At my university we have, as is common now, a Strategic Plan. Our Strategic Plan is a public document and has been designed with an eye to what will impress our public. The first goal of our Strategic Plan addresses our commitment to high-quality undergraduate education. By making this our first goal, we acknowledge that we know teaching matters to our public. When faculty on my campus discuss the other goals in our Strategic Plan, we agree that the university takes them seriously and puts its resources into their achievement. Reference to the university’s commitment to undergraduate education, however, is met with derision or the wink of complicity—we have to say it but we all know we don’t mean it. But what is the cost of this gap between what we say and what we do? What is the cost of this open hypocrisy—to us as faculty, to our students, to our institution as a whole?
Those of us who teach at public universities, at least in the Northeast, have witnessed a steady erosion of support for our enterprise. While many factors contribute to this situation, I believe our hyper-valuation of scholarship and our devaluation of teaching is one of them. After all, sitting in the legislatures that make funding decision are some of our former students who, perhaps having experienced the consequences of our priorities, do not share them and are not convinced that we need or deserve more money. They may be particularly unconvinced when they recall that we were only too willing to let a part-timer fill in for us when we got that coveted buyout to pursue our scholarship. They might well ask why the state should pay a professor $10,000 plus benefits to teach a course when the professors themselves have said no harm is done, no difference made, if this same course is taught for a $2,500 flat fee, no benefits, by someone who is not a professor. If our publics seem unpersuaded by the difference between a professor and a part-timer, perhaps they are simply reflecting our own evaluation.
When they fail to increase our funding or when they cut our budgets, our publics are also telling us that they do not find what we do as teachers, whatever we or they call it, very valuable. Again, they are mirroring our own judgments. When we say that teaching is what we have to do in order to get to our work, we are effectively saying that teaching is a means to an end. Ethically speaking, we treat teaching as an object, not a subject, something to be made use of, not valuable in and of itself, and we treat it the way we treat anything labeled “less than”—with varying degrees of dismissal and contempt. On my campus a history of the effort to establish a Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning would provide sufficient evidence of this contempt and its many guises, including a kind of collective faculty outrage at the deflection of scarce resources to such silliness. And there is the fact that at my university the rank of Distinguished Professor is reserved for those whose research is deemed outstanding; I am a Distinguished Teaching Professor, the adjectival inflection serving, as always, to mark something lesser. (I might also note that I could not have achieved promotion to this rank without an outstanding record of scholarship.)
Then there are the conversations about teaching as a criterion for tenure and promotion that take place in academic personnel committees and the distinctions made between the “objectivity” of the review of scholarship and the “subjectivity” of the evaluation of teaching, distinctions that have the effect of making it difficult to use teaching as a criterion for personnel decisions. Our failure to provide doctoral students with training in teaching equivalent to that we provide for scholarship offers further evidence of teaching’s “less than” status. Imagine how different our profession would be if we required for the Ph.D. a teaching equivalent of a thesis. Teaching, we implicitly say to our graduate students, is not as important as scholarship; you will get a teaching assistantship based on our assessment of your potential as a scholar. Of course, if we think you are really hot, we will give you a fellowship, and then you won’t have to teach at all! From the outset, we give those entering the profession the message that teaching is low status and scholarship is high status and that if you wish to get ahead in the academy, you should try to teach as little as possible.