All in the Game

Let Them Teach at Stanford

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By Stanley Fish BACKUP

Upon hearing that the University of Illinois at Chicago was luring high-profile (and high-priced) faculty members away from the University of Chicago, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan and other prestigious institutions, State Sen. Steve Rauschenberger, an Illinois Republican, exclaimed, "Let them teach at Stanford!"

What he meant by this update of Marie Antoinette was clarified when he subsequently declared, "I just don't buy their long-term argument that [hiring stars] somehow translates into effective undergraduate education."

Intrigued by these statements, I decided to call Senator Rauschenbereger and ask, first, if he was quoted correctly, and, second, if he would be willing to share with me his thoughts on the university and on higher education in general. He answered the phone himself, immediately acknowledged the statements as his own, and proceeded to speak candidly with me for almost an hour. His primary concern, and the concern of his colleagues in the legislature, he told me, had to do with the perception that what he called "rock star professors" come to the university with negotiated low teaching loads and thus are hired at the expense of the undergraduate mission.

Well, yes and no. Of the 128 faculty members hired during my time as dean, 26 were brought in at salaries of $80,000 or more. (By the way, the number lost to retirements and other departures in the same period is higher than 128.) But of those 26, 13, or fully half, were heads of departments and programs and had reduced teaching loads by virtue of their administrative duties. Of the remaining 13, some but not all teach less than a full load. Given that the entire faculty of the college totals more than 400, the number of courses lost to undergraduate teaching by these arrangements is small.

Nevertheless, Senator Rauschenberger's worry has a basis in fact, and interestingly enough the location of that basis is the 102 who were offered more modest salaries (in some instances as modest as $38,000), for in many cases they too were given course relief, at least in the first year or two. In some cases, course relief was further sweetened by the promise of a semester off in the period before they would come up for promotion.

Those numbers begin to add up, and the question arises as to why we are engaging in such practices. The quick answer is that we have no choice if we want to compete for junior scholars coming out of the best graduate programs, for the other research universities in the hunt are offering the same or better packages, and were we to take the "high road" and give teaching relief and other "perks" to no one, we would retain our purity, but lose out on all the prize recruits.

But does that mean we couldn't attract competent, well-trained teachers to the university? Not at all. In an employment market like this one, there are more qualified persons than there are jobs for them to fill, so why not hire at a level just below the level of fierce competition and at one stroke increase credit-hour productivity, satisfy the needs of students, and look good in the eyes of legislators? And as for those who are being wooed by ever-escalating promises of time off and research budgets, why not let them teach at Stanford?

This is a pertinent question, and to answer it effectively, it will be necessary to come up with an argument that Senator Rauschenberger (and others) will "buy" -- that is, an argument that really shows how hiring stars (both junior and senior) "translates into effective undergraduate teaching."

It won't be enough to make a race/class argument as James Stukel, president of the University of Illinois system, did when he declared, "People coming from underrepresented groups ought to have the opportunity to have the very best people in the classroom."

Stukel's point is a good one -- it is not in the democratic spirit of the country to reserve the "best people" for the children of privilege -- but it skates above the issue raised by the senator and raises his (implicit) question: Why are the best people the people who are angling for research time and support? Why aren't the best people the people who come largely to teach?

I sometimes wonder if it would be possible to respond to such a question without requiring those who are asking it to enroll in a doctoral program, complete it, and teach at a university for at least five years. (And even then, I know of credentialed academics with longer tenures on whom such a response would be lost or be a lost cause.) I wonder, that is, if the effort to explain the life of the academy to those outside it (and to some inside it) is pretty much bound to fail.

In his conversation with me, Senator Rauschenberger named as his chief concern the lack of good lines of communication between the world of higher education and the legislature. We're sitting there making important decisions about what will get support and what won't, he said, but often we don't have a sufficient understanding of what is at stake to make decisions that are really informed. The strong implication was that it is the responsibility of the university to educate the public and state officials about what goes on in its precincts (education is the university's job after all), and that if that happened maybe the usual complaints about professors who work only a few hours a week and spend their time researching arcane matters of interest to no one but themselves would no longer be heard. I don't think so.

