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About the Author
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg served for 30 years as a university president. He is now president emeritus and university professor at the George Washington University, where he teaches courses on the university presidency in America. He is also an adviser to Korn/Ferry International, where he is helping to find the next generation of university leadership. In June 2008 Simon and Schuster will release his new book Big Man on Campus: A University President Speaks Out On Higher Education. B.A. Columbia, M.P.A. Harvard, J.D. Yale. Fifteen honorary degrees. A swell guy. But not much of a dancer.He will blog about issues torn from the headlines dealing with higher education. Contemporary topics of pressing, current concern. And some serious matters too.
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Students Want More of Everything -- Except Reading
Last week I commented on students’ demands for “more” — greater and immediate access to faculty, more choices in residential living and dining, and better support services. The more students pay in tuition and fees, the greater the sense of entitlement.
But lately I’ve started to be concerned about something students don’t seem to want and that is, to use a vernacular phrase, homework. For the most part, students don’t mind coming to class but what they aren’t too keen on is reading.
My standard is my own freshman year, and the rigors of Columbia College’s core curriculum, the heart of which is Contemporary Civilization. We read continuously for 30 weeks, day and night, weekends included, in order to keep up with the syllabus. Devouring the classics (alas, in translation, though a few classmates, like Henry Ebel, taught themselves Greek for fun), reading our way through history, it was a tour de force for a first generation kid, something that opened my eyes to what college was all about, as well as to the foundation of Western intellectual thought.
But when I listen to students today chat (not, I hasten to point out, the ones in my very own class who are all good looking, strong, and above average) about their classes, I too often hear criticism of the work load rather than excitement about the subject matter, a complaint about the hours taken from meeting with friends or playing sports rather than engaging in debate, deciphering philosophy, history or a good poem. “Keep it neat, simple and to the point,” my faculty colleagues tell me. If I assign too much work, they say, students will write negative comments and the following semester enrollment will plummet.
When I asked my current class for their advice about how many books they thought I could assign next year when I reinvent the course, I began like an auctioneer with the number 14 — one for each week. “What do you think?” I asked. Not a single person agreed. How about 12, 10 or eight?” Reflecting on their colleague’s appetites, somewhere between 6 and 8, they advised. That felt about right to them. To me, however, it seems skimpy, thin, not rigorous enough. Maybe I’ll list eight and then “sneak” in extra readings along the way — handouts, journals, novellas, and a few little extras. “Where’s the beef?” may be the slogan for the dining hall but it isn’t the current cry for the classroom.
I’m not yet prepared to to give in to reading lite in the fashion of nouvelle cuisine. There is an academic joke that says the higher the tuition the more vacation days each semester. Perhaps to that we should add, and also the fewest pages per credit hour.
Posted at 07:56:54 PM on April 27, 2008 | All postings by Stephen Joel TrachtenbergComments
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Imagine that your assigned books are the ‘loose baggy monsters’ of 19thC fiction…I used to do six per term, but lately I’ve been doing five, which they seem to find more manageable, and as long as one of them is Bleak House or Middlemarch, I figure they’re still getting plenty of beef.
— Rohan Maitzen · Apr 28, 02:14 PM · #
Let’s see now: What might make students want less homework?
For starters, it could be the 30 hours a week spent outside of the classroom in employment to pay for tuition, fees, room and board. (That makes them really want “their money’s worth”, too, of course.)
Then there’s those lovely residence halls. Often three to a room or, if they’re really lucky, a suite. That’s very conducive to the kind of quiet, contemplative environment for homework and reading.
Of course, they started out in freshman year primarily in large lecture classes (so that the university could maximize tuition profit and minimize instructor wages) where they may even have had their major testing by multiple choice, z-scored exams.
Oh, and they were likely in a “discussion section” headed by a TA — sometimes simply another undergrad who took the course last year, and who is now getting academic credit or a stipend to “evaluate” his/her peers. That, too, really encourages a respect for homework and reading.
Now as for those hours of philosophical debate outside of the classroom, they would take place under the mentorship of just how many faculty engaging in co-curricular/extra-curricular activities on campus? The adjuncts fly in and out — but so do the senior faculty: teach the class, have an occasional office hour — over and out.
And as for asking students what they think is the appropriate homework load, well, now, as SNL’s “Church Lady” would have said: “Isn’t that special?” No wonder adjuncts and untenured ladder faculty feel they need to give out easy grades — those all-important “student evaluations” (rather than being simply “student response questionnaires”) will be used to make or break their careers.
After all, even the former university president grants to his students the impression that the consumer plays a major role in determining the scope/content of the course.
And we wonder why Jonnie doesn’t quite see the need to read much, eh?
