When
research is not enough
Glyn Davis
Derek
Bok
Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students
Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More
Princeton University Press, $52.95 hb, 413 pp, 0691125961
On
a cold, grey day in February this year, economist Larry H. Summers
announced his resignation as president of Harvard. Though some
undergraduates gathered in Harvard Yard to wave signs saying ‘Stay
Summers Stay’, the rift with faculty and the governing board
proved too much. Summers issued a dignified letter to the Harvard
community, shook hands with well-wishers, and disappeared.
Much media commentary on his resignation suggested a hostile faculty
had campaigned against a visionary leader. Lawyer Alan Dershowitz
called the outcome a ‘dubious victory for the politically
correct’. An Op-Ed writer in the Wall Street Journal
described the move as a ‘coup d’École’,
citing clashes between Summers and professors over a petition
to divest from Israel, comments about the under-representation
of women in science, and clashes with prominent black faculty.
Such analysis restates a now familiar critique of American higher
education. Captured by shadowy forces of ideology, professors
allegedly resist leadership from above and criticism from students
below. Summers becomes a convenient symbol of the alleged ungovernability
of the American university, a man whose plans for revising curriculum
and a new campus to accommodate growth sparked a revolt of the
tenured.
Since Harvard remains an endless source of copy, no doubt books
will appear soon to dissect the Summers years (2001–06).
These will likely show a more complex narrative at work, and may
also highlight the often unhappy history of leadership at the
richest and most famous university on the planet. President Abbott
Lawrence Lowell (1909–33) once described Harvard administration
as ‘tyranny tempered by assassination’. His predecessor,
Charles William Eliot (1869–1909), was asked to define the
single most important attribute for a successful college president:
‘The capacity to inflict pain,’ he answered confidently.
One former Harvard president unlikely to comment on the fall of
Larry Summers is Derek Curtis Bok (1971–91). Though seventy-six
and long retired from university administration, Bok resumed the
role of president in July, as the Harvard Corporation scrambled
to find a long-term successor.
Yet Bok’s most recent book, Our Underachieving Colleges,
published just before Summers strode out to face the media scrum,
signals clearly his concerns about American higher education.
Bok is unmoved by conventional pieties about universities held
to ransom by tenured radicals. He rejects the doomsday tone of
much recent writing on higher education, with its claims of mediocrity
and subversion by postmodernists (has a passing intellectual current
ever been credited with such apparent influence?). Such polemics,
he argues, are long on rhetoric but short on evidence.
Instead, Bok is worried by a pervasive conservatism in higher
education, specifically the refusal by professors to confront
evidence about poor teaching. His concern is less content than
process — without more attention to classroom experience,
America’s myriad colleges and research universities will
not meet their obligations to students or communities.
This is brave territory for Bok to explore, because assertions
about teaching quality inevitably run into problems of data. The
unreliable nature of teaching quality measures is a core issue
for universities: since only research can be confidently counted
and ranked, research league tables dominate discussions of performance.
With few proxies of overall quality available, students may select
a university that focuses all its resources on research performance
rather than on pastoral care and classroom excellence. Reputation
is no guarantee of a great student experience.
Bok is careful to survey beyond America’s élite universities
to a wide array of institutions. Yet he need look no further than
Cambridge, Massachusetts, for examples of dissatisfied students.
Take, for example, Privilege, by recent graduate Ross Gregory
Douthat, published in New York last year. In often startling prose,
Douthat catalogues his cumulative disappointment with the Harvard
undergraduate experience: students obsessed with networking (‘a
Harvard education is a four-year scramble to ingratiate oneself’);
professors concerned with protecting research time; incoherent
electives; grade inflation; and classes taken by young teaching
assistants desperately concerned about their career prospects.
‘I give out mainly As,’ one TA tells Douthat and his
classmates. ‘A few Bs maybe. But I don’t like to, you
know?’
Bok understands the pressures that would leave teaching little
valued in institutions that claim to be great centres of education.
