What Higher Ed Critics Don’t See: A UT Professor’s Perspective
Randolph Lewis is an associate professor of American studies. His piece first ran in Inside Higher Ed.
The assault on higher education in Texas has been painful in recent months. Mysterious organizations with deep pockets have been pushing “breakthrough solutions” with little sense of the realities of higher education. Why do these people want to mess with Texas’s best universities? What kind of political game are they playing?
I look at my colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin and see hard-working, student-centered, idealistic people who are contributing to the quality of life in Texas. No different than faculty at Texas A&M or other state universities, we are proud of what we do.
Yet we’re under fire, forced to justify our existence to a grim assortment of the dim, the lost, and the self-interested. Yes, we realize that the attack is coming from a toxic blend of ignorance and ideology. It’s often coming from people who don’t know the difference between a teaching assistant and an assistant professor, who don’t understand how research and teaching are interdependent, and who cynically want to make room for their own for-profit colleges and online schemes. To many of our critics, an education is a fungible asset that boils down to dollars and cents and nothing else.
It’s an absurd position—but that doesn’t mean we’re immune to their criticism. The sad truth is that it’s undermining our morale as well as the public perception of what we do. Let me give some examples of the claims that have been made about institutions like UT, each one tearing down our mission and our morale with falsehoods and distortions.
Not invested in our students? Apparently, the attack dogs have never spent much time with faculty members. If they did, they would see a high level of student interaction among tenured, tenure-track, and adjunct faculty alike. They claim our commitment to students is measured only by hours in formal class time. While our detractors imagine us frittering our days away with tea and crumpets, they fail to appreciate how our lives are freighted with hundreds of hours of invisible labor each semester: the long hours on scholarship committees; the late night e-mails from students needing an immediate response; the endless stacks of papers to grade; the extra meetings with students that spill out of office hours. Day after day, we are doing the little things that allow undergraduates to flourish in the world after UT. Our task is daunting but meaningful: we are teaching young people how to research, analyze, write, present, and innovate in ways that enrich individual lives as well as communities.
Faculty not working hard enough? We cringe when we hear that our productivity should be measured with a simplistic formula, one that would never be applied to lawyers, doctors, or legislators. We listen to claims that we’re neglecting our students because we’re too focused on research—or, paradoxically, that we’re not doing enough research. Somehow our critics think we’re only working when we’re physically in the classroom, which is akin to saying lawyers only work when they’re in the courtroom. All I can say is this: Being a professor is a great but exhausting job in 2011. The combination of student demands, research pressure, and service expectations creates a hectic workday that is never really over, not even late at night or on the weekend. In other words, it’s like most jobs in the frantic post-industrial economy.
Putting research over teaching? Sorry, wrong again. One of the key figures in the attack on UT is oil-executive Jeff Sandefer, who claims that UT hires top researchers without regard for classroom effectiveness. “They’re willing to trade off quite a bit in teaching quality for that research,” he was quoted as saying in the Texas Tribune. “Whether the new people are good or not is beside the point.” The reality is that good teaching is almost never “beside the point,” not even in the “publish or perish” culture of a research university. Professors who are not naturals at the podium are pushed into remediation—if they do not arrive as strong teachers, they receive assigned mentors, special training, and peer pressure from faculty who expect excellence in research and teaching alike.
The need for greater transparency. If you want to feel naked to the world, try teaching at a public university—not much is kept under wraps. Your salary, your syllabi, your publications, even whether you are “hot or not” is posted on the Web (the last on sites like RateMyProfessor.com). If you want to feel secure behind a wall of lawyers and feudal privilege, try working at a corporation or perhaps in the governor’s mansion. (Or check out the website of the group behind much of the criticism—the Texas Public Policy Foundation—and try to figure out who is really funding their campaign against Texas’s universities).
A greater reliance on student evaluations will result in a better education. Unfortunately, turning education into a popularity contest is not the answer. For years universities have expanded their assessment programs to fit a more corporate model. What have we learned from this vision of students as “consumers”? That they don’t like it when historians “talk about lynching.” That they favor female professors who “look sexy” in particular outfits. That they don’t like “reading books that are hard.” (All actual comments that my peers have received). Of course, student evaluations can sometimes be useful—but only to a point, one that gets overlooked in the mania for “market based solutions.” Sadly, our market-minded critics won’t be satisfied until we put instant polling in the classroom, so we can see what ideas are “selling” without waiting for end-of-semester evaluations. Driven by market imperatives, commercial radio has moved in this direction—why not let “edu-consumers” shape the curriculum with instant feedback?
