complains about demands on its time and admits that teaching is an important part of its job, students see an aspect of the problem when they learn that the professor who has been bored and boring in a lecture course is the leading scholar in his field.

For the student with an alert and critical mind, the ideal professor is the scholar who can teach. For such a student will demand an instructor who is at the forefront of the field, and who considers the field a live one. There are, however, very few Kittridge's at Harvard now, or at any time. There are very few professors who give brilliant lectures in the morning, write penetrating essays in the evening, and give friendly dinners on Sunday afternoons.

The average professor, indeed, is as apt to have a deliberate policy of avoiding undergraduates as of cultivating their friendships. The undergraduate is, from a faculty point of view, often a burden. As the Behavioral Sciences Report noted in 1954, "Harvard's effort to bring individual instruction to the undergraduate through a tutorial system (recently revised) puts another large burden on the faculty.

Pressure Towards Scholarship

And yet the Harvard faculty will admit in survey after survey that it is less burdened at Harvard than at any other University. Although the faculty is keenly aware that it has a duty to teach and although many have a desire to teach, the pressure towards scholarship mingled with the feeling that "true scholarship admits no distractions" hinders teaching as opposed to scholarship.

By training and by belief, the Professor thinks in terms of scholarship. His rise to tenure was part of a highly competitive system entitled "publish or perish." And even with tenure, the pressure to publish is increased as more is expected of him. While upper level courses, particularly those in the Graduate Schools might stimuate the professor or even help him, there are few professors who feel that College level lecturing is an important aid to their scholarship.

Other colleges, faced with the same problem, have attempted to use separate faculties at the College and at the graduate schools. The results have generally been disasterous. At Chicago and Columbia the teachers at the college level were considered second-rate by the university-level professors and by the better students. The morale of the faculty and the students, not to mention the quality of the teaching, suffered measurably.

Still, the professional teacher does have a place at Harvard, particularly in the instruction of lower level language courses. Graduate students find these courses torturous, and with good reason. In the 1956 report, it was recommended that permanent lecturers be appointed to teach these courses. Just so long as the College is committed to the languages, these basic courses must be taught, and it is obvious that a teacher of considerable training is needed.

Another exception to the rule that the best scholar is the best teacher concerns the creative artist. There are already, in the English Department, men solely concerned with writing rather than scholarship who will probably stay at Harvard for years without ever becoming professors.

Scholars Preferred

Yet these men are challenging and often inspiring. The Departments are usually too rigidly committed to the idea that what is best for the scholar is best for Harvard and forget or are afraid to admit that scholarship is not the only worthwhile creative pursuit. As a result, artists and authors are more apt to visit Harvard for a year and give extra-curricular talks, rather than courses where their ideas can be given a closer discussion and where students can exchange ideas with the artist.

Every department is guilty of what the Committee of Eight long ago noted as an "internal tendency to conform." Departments all too often recommend for promotion those men who most nearly come up to their rigid motions of their standards. And it is still an all too common practice for an aging professor to pick a fair haired young boy out of GSAS and groom his as his successor.

The 1956 report recommended that greater attention be paid to the advisory ad hoc (comprised of men in and out of the field, from Harvard and elsewhere) committee's report on a nominee for a permanent appointment. But the original nomination still rests with the departments, with the ad hoc committee advising the President on his decision at a later date. The President and after him, the governing boards, should be encouraged to prod the departments into looking around for new blood even if it makes their own boil.

But the rigid conformity to scholarship goes back further than the recommendations for tenure. It is the teaching fellows, usually second or third-year graduate students, who have the greatest contact with the undergraduate, and who are at the same time subject to the greatest academic-scholastic pressures. When their promotions are considered, their teaching record is considered, but it hardly the determining factor. They realize that the good scholar will probably gain the instructorship, rather than the very good teacher.

While there always has and probably always will be a shortage of universal men in the junior faculty, there is little excuse for the sketchiness of the training in teaching and tutoring techniques now given to teaching fellows. It is while he is at graduate school that the techniques and attitudes towards teaching of the future professor are determined. A few lectures, as now suffices, is hardly ample considering the amount of teaching done by the junior faculty.

