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Those who have to, teach
A panel of tenured Harvard professors has issued a report calling for systemwide measures that will improve the overall quality of teaching at Harvard. The report proposes that the university should:
--Foster a more collegial teaching culture, where faculty share course materials and discuss teaching goals and practices.--Gain more support for academic innovation, including grants, administrative assistance, and a review of course-scheduling practices.
--Improve systems of accounting, so faculty achievements in teaching and advising can be recorded and used by others.
--Link good teaching to salary adjustments, faculty appointments, and career advancement.
--Increase visibility for excellent teaching methods and achievements, as an educational tool and as an incentive to teach well.
Current Harvard president Derek Bok praised the report, saying that "For decades, universities have been criticized for paying too little attention to the quality of teaching," and noting that the report "represents an important opportunity for Harvard to address