Because it doesn’t work. We know that evaluations soar when students are presented with information that confirms what they already know—just as evaluations go down when students are challenged to confront new ideas. In other words, in a “market driven” classroom, critical thinking and real innovation wouldn’t “sell,” while comforting mythologies would be rewarded with high evaluations linked to compensation. Consider Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s absurd claim that the Founding Fathers eliminated slavery — many students would be pleased to hear such a comforting vision of our national origins. But wouldn’t you prefer to learn the hard truth? Wouldn’t that result in an informed citizenry able to make wise choices? Academe is one of the few places where we can choose hard knowledge over self-indulgent fantasies without being penalized.
Despite the attacks on our mission, our budgets, and our morale, I still believe that places like UT are extraordinary. In a state that has not always made a strong investment in education, UT has become one of the top public universities in the United States and as well as a powerful cultural resource. Speaking only for myself as a faculty member and an alumnus, I would offer a simple message to the attack dogs: don’t mess with Texas higher education. If you have a useful solution to a real problem, then let’s talk. We are an idealistic bunch eager to find a better way forward. There is always room for improvement. But don’t come at us half-cocked, distorting who we are and what we do. The people of Texas deserve better.
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14 Comments
Amen. Well written.
Thank you for insightful and factual overview of this critical situation. Your article is well-written; I hope the other side actually thinks about this. Or, is that hoping for too much?
When I got my MA at Cal State, I interacted at a different level with faculty members than you do as an undergraduate. You’re taking their course because you want to know the field and have signed up for that degree program.
The basing the tenure review on 50% student reviews did not work. It dumbed down classes (you don’t get good reviews on average for making it hard), you had to pander to the students (if you could opt out of a term paper who wouldn’t?).
These are people whose experience is high school, where they are pampered, not an institution of higher learning where you go to learn a profession and sample a lot of academic areas as an undergraduate. A diet of what you want is not as good as one that is good for you.
I’ve been disappointed since I graduated that it seems that the State does not support the universities as much as it did. Tuition costs soared, enrollment blew the doors off a lot of buildings, and now we have this.
UT and A&M were world class institutions that needed to be taken care of and nutured. Now they’re a political football for some amorphous political group of know nothings.
Our alma maters are worth fighting for.
This is an excellent response to the criticisms recently received. As a recent alumni, I can never begin to describe the significance the University of Texas has had on my life. I owe my growth to the teachers, peers, and resources I interacted with closely on a daily basis. I will savor the ability I had to ponder outside my degree and become an interdisciplinary thinker in classes with less than 20 students. The graduating class of my program had 16 people, and I will never allow anyone to assert that my time there was inefficient, wasteful, or of low quality. What an incredible GIFT to find these intimate courses at such a large university, where each student and teacher can truly have a lasting effect on each other rather than a vague memory of lectures and power point slides.
With complete confidence, I can say that my professors were very caring, intelligent, and all experts in their field. Research they committed to informed their teaching, which was then passed onto me. It saddens me to see politicians giving such blatant disrespect to teachers under the shadow of their own interests. It’s shameful. There is a massive difference between looking at where dollars might be wasted (how about the expensive celebrity guests we paid, for starters), and dismantling the quality of higher education itself. This Texas Ex will stand behind the university and its teachers to protect its integrity.
Randolph,
I appreciate your opinion and agree with Andrew P that, rhetorically, it was well-written. However, as a proud Liberal Arts graduate myself, if I had turned a paper in that was this light on evidence or references, I would have received (at best) a C-.
I would be especially interested to hear more from you about the following data:
– Classroom Data —
1) Student/Teacher Ratios
2) Student/Teacher Ratios MINUS TA’s and GA’s
3) Median Class Size
– Financial Data —
4) Annual Tuition Increases [see UTWatch. org's 2004 report on 931% tuition & fee increases over 30 years using UT's own financial data]
5) Median Student Debt at Graduation
6) Median Earnings per Major [see Georgetown's 2011 CEW study, Carnevale, et al]
7) Comparison (or explanation) of total student debt/median earnings per major
Before anyone attacks me personally, please realize I am not part of any amorphous group or political party. Just an interested observer in the education debate and general lover of facts.
