Learning the Scholarship of Teaching in Doctorate-Granting Institutions

The emergence over the last decade of a national ferment in undergraduate teaching has given voice in higher education to a view expressed by the late Ernest Boyer that teaching is more than "a routine function, tacked on, something almost anyone can do" (Boyer, 1990, p. 23). Teaching, he wrote, must be viewed, like research, as "scholarship," and like research, is "consequential only as it is understood by others" (p. 23). The dialogue surrounding undergraduate teaching has not remained entirely learned in tone, however, and has been approached in confrontational terms as well as in a scholarly context of collegial discourse. Representative of the disparaging view is Martin Anderson, a former policy adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Anderson joined a crowded field' of popular authors with his 1992 assault on the integrity of undergraduate teaching, Impostors in the Temple: American Intellectuals Are Destroying Our Universities and Cheating Our Students of Their Future. Although many applaud Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered with its optimistic references to undergraduate teaching as an activity that "both educates and entices future scholars," (p. 23) Anderson found in Boyer's report for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching "the secret shame of most universities and colleges in America: studied neglect of the teaching of students"' (Anderson, 1992, p. 45). Neglect may seem to be an unjustified conclusion given Boyer's recount that by a ratio of more than two-to-one, faculty responding to a national Carnegie Foundation survey said that their interests lie primarily in teaching rather than research (Boyer, p. 44). The Carnegie finding is tempered, however, when the data are broken down by institutional types: research, doctoral granting, comprehensive, liberal arts, and two-year.3 The two-to-one ratio is reversed at research universities where 66 percent of the faculty point to research rather than teaching as their primary interest (p. 44). Nearly half the surveyed faculty at doctorate-granting institutions found teaching less important than research (p. 44). Furthermore, Boyer reported, a 1990 survey of chief academic officers "reinforced the point that the shift toward research has, in fact, been increasing at the expense of teaching" (p. 29). The survey by Richard Miller weighed the balance of importance between teaching and research as leaning toward research and away from teaching at 26 percent of the institutions responding and moving toward teaching at only 5 percent of schools responding (Miller, 1990, p. 19). Breaking down the data further to isolate the responses from the doctorate granting and research universities, the findings illuminate a downward gradient along which these institutions are drifting away from teaching. No doctorate granting institutions reported "movement toward teaching and away from research." In fact, 56 percent of the institutions identified in the Carnegie Classification system as doctorate granting universities reported movement "towards research and away from teaching" (p. 19). The finding that teaching comes in a distant second to research at research and doctorate granting institutions is significant when placed into a framework suggested by the president emeritus of Stanford University.' In his keynote address at the November 1995 workshops of the American Association for Higher Education, and in his follow-up in Change magazine, Donald Kennedy (1996) identified a serious contradiction between the education of doctoral students at research and doctorate granting institutions, and what is known about their career plans. "By the 1920s, it had become plain that the intent and usage had grown irrevocably apart: the doctorate trained people only to do research, but was required of those who wished only to teach," he said (p. 10). Kennedy did not suggest that a "teaching doctorate" be offered separately from a research doctorate. …