Teaching

I have just finished reading a dissertation of a doctoral student who attends, shall we say, Behemoth State U (BSU), which is not the school where I teach.

By way of background, my editing specialty is taking dissertations of people who are in some kind of trouble (often poor writing skills) and editing them so that these people can pass. Often the people have good ideas--they just don't know how to get those down on paper. And a dissertation offers special writing challenges because of its complexity.

In this case, there were some writing issues, but there were also many issues that could have been prevented, had someone helped this student out--someone on the committee.

Because BSU has as its focus the desire to stay highly ranked in the US News and World Reports college issue, faculty at BSU have as their focus the need to get something--anything--even a grocery list--published in peer-reviewed journals. This focus takes up most of a faculty member's waking hours, those that are not devoted to various kinds of meetings (e.g., the committee to determine whether it would be a good idea to make "The" part of BSU's official, copyrighted name--so it would be The Behemoth State University and all the old stationery would have to be junked). (Okay, I graduated from BSU and I think my dissertation is probably the only one that left out the "The").

Therefore, because professors' time is taken up with research and committee meetings, they have no time to teach, either their classes or their graduate students. So, even though a graduate student provides multiple copies of her proposal and drafts of her work over a couple of years (as this student did), all that paper rarely gets read until the night before the defense. As a result, the defense becomes a nasty surprise and a disheartening and overwhelming experience.

Add to that a defense that falls near the end of the term. If the student does not produce a passable dissertation in a matter of a couple of weeks, the student will have to pay $$$$ for tuition for the following term. Tuition many students don't have, but the professors remain blissfully ignorant of this. Or they have forgotten this stage in their own lives.

There are professors who use the conceptualization and writing of a dissertation as an opportunity to teach how research goes. This is what needs to be done consistently. What saddens me is that the number of doctoral students one has contributes to one's ability to get a promotion, and yet, all too often the number does not reflect the quality of the dissertation adviser or committee member's actual participation in the project.

Relevancy

What on earth do we think we are doing?

Just because colleges and universities have always run in one way doesn't mean that they always have to run in the same way.

The world around us has changed. More people are going to college, and tuition is very high. This means that students have to work in order to avoid going into a completely crippling amount of debt before the age of 22.

What students need to know has changed drastically with technology. Being able to use a computer is now as important as being able to read, write, and compute. At the same time, knowing particular facts is less important; being able to find information and critically assess its quality and value has become extremely important. Yet right now we have a bunch of young people who have passed a bunch of tests and who don't know how to tell the difference between an authoritative web page and one that is a sales pitch.

Textbook companies have gotten onto the "let's make as much money as possible from students" bandwagon. They have many professors going along with them by having the teachers write textbooks (that royalty income is a really nice little supplement to a professor's salary) and through providing free textbooks to professors in hopes that those texts will be adopted.

Yet given the robust possibilities with multimedia through technology, textbooks themselves are an anachronism. [Note: I love reading a real book as much as anyone--yet textbooks are a genre designed only to impart information that is presumably to be memorized and regurgitated back on some test based on questions the textbook company provides to the professor--few textbooks are written with any kind of artful, inherently interesting prose. Textbooks are texts for a captive audience, bestsellers only in the sense that if you don't read the textbook, you may have wasted whatever tuition dollars you spent on the class in addition to the $150 book.]

Do we want a university degree to simply be a "union card?" Or do we want it to mean something?

If what we do is to be meaningful, we need to drastically reassess what students need and provide it for them. This means recognizing the financial position students are in and accommodating that position, e.g. through on-line courses that allow students to learn around their work schedules and recognizing that expecting students to be on campus five days a week is not realistic. It means understanding the world into which students will enter and connecting learning to that world--making university activities relevant. It means having the creativity to give students something new by building bridges from where they are to where we would like them to be. If we believe that a particular course is good for a student, let's help them to understand how they will benefit from that course in the world.

Finally, college students are in a transition in their lives whether they are 18 years old or 50 years old. Transitions are exciting but also scary. If we are to help students to make the transition in the most intellectually promising way, then we need to know who our students are and what their needs are--not just in terms of our little subject area, but in terms of their lives. The foundation of teaching is the relationship between student and teacher.