From: bfrg9732@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Brian F. Redman)
Subject: Imposters in the Temple -- Part 3
Summary: Intellectuals are destroying our universities
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 13:54:12 GMT
Keywords: treachery trickery deceit deception


Imposters in the Temple:
American Intellectuals are Destroying our Universities
and Cheating our Students of their Future

by Martin Anderson

Part 3  --  Children Teaching Children

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In December of 1990, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of 
Teaching published a report entitled "Scholarship Reconsidered." The 
report concluded that "in the current climate, students all too often 
are the losers... in glossy brochures, they're assured that teaching 
is important, that a spirit of community pervades the campus, and that 
general education is the core of the undergraduate experience. But the 
reality is that on far too many campuses, teaching is not well 
rewarded and faculty who spend too much time counseling and advising 
students may diminish their prospects for tenure and promotion."

According to Anderson, "There is now a widespread contempt for 
teaching among the teachers on our university and college campuses. 
The immediate losers are the young men and women who are the students. 
The long-run losers are all of us, as the country loses all those 
things that might have been if the best and the brightest of our young 
people had achieved their potential."

In January of 1990, James David Barber, a professor of political 
science at Duke University charged that "the community of scholars" 
had so fragmented that it had "essentially destroyed any institutional 
responsibility for the quality of teaching, the rigor of student 
evaluation." He went on to declare that "there are universities, 
including famous ones, where professional ethics are completely 
neglected in faculty recruitment, so that this relatively civil line 
of work is warped by bullying and lying punks."

By definition, teaching is what separates the academic intellectual 
from the professional intellectual -- the first thing professors must 
do is profess. Teaching, when done *properly*, is tough, demanding 
work. But *proper* teaching creates a problem. Because of the low 
status given to teaching in academia, because professors receive 
advancement based mainly on their work as researchers and 
administrators and *not* based primarily on their teaching, "being 
intelligent, rational beings, [professors] have noticed that they 
don't get rewarded for doing something they don't like doing anyway. 
And many of them have sloughed off their teaching responsibilities."

Anderson thinks that the critical problem is not that professors do 
not teach well but rather that few of them teach at all. A significant 
portion of teaching has been handed over to people who are 
unqualified. "The clever solution that professors have come up with 
for the teaching albatross that grew around their necks in the 1960s 
and 1970s is the teaching assistant. These young men and women, 
usually graduate students, ... do a large part of the teaching work of 
many of our universities. You won't find them listed in any college or 
university catalog by name, but they lecture, they lead classroom 
discussions, they make up examinations and grade them, and they 
counsel their fellow students."

Thus, the reality of the university is different from what is 
described in the brochures and the catalogs put out by these 
institutions. Anderson asks, "If this were a business, or a profession 
such as law, would we stand for such false and deceptive advertising? 
Wouldn't we call it fraud? ... This kind of intellectual deceit, 
baiting the catalog with tales of world-class professors and then 
switching to student teachers once the freshmen are safely enrolled... 
is now accepted practice in many colleges and universities."

To give an idea of the amount of teaching being done by teaching 
assistants, the author points to an article in the "American Scholar" 
which noted that "a two-day walkout of teaching assistants on the 
Berkeley campus of the University of California in the Spring of 1989 
caused the cancellation of nearly 75 percent of classes."

Writing in a 1987 report entitled "Institutional Responsibilities and 
Responses in the Employment and Education of Teaching Assistants," 
Kenneth Eble, professor of English at the University of Utah, reaches 
the following conclusions regarding the current system of reliance on 
teaching assistants in academia:

o -- it "fosters education on the cheap"

o -- it exploits both the teaching assistants as well as the 
students under their tutelage

o -- it "creates an underclass, temporary to be sure, but 
signifying a class system, pretending to be something 
else."

o -- it "fosters ... a pedagogy of pooled inexperience."

o -- it "supports faculty self-interest, neatly separating the 
drudgery of basic instruction from the glory of specialized 
scholarly pursuits."