He argues that academics and university leaders ignore evidence
about the futility of many time-honoured teaching methods. Professors
resist taking instruction; they see teaching as innate, rather
than a skill to be learned and developed. As Bok observes, ‘Since
faculty members normally keep abreast of published work in their
fields, the content of their courses tends to be reasonably up
to date. The same cannot be said of their teaching methods.’
Lectures remain the most popular form of instruction in American
colleges, despite overwhelming evidence that students learn best
through active learning — problem-based learning, study group
discussion and laboratory exploration. Bok cites studies to show
that most students cannot recall factual content from a lecture
within fifteen minutes of class concluding. One study from the
University of Texas, at indicates that professors, on average,
spend eighty-eight per cent of available teaching time lecturing,
and just five per cent talking with students. The same literature
suggests that only eight per cent of professors consult the literature
on teaching research.
Bok is concerned about more than classroom experience. He argues
that curriculum design in many four year colleges fails to achieve
the aims of a generalist education, concerns such as the ability
to communicate, character building, citizenship, living with diversity
and preparing for a global society. Faculty press early for specialisation,
with unexpected consequences for broader graduate attributes:
Unfortunately, far from reinforcing other aims of undergraduate
education, many concentrations appear to have the opposite effect.
Thus Alexander Austin’s study of 24,000 undergraduates revealed
that majoring in engineering was associated with declines in writing
ability, cultural awareness, political participation, and a commitment
to improving racial understanding. Majoring in education proved
to be negatively associated with self-reported growth in analytical
and problem-solving skills, critical thinking, public speaking
and general knowledge. Other concentrations were associated with
declines in critical thinking (fine arts) or civic engagement
(science) or writing ability (science).
Why would teachers rely on teaching methods and curricula known
to be inadequate? Bok identifies a number of causes: the craft
training system that sees junior academic staff learn by imitating
existing professors; the efficiency of large lectures over small
classes; time pressure on staff to excel in research; the inherent
conservatism of a profession that sees no need to change; and
the inability of university leadership to make teaching quality
a pressing issue. Advocates of reform are caught by the difficulties
of measuring performance, the lack of national standards, and
the reality that ranking systems such as the influential US News
and World Report pay scant attention to measures of classroom
quality. All incentives run strongly toward the status quo.
Not everything is gloom, of course. Bok finds examples of excellent
teaching practice, and of professors willing to learn and innovate.
One striking example, inevitably, draws on Harvard. Eric Mazur
taught a quantitative introductory physics course to undergraduates
for some years using the standard approach of lectures, distributed
class notes and set textbooks. His student evaluations seemed
sound, so Mazur saw no need for change until, by chance, he read
an article suggesting that physics students in courses such as
his rely on memory, rather than understanding, to solve assigned
problems.
Somewhat affronted, Mazur tested his students. He was disappointed
to find little grasp of underlying scientific principles, and
decided to change fundamentally his teaching approach. Instead
of distributing a lecture summary after class, Mazur now required
from students a short paper prior to his lecture. This identified
what students had understood from the textbook and what remained
puzzling, and so allowed lectures to focus on problem areas. In
class, Mazur abandoned the one-hour lecture, speaking instead
only briefly at the start of the class, before setting short exams
on key physics concepts. Students were invited to discuss their
findings while he compiled scores and identified continuing problems
to be solved in class or carried forward to tutorial groups.
Evaluation soon recorded a significant improvement in understanding.
Bok reports Mazur’s undergraduates doubling their understanding
of physics concepts compared with earlier cohorts. Mazur published
his method and results in academic journals. Yet ‘his techniques
have yet to penetrate more than a small fraction of the quantitative
science courses across the country, leaving most students still
at risk of getting through by memorising material they do not
truly understand’.
Such attention to research on teaching, Bok suggests, is distressingly
rare. As he observes with gentle irony, ‘faculties seem inclined
to use research and experimentation to understand and improve
every institution, process, and human activity except their own’.