While the techniques of the teaching fellow can be improved quite easily, the problem of maintaining even the present level of quality and native ability is quite another matter. In the sciences for example, study grants and industry jobs are awaiting even the mildly promising science student.

The University cannot complete with the money offered by big business to research scientists, although it might well make more of its unrestricted funds available to younger faculty members for private research. The University's prestige does not make up for the small salaries, not to mention the lack of facilities for young married couples.

While the sciences are having trouble keeping their good men at the teaching fellow. level, the other Departments are first being hurt at the instructor level. The promising Harvard instructor can usually count on getting a higher paying position, often with tenure, at another institution.

Temptations Elsewhere

The instructor is especially tempted by tenure at another university since the odds against gaining tenure at Harvard are always steeper than at other institutions. This, combined with the growing financial wealth of state supported universities places considerable pressure on Harvard to better the salary, living conditions, and working conditions of the teaching fellow, instructor, and assistant professor.

The demands placed upon the teaching fellow and upon the professor by the student will, in all likelihood, grow heavier in the next few years. As the level of undergraduate intelligence rises the demand for a deep and more creative teacher will grow stronger. That the level of intelligence is rising is obvious--the class of '56 scored a median of 583 on its Standard Achievement Tests while the median for the class of '59 was 631.

Such minds have demanded more of their professors in terms of time and quality. An increasing amount of attention has been focused upon the means of communication between the student and the professor; the most obvious and most criticized being the lecture system.

The lecture platform aspect of the professor-student relationship was described in General Education in a Free Society as the Olympian level. This lofty level will be improved only when Departments pay more attention to teaching and, more important, when the individual professor makes greater attempt to improve his teaching technique.

The other level of contact was referred to as the earthly, where "the teacher sits on the same level as the student, discussing the truth as it appears to each." While it is highly dubious that a University Professor will sit with a freshman discussing truth, it is possible that in the House dining halls, in an occasional meeting during office hours, and hopefully at an open house, a professor might chat with students more often than at present.

Attitude and Time

The question is largely one of a subjective attitude and a quantity of time which is difficult to measure. But in all, the professor's problem is largely that he wants to do too much rather than too little.

This can best be seen in the amount of time the professor spends on administrative details--at least a full afternoon aweek. Yet few professors if any shirk these duties as they firmly believe that for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences toremain independent, the faculty must do its own administrative work.

In recent years, professors have also spent increasing amounts of time working in the public domain as political advisers, government officials, and advisers to private industry. Rather than a luxury, this practice has come to be considered an important and worthwhile part of the academic life. As one Government professor said, these jobs are the "raw material" of the text books.

The professor is encouraged to follow such pursuits during sabatticals. If a professor wishes to concentrate entirelyupon research or a political campaign, he can take off one year in every four, and he will usually find some foundationor committee to pay him for his trouble. Occasionally the Dean's office or the Departments themselves have even had to apply pressure to halt a mass exodus.

But if the strains of conflicting roles call for improvement in the best faculty, several faculty members point out that there is also room for improvement among the undergraduates. As one professor said, "We are faced with either bringing the faculty down to the student's level of the student's up to the level of the faculty."

The student level would be raised, according to this professor, at the expense of athletes, class presidents, sons of alumni, and children of wealthy families. Such a move would discourage universal men among the students, but would make the College a community of scholars. These students would stimulate the faculty and thus encourage closer contact.

But rather than solve the problem, this might make the professor shortage even more keenly felt. Nevertheless, a less extreme application of this theory was discussed by Dean Bundy in the Fall 1955 issue of the College Board Review.

The Dean urged putting more pressure on the secondary schools by demanding more polished students and fewer "diamonds in the rough." He advocated the selection of the better trained student, when other qualifications are equal.

If the level of the student continues to rise, the professor will find his lectures are being better understood, and thus the students will find more areas untouched, more questions unanswered, and more loopholes.

Hopefully the professor will be encouraged to improve his lectures and to spend more time with his undergraduates. He and his instructors and teaching fellows have not fully met the present demand. They will find it more difficult to meet the future situation unless they make a concerted and conscious attempt to solve present failings.ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, Jr., took a year off to write for Adlai Stevenson in the last campaign.