Anderson notes a concommitant "grade inflation." According to the 
author, "Much of the sweat and anxiety went out of being a student as 
good and excellent grades were passed out like so many lollipops." It 
is almost as if there is an unspoken compact between the students and 
the professoriate -- "Don't demand too much of us and we won't demand 
too much of you. Don't blow the whistle on us and in return we will 
let you slide by."

This situation is problematic in that if good grades are so easy to 
get, it is difficult to distinguish good students from bad students. 
If everyone is a good (i.e. good grades) student then ironically no 
one is a good student. "Today a college degree has become more a 
certificate of attendance than a badge of achievement, its worth 
devalued in the market."

Another consequence of the abandonment by the professoriate of their 
primary duty of teaching has been the increased length of time 
required by the undergraduate to obtain his or her degree. "Most 
students now take more than five years to earn their degree."

The question may arise, "Why don't the students complain?" The answer 
is, according to the author, that the only persons available to whom 
they can complain are the same ones who are responsible for the 
current setup. "Who are they going to complain to -- " asks Anderson. 
"the professors and administrators who set the system up and who 
ultimately determine whether or not the student gets a degree?"

Anderson thinks that if the university argues that these teaching 
assistants are indeed qualified for what they do "then we should 
insist that the university do the right thing: promote them to 
faculty, pay them a decent wage, and give them the title for the work 
they do. Or stop pretending."

So why do these teaching assistants put up with it? "Where on earth do 
they find all those students willing to teach other students, usually 
for very meager wages?" The answer, according to the author, is that 
they coerce them. "The exploitation of graduate students in American 
universities is the mental equivalent of the old sweatshops, long 
endured in silent agony by their victims. The typical candidate for an 
advanced degree is in a terribly difficult position to complain to 
anyone about anything, but we are beginning to hear some murmurings of 
protest." In 1991, Jacques Barzun, a doyen of the American 
professoriate attacked this unjust setup and recommended that this 
"use of slave labor should be abolished."

Clearly these teaching assistants are both powerless and exploited. 
"The Ph.D. process in America is, in effect, a long apprenticeship, a 
throwback to the medieval guild system in which a master craftsman 
could hold his apprentices in virtual bondage. With exceptions here 
and there, today's Ph.D. students are similarly beholden, as 
apprentices to professors." Anderson offers a hypothetical situation 
to give a concrete example of such exploitation: "Let's say the 
professor supervising your doctoral studies 'suggests' you teach an 
undergraduate course. Do you say, 'Sorry, I'd rather concentrate on my 
studies, get my degree, and then compete with you'?" In many cases the 
universities do not even bother fooling around with implied threats 
and economic coercion. Often, they simply *require* that every Ph.D. 
candidate teach for a certain amount of time.

Anderson offers a similar hypothetical situation to give an example of 
exploitation by the professoriate of their grad students, this time in 
the field of research. "Again, the professor in charge of your Ph.D. 
program 'suggests' you might like a job doing some of his research 
work. What do you say? 'I would rather concentrate on my own research 
so I can finish my dissertation and enhance my reputation, not 
yours'?"

One consequence of this exploitation of the labor of grad students is 
that it currently requires a median 10.5 years between graduating from 
college and obtaining the doctorate. These grad students are robbed of 
time which could be well spent studying in order to do the teaching 
that is not being done by the professoriate. "What they need most is 
*time* to pursue their advanced course work, *time* to master their 
field of study, *time* to learn how to conduct original research, to 
write, and to finish a dissertation. Instead, the professors rob them 
of that time."

"There is an unseen cost to this exploitation of graduate students... 
What we don't see are the tens of thousands of brilliant minds who 
would not tolerate the abuse, the students who would not submit to the 
humiliation and exploitation," declares the author. Anderson believes 
this is especially tragic in that "it is these strong souls who would 
have been much more likely to advance the thresholds of knowledge, 
more likely than the ones who followed the rules and meekly 
surrendered."

Anderson notes that there is a conflict of interest between being a 
dependent employee of the university while at the same time supposedly 
being free to challenge what is being taught by the professoriate. For 
example, we "need to stop the practice of students doing research for 
the professors who supervise their doctoral programs. The conflict of 
interest is self-evident."


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Synopsis/Review by Brian Redman
"Ah yes, Armageddon. I remember it well."
End Part 3



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