Academic Recruitment: Some Thoughts on Role Models and Self-Image

hat sorts of persons should be encouraged to enter the teaching profession? How can they be recruited into it when plumbers earn more than many college presidents and when contracts of automobile workers may set their general wage level equal to the median salary for American faculty members? In this era of the three day weekend, labor bargainers discuss how soon they should press for the thirty-two hour work week. How can colleges attract personnel willing to put in the far longer hours required to become and to remain competent in disciplines where new knowledge is ex p'oding, to take the further time to prepare challenging and up-to-date teaching materials, and to be willing to work with students on individual projects or in tutorial courses? Since teaching can centrally influence our na tion's ability and resolve to humanize the technocratic society, to find workable solutions to such problems as ecology or peace, the characteristics of our academicians take on particular importance. Some apparent answers to the issues of recruitment pose as many problems as they solve. Tenured professors can certainly compensate for marginal sa'aries through long vacations and a refusal to undertake publication or serious scholarship, but to the extent that they do so, they undermine their own effectiveness in the discovery and transmission of knowledge. Another traditional solu tion to low salaries has been to reward professors in social prestige as well as in dollars, but academic prestige will fall flat unless we attract the kind of professors whose personal conduct toward students makes them genuinely deserving of respect. This is difficult in a period wrhen students have become increasingly critical, when confrontation politics on campuses has estranged educators from some of their former sources of support, and when American ideals of leisure, income, and standard of living have become so much higher than those of so many other peoples around the world. For a related reason, the salary solution of trade union militancy may not provide the best answer. If professors turn to strikes and make higher wages their prime ob jective, becoming as materialistica1ly motivated as an older generation of business executives or the present w generation of assembly line workers, have not the true benefits of the academic life lost their challenge and their appeal? A more humanistic response to these issues is re cruitment by example, that is, the definition by professors of those qualities needed in the scholarly community and a conscious decision to embody those characteristics so as to induce students to follow their model. A most interesting indication of the importance of this factor recently appeared in the area of religious vocations. In Chi1e, a noted Jesuit sociologist used survey research to study the attitudes and backgrounds of two groups, one a set of seminarians who had decided to enter the priest hood and the other a collection of students in Catholic secondary schools who showed no interest in this career. The questionnaire survey indicated that the vocational decision was not based primarily on their social class, their home life, or their religious be'iefs; it depended even more on whether or not they had known as a friend a priest whose life seemed to be particularly admirable and worthy of emulation.1 Professors, like priests, teach more by examp1e than by rote. Since this is true, it be comes crucial to ask what, in addition to the knowledge and skills of their various disciplines, educators should try to impart. Without excluding other objectives for the professorial example, five goals have especial sig nificance: a combination of tolerance and critical abilities, respect for other persons, a sense of humor and pro portion, intellectual interest, and recognition of the need for hard work.