In two recent articles, Joseph Asch presented "11 Ideas for a Better Dartmouth" (May 11-12). Most were good ideas -- some were very good. However, Asch's suggestions for how to improve teaching fell short of the mark. Let me explain why.
Asch suggested that the college reward faculty for good teaching -- with the quality of teaching to be judged by students. There is a fundamental problem with this. Student evaluations are undoubtedly helpful: students can certainly tell when teaching is bad. However, they are not in a position to tell whether or not it is really good. This is because good teaching at the university level is only partly a matter of how one teaches: much more it is a matter of what one teaches.
Students cannot know what they are not being taught. Of course, bad methods can make content irrelevant, but good methods do not by themselves constitute good teaching. That is why the College's extravagant new Center for the Advancement of Learning, with its focus on classroom technique and high tech, is largely irrelevant. And the problem is not only that students cannot judge good teaching: it is very difficult to evaluate it directly at all.
Is the improvement of teaching then a hopeless goal? Not at all. If it is impossible to promote good teaching directly, it is possible to promote it indirectly. It is possible because good teaching is closely related to something else that is easier to evaluate -- good research.
It is precisely because what is taught is so important at the university level that teaching and research are so thoroughly complementary.
Only one who is working on the frontiers of a discipline has access to the latest findings and to the best thinking on a subject.
Great university teachers are not those who give clear explanations of what is in the textbook but those who do the work on which future textbooks will be based. Moreover, good researchers are passionate about their subjects and this passion comes across in the classroom.
This complementarity between research and teaching can, however, break down. Some major research universities recruit research superstars who disdain undergraduate education and leave the teaching to graduate students.
Clearly, in such circumstances even the best research contributes nothing to teaching. But this is not Dartmouth's problem. I know of at most one research superstar in the Arts and Sciences, and there is little teaching here by graduate students. At Dartmouth, there is therefore a high correlation between good research and good teaching.
The problem, rather, is that there are too few good researchers at Dartmouth.
So to promote good teaching, the College needs to hire and to tenure more good researchers. The first thing the College should do is replace "guest worker" visiting faculty with regular faculty. Of course there are exceptions, but most visitors are not researchers. However good they are at the mechanics of teaching, they fall short on the content. This is less critical in introductory courses, but it is fatal at the higher levels.
Despite years of pleading by departments, the administration has been reluctant until very recently to hire more regular faculty because they cost more: better to spend the money on more administrators to advise us on how to teach.
Second, the College should hire and tenure solely on the basis of the quality of research -- weeding out, of course, those who are incompetent or negligent in the classroom. The administration does not like this idea either: furthering its own political and social agenda is more important to it than teaching and research.
The complementarity between teaching and research can break down in another way. In the sciences and parts of the social sciences, research is reality-based: research means the discovery of truth and a better understanding of how the world works.
However, in the humanities and in other parts of the social sciences, an increasing proportion of what passes for research is not reality-based but socially constructed. "Research" does not mean discovering or understanding anything: it merely means writing stuff that your peers like. The result increasingly is post-modernist, neo-Marxist claptrap. Those doing "research" of this type are unlikely to be good teachers in terms of what they teach. They have no truth or knowledge to impart -- only attitude. Indeed they deny there is such a thing as truth or knowledge.
It is precisely here that the leftist bias on campus matters -- where "teaching" becomes indoctrination in political correctness. The political views of professors of anatomy, organic chemistry, or electrical engineering matter very little, since they are unlikely to find expression in what they teach. Not so in multicultural and postcolonial studies or in GLBT studies.
So here are some more suggestions for how to promote good teaching.
When evaluating research for tenure, impose a reality check: peer judgments are not enough. If research sounds like nonsense to outsiders, it probably is nonsense. Also, foster intellectual diversity on campus. Students exposed to more rational views of the world are unlikely to sit quietly when fed politically correct nonsense. Negative feedback from students may help to moderate the excesses of classroom ideologues.
This is one way that students really can contribute to improving the quality of teaching.
