In the eyes of many parents, GTAs are the reason their sons and daughters didn't get a good university education. Kansas state lawmaker Ralph Tanner, a Republican from Baldwin City, says he receives countless complaints each year from parents of KU students who say their children never get to see a real professor because they're always stuck in a class with graduate teaching assistants. And then to have them, according to some, and I'll use a work that I wouldn't necessarily use myself, but it's a word that's commonly used, these people are wasted. Tanner, a former president of Baker University, has long believed that graduate teaching assistants have been overused at the nation's research universities. He says professors accept their involvement only because they're simply not interested in teaching undergraduate courses themselves.
Many full professors have little desire to deal with freshman and sophomores.
It takes a special kind of approach, a special kind of interest on the part of the professor, to want to be involved with bright, young or sometimes unbright, immature kinds of folk. There is a disdain on the part of some senior professors for teaching at the freshman and sophomore levels. Right now if a senior professor expects to advance to tenure, he or she must engage in substantial scholarship, that is research, publication. It's still in my judgement a publish or perish world out there. And I think that particular notion drives the concept that keeps senior professors out of the classroom.