Respectfully,
Dong
Agreed that this is passionate, yes, but not very factual. It is easy to beat up on straw men, it is a lot more difficult to offer solutions to keep tuition under control and improve excellence at UT.
In 1984, I enrolled at UT to work for an M.A. in Math Education and a teaching certification in math and history. I took a number of undergraduate history, math, government, psychology, and education courses, as well as graduate-level classes. EVERY SINGLE CLASS was equal in quality and interest to the classes I had taken to earn my B.A. at Stanford University. (And at that time U.T. tuition was $4 a credit hour!)
My professors were extremely helpful, supportive, and well-prepared–indeed, truly inspiring. I am so grateful for the quality of instruction I received at the University and am in total disagreement with the criticisms leveled against the instructors who provided me with such a stellar education.
“Yet we’re under fire, forced to justify our existence to a grim assortment of the dim, the lost, and the self-interested. Yes, we realize that the attack is coming from a toxic blend of ignorance and ideology.”
What a completely bigoted statement, Mr. Lewis!
I think you have been clositered in your ivory tower too long. There is a very real world outside ‘Moscow on the Colorado’ and yes, there are people who live there who don’t know a teaching assistant from an assistant professor, probably because they have jobs where accountability and meritocracy exist. It’s not “publish or perish” for us, it’s “be productive or look elsewhere”. We who are outside your little world understand the need to cut expenses in hard times and to redouble our efforts to maintain our incomes in a right-to-work arena. As someone hold holds himself out to be educated, your inability to understand our viewpoint is astonishing. Many of those of your ilk confuse being educated with being indoctrinated and perhaps this is your shortcoming as well.
Ken, most people like you and the TPPF don’t understand higher ed. Educate yourself. Higher education produces millions for the Texas economy. Cutting higher ed down means cutting millions in profits for the state. Don’t you understand the basics of investment?
“Yet we’re under fire, forced to justify our existence to a grim assortment of the dim, the lost, and the self-interested. Yes, we realize that the attack is coming from a toxic blend of ignorance and ideology.”
And also from students like myself, who have seen skyrocketing tution costs first-hand at a UT System school, and want a discussion about ways to reduce costs and make college more affordable. Moral grandstanding is really easy to do when you demonize your opponents offhand. But believe it or not, there are actual students who want to see change at Texas Universities so that students aren’t graduating with crushing debt in the future.
Certainly student debt is a huge issue. Might I ask why you believe the proposed changes will have any effect on tuition and other student-borne costs?
When have we ever seen conservative ideological reforms produce cost savings? It hasn’t worked in reforming the military or any other public good. Why would it work at UT and A&M?
Thank you for writing this response. Those tearing down public education are now attacking our public universities, starving our students and paying certain educators (law professors, for example) million dollar salaries–kind of reminds me of ENRON. Plenty of money at the top and none trickling down, classroom profs and others being laid off while there is no sacrifice by those “leading” UT during these challenging economic times. Crippling students with debt is not the answer–taxation and funding is the answer. The generations who benefited from reasonable tuition (myself included–as well as almost every tea-bagger) need to tell elected officials they are willing to pay their fair share now in taxes. I’d rather pay for colleges than prisons! Let’s create an educated populace who vote instead of one on the dole or desperately in debt.
“I’d rather pay for colleges than prisons!”
Amen to that!!
As a recent college grad I found that there SHOULD greater reliance on student evaluations…not all students are lazy and seeking a hand out grade. I regularly had teachers who showed up to class unprepared, unwilling to teach a lesson, etc. I asked a professor a question about a piece of software it was his JOB to instruct me to use, he told me to “google it.” I was a good student, interested in learning and I was rewarded with a teacher who didn’t give a rat’s ass, who was just there to pick up his check. When the WHOLE class complained that he wasn’t doing his job he just got moved to another faculty, presumably to he could screw up some other students’ expensive education. It’s frustrating being a student, investing in your future and having the whole faculty and management of the school turn a blind eye to teachers who are a problem!