I'm all for communication -- the more the better -- but detailed accounts of what professors do and why they do it have been offered innumerable times to innumerable audiences (including state legislators), and still all the old charges continue to be retailed and recycled.

It seems that whatever we say doesn't get through, and it occurs to me that we should be looking for a different way to say it, one that responds directly to the doubt that a prestigious faculty enhances undergraduate education. Perhaps if we posed (to ourselves) a sharpened question we might come up with answers that would "travel" and have a chance at being persuasive.

Here is my candidate: What is the difference between a university where the instructors are well-trained and perfectly competent, and a university where the instructors, in addition to being well-trained and competent, are producing the research that is taught at other universities?

It is certainly not a difference visible to the general public or even to the students who might be its beneficiaries; the president of the undergraduate student government at Illinois at Chicago complained in an interview about hiring "these nationally renowned professors"; and students who don't quite know what a dean is will hardly be impressed to learn that their instructor is one and has written a bunch of books. (It wasn't until I got to graduate school that I discovered that my favorite undergraduate professors had written books and that my new professors had read them.)

The difference is less tangible (which means that we may still be in trouble) and has to do with the down-the-road effects of being taught by instructors whose formulations are remaking the field of knowledge to which the course is devoted.

Here is an example. Courses in gay and lesbian history and culture are now a staple of the curriculum in most colleges, and you can be sure that among the materials studied in those courses will be Texas v. Lawrence, the recent Supreme Court decision overturning the anti-sodomy laws of Texas and overruling Bowers v. Hardwick. The students who read the case will learn that the majority opinion turned on the work of several historians whose research demonstrated that homosexuality did not emerge as a distinct category until the 19th century.

Students at Illinois at Chicago may or may not know that one of those historians (named in the opinion) is a member of the faculty and quite likely their instructor; but whether they know it or not, they will be the beneficiaries of the fact because they will be learning this bit of history from the horse's mouth; and in the (almost certain) event of a discussion of the issue, they will be conversing directly with one of those whose words will likely influence whatever happens in the future.

Now, that example is a particularly dramatic one, but in every department in the college there are faculty members who have a similar relationship to the areas they work in and are makers of the knowledge they are transmitting: a political scientist whose statistical compilation of the American electorate is a basic reference work for his colleagues; an earth and environmental scientist whose work on the Antarctic is literally opening up new territory; psychologists who not only study assessment but have written the book other psychologists study; a Latina scholar whose new journal is simultaneously serving and creating a field; an English professor whose writings on disability are among the primary documents of an emerging discipline; an organic chemist whose new synthetic methods are rewriting the text in carbohydrate chemistry for pharmaceutical and biomedical applications.

It is not that those who teach the work of these star professors do not deliver the "goods" -- the category of the great teacher who is not himself or herself a leading researcher is a real one -- it is just that there is something particularly powerful and exciting about watching and interacting with someone whose discipline-shaping ideas are being worked out and tested at this moment in this classroom. It is an excitement students will feel even when they know almost nothing about the credentials or "national renown" of their instructors; and it is an excitement that will flower (not in every case but in enough cases) in a decision to take up a certain line of work or in a resource that can be sustaining at a difficult moment or in a memory that keeps alive and renews the pleasures of serious thought.

Notice that I have not named among the benefits of a faculty whose work is being taught elsewhere the greater likelihood of attracting other top-notch scholars or the increased possibility that these scholars will bring large amounts of grant-supported research to the university and thereby improve its national ranking and cause it to become more attractive to private donors.

Those are all real benefits, and I would be the last to dismiss them; but I have tried to be true to Senator Rauschenberger's basic concern by offering an account of the educational benefit that might flow to students because they were being taught by leading-edge professors, rock stars or not. Stanford has such professors, but we have some too, and I would hope that the residents of Illinois and their representatives would be happy to know that they were appearing daily right here in the neighborhood.