American universities remain teaching institutions but not ‘learning
organisations’ committed to self-examination. Bok quotes
surveys suggesting that nearly ninety per cent of college professors
consider their teaching ‘above average’.
To make a difference, Bok seeks robust indicators of teaching
quality. ‘If nothing much turns on the results, faculty members
will ignore the tests.’ At present there is ‘no compelling
pressure to improve undergraduate education’. Professors
— like everyone else — find close evaluation unwelcome
and uncomfortable. Bok argues that only when teaching scores appear
in university rankings, and so influence student choice, will
reform follow. While Bok sees a role for philanthropic foundations
in encouraging closer attention to teaching quality, and for governing
bodies to ask awkward questions, he looks to universities to solve
their own problems. ‘Useful reforms can come only from within
the universities,’ he warns. ‘Ultimate success or failure
… will depend on the faculty.’
Australian
governments have not been so patient. Under Education Minister
Brendan Nelson, teaching scores became the basis for scarce additional
funding. The first round of the Learning and Teaching Performance
Fund in 2005 distributed $54.4 million in funding to fourteen
universities, based on a composite index of measures, weighted
toward student satisfaction scores. The announcement sparked a
long and unresolved controversy over the validity of scores and
the fairness of outcomes; a Department of Education, Science and
Training advisory group, carefully drawn from winners and losers
alike, is now reviewing the methodology.
Whatever the merits of the Nelson decision to award dollars based
on contested teaching scores, his action focused attention on
teaching quality more sharply within Australian institutions.
Teaching evaluation has a long history in Australia — many
measures Bok seeks for American colleges are already commonplace
locally. A new funding source has heightened interest. Since universities
are filled with clever people, this has inspired some cuteness
with rules and measures. But it has also made Academic Boards
ask pointed questions about courses and teachers with poor appraisal
results. Many Australian universities now require new academic
staff to undertake teaching training, and encourage mentoring,
feedback and structured reflection on teaching practices. Such
measures are reported through statutory requirements that would
be resisted fiercely as infringements on academic freedom in the
United States.
A renewed focus on teaching raises important questions about the
purpose of a university. International recognition systems stress
research above all other activities. Indeed, the lure of the Shanghai
Jiao Tong index, which ranks universities exclusively on research
performance as measured by science-weighted US-based indices,
is hard to resist. The Jiao Tong index has produced a single international
ranking and so changed forever competition between universities,
whatever the widespread pretence to indifference. ‘We don’t
pay much attention to such rankings,’ a senior academic at
Heidelberg University told me last year. ‘But then we’re
number sixty-four in the world, so we don’t need too. I notice
your institution is only eighty-second. Why am I talking with
you?’
There are other ways to think of universities, better games to
play. In contemporary Western practice, an ideal university excels
at three core activities: research of course, but equally learning
and knowledge transfer. When these three strands are tightly wound
together, each reinforcing the other, greatness follows. No single
ranking can measure this triple helix, but together these goals,
working together for researchers, students and community, define
the purpose and ambition of higher education worth taking seriously.
Bok finds himself in the unusual position of being able to practice
what he has preached. Our Underachieving Colleges is a
superb book, driven by tough questions, impatient with opinion
and nostalgia, concerned to test propositions against evidence.
Since Bok’s subject matter is American, his solutions reflect
the political culture in which American colleges work.
Larry Summers does not appear in the index to Our Underachieving
Colleges, yet he drew some of the same conclusions. His letter
of resignation cites complacency as among the greatest risks facing
Harvard. Standing in Harvard Yard, Summers noted surveys showing
that ‘the quality of experience we provide our students is
not fully commensurate with their quality or the quality of the
Harvard faculty’.
Derek Bok the author has identified the sources of conservatism
among American professors when teaching the next generation. Now
Derek Bok the University President has an unexpected chance, once
again, to inspire and to teach.
Glyn Davis is Vice-Chancellor of the University
of Melbourne, and was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard during
a small part of the Bok presidency.
Download
print-friendly version.