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 28, 09:03 PM · #
I teach Japanese undergrads at Japan’s 8th ranked (by employers) private university. My seminar students each year read 116 graduate level research books in English (posted on scribd under my full name)—that is 18 courses of readings, in volume and quality, for one course. The seminar is two years long so they read the same 116 books twice, in junior year diagramming the main 75 points of 2 key chapters per book, and in senior year discussing another different 2 chapters per book per student. At the end of junior year each student hands in 216 pages of chapter main point diagrams—as proof of the quality of reading they have done. Needless to say one word copied from another student and both students are expelled from the seminar and never graduate from the university (in practical reality—this has never happened yet, thank goodness).
My point is they read, they read graduate level research books only, they read a lot of them, their reading quality is written down and measured, and they read twice. In addition they are reading in something NOT their native language.
How do I do this? It is not normal in Japan (even grad students of national universities in Japan proudly announce they do not read research literatures because their own personal brilliance makes reading others’ ideas unnecessary—really).
I context reading:
1) reading is death—pure and simple
2) reading means NOT BEING ALIVE in all the ways you are used to—videogaming, sexing, talking with friends, doing whatever the hell you want whenever you want, etc.
3) you read not talk because people put their best into writing not into speaking—people with a best do not want to endlessly repeat it orally that is one big reason they write it down, to not have to repeat it orally endlessly
4) if everyone prefers video and interactive game media that is a GOOD reason to READ instead—to develop competitive advantage by doing something harder and rarer than the average jerk is willing to put up with
5) most of the jobs in this world are horrible—boring, degrading, monkey-dom shenanigans from male hormones, petty repetitions of thoughtless routines that go for “ideas” in businesses filled with money-grubbing losers
6) the good jobs—less than 1% by any reasonable measure—go to people who did harder, rarer, more challenging things than what was comfortable, popular, and easy enough to entice the rest of the jerks around
7) as students you are too young to know but around age 40, on average, your friends will start dying at regular intervals and you will change emotionally, realizing that nothing you do while alive will last or even be remembered (Elton John now writes classical music out of confidence that not a note of his pop music stuff will even be elevator music in 100 years).
8) you will, therefore, after age 40 or so, have to choose, daily between investing in lifestyle and crap that will not leave a trace on humanity after you die, or turn Piccaso-ic and dedicate all your hours making artifacts that endure for hundreds of years and communicate you to future ages
9) interview great designers, inventors, artists and one surprise is THEY ALL have huge personal libraries—a lifetime of reading behind their originality!!!!!
This, of course, does not impress all students—I get rid of the jerks it does not impress. But the nice thing is I have a sophomore seminar. Unlike my 3rd and 4th year seminars, which I choose from candidates applying, my 2nd year seminar students choose me, and school officer workers randomly reduce those applying to 15, the limit per seminar. These choosers of me—knowing full well the nasty volume of homework in my seminar, each year get better and better (averaging 800 GRE math scores and averaging 800 Toefl writing test scores).
There are details I must omit—reading in teams, 30 minute weekly team presentations, evaluated on 64 dimensions, structural cognition tools taught, extended mind tools developed and graded. My point is:
A. copy machines caused professors to tell lies about what reading they expected—requiring ridiculously too much
B. students learned to deeply discount professor “reading requirements” statements
C. now everyone treat reading as a relictual thing like cathedrals
D. this can be interpreted to mean that professors never really read themselves and they are passing on that culture of subversion to subsequent generations
E. I read, and read a lot, and greatly benefitted from being forced by various MIT professors to read what I never would have exposed myself to on my own. I BELIEVE in reading and my students sense this. I show them one page of one of my books—I sold that ONE page to Procter & Gamble company for $25,000—a silly example of the power of reading!!!!!! If your reading ALWAYS produces an output (some form of info reduction), then the motivation to read increases exponentially!!!!
— Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 29, 05:55 AM · #
I teach “professional” school level courses. Students are required to have at least two years of college education before taking my course. The first day of the quarter my supervisor was already inundated with complaints because I required my students to read two (2) pages of text and learn fifteen (15) vocabulary terms. My middle school aged daughter had more homework.
— rgmayne · Apr 29, 08:07 AM · #
How does RTG do all that wonderful teaching with a broken arm? (You know, the one he got from patting himself on the back so much.)
— LuckyJim · Apr 30, 12:14 PM · #
On “complaints”:
Comment 4 hints at the larger issue, the culture of academia is now so “consumer-oriented” that the “supervisor” receives complaints about what is the purview of the faculty to determine: course assignments.
What did the supervisor say to the students? Was it, “Sorry, but you have to discuss your reactions to your course with your instructor who has academic freedom. Come back if you’ve been harassed or if the instructor fails to meet classes, for example. It is not my job to adjudicate for students against faculty in the matter of their courses.”
Naw, students know that the administration and its minions (department chairs and others) are all too eager to please the student. Need a grade change? Happy to oblige. And courts (e.g. Parate v. Isibor) increasingly permit it so long as the administration changes the grade itself.
What this posting tells us “from the very top”, as it were – from a former career university president: Keep those tuition dollars coming, keep that administration building humming, keep those construction contracts running, etc., etc., and so forth.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 30, 02:06 PM · #