In Defense of Bad Teaching (or, The Conceit of the Liberal Arts College)

My colleagues Aspazia and SteveG have paused from their final exam grading to reflect on their roles as teachers at a liberal arts college. Aspazia applauds Harvard University for a report calling for more emphasis on teaching; she suggests that we at Gettysburg College would do well to reward good teaching more than we currently do. Steve suggests that the incentives that faculty face even at a liberal arts college – let alone Harvard – make rewarding teaching an uphill battle at best.

Let me play the contrarian here and ask the question: is rewarding good teaching really such a good idea? Is tolerating bad teaching really such a sin? I’ll do this by asking a series of pointed questions. These are not rhetorical questions: I’d really like to know the answers, and it’s possible I’d be persuaded that good teaching is very important. But for now, I’ll wax skeptical.

1. Do students want good teaching?

The premise of Aspazia’s posting is that there’s a tradeoff to be had between good teaching at a place like Getysburg and “be[ing] around some of the greatest minds on earth” at a place like Harvard; and that students willingly forego access to the great minds to come to a teaching institution. In other words, we survive by filling the niche in the market that is good teaching. Obviously, anyone would prefer good teaching to bad teaching if there wasn’t a cost. But how many of our students would give up some other substantial benefit for the good teaching we offer? How many of our applicants would, other things equal, choose Gettysburg over Harvard? Do those who are attracted to a place like Gettysburg come here for the teaching, or is it the size, location, culture?

2. Does good teaching produce better-educated or more successful graduates?

For any particular course I teach, my syllabus is pretty much the same as that of a similar course in a research university. Students who read the assigned readings carefully are going to come away with the same basic knowledge whether at Gettysburg or, say, Penn State. Do the creative twists I employ (“hands-on” assignments, class discussions, feedback on papers, discussion boards, etc.) add significantly to their understanding of the material? How would anyone know? Our college as an institution does a lousy job of assessment. Even if it did a good job, every institution uses different means of assessment, so it would be impossible to compare education outcomes across schools. Worse yet, we as a faculty can’t even agree on a reasonable set of educational goals we’d like to aim for. Our curriculum says something about “multiple inquiries” and “integrative thinking” and “global citizenship” and oh I can’t remember the other; but I don’t know how many of us actually buy into those goals or even understand them. Where is the data saying good teaching pays dividends?

3. Is teaching actually better at liberal arts colleges?

We certainly teach more. We also probably put more effort into each class and make more time for students. But do students capitalize on the opportunities we give them? My courses are distinguished from those at a research university by the requirement that students, say, write a research paper. But if most students spend no more than two days tossing the thing together, are they really being educated more effectively? As for the conscientious students who pour their hearts and souls into their term papers – if they were at a research university would they simply find other outlets for their academic passion? Where’s the evidence that students get more out of my intermediate macroeconomics course than they would from, say, Brad DeLong at Berkeley or Greg Mankiw at Harvard?

Let’s do a thought experiment. In the Economics Department, we teach about 54 sections of classes per year. We do this (starting in 2008) with 9 full-time, tenure track faculty teaching 3-2 loads (assuming one of our ten faculty members is on sabbatical each year), with nine sections filled by visitors and adjuncts. Suppose we took the 20 introductory-level courses we teach (average class size 20-30) and consolidated them into 4 big lectures with 100+ students in each. Suppose we reduced by one the number of sections we offer of our intermediate theory courses and statistics courses by upping the enrollment cap from 30 to 45 or 50. Bang, now we’re teaching 35 sections instead of 54, of which 26 are taught by tenure-track faculty. This would allow us to move to a 2-1 teaching load. Suppose we did this in all departments, then upped the research expectations accordingly, attracting if not the greatest minds, at least greater minds than we currently have. From the student’s perspective, you’re now taking your introductory courses and some 200-level courses in large lectures, but you get basically the same experience in upper-level courses that you have now. Would we see a decline in applications? Would students get a worse education than they currently do?

I sometimes fear that all the talk we do about teaching is so much self-congratulatory claptrap to cover for our inadequacies as scholars. I sometimes fear that the main service we do to our students, relative to large universities, is to comfort and entertain, rather than to educate. Please, someone convince me that I’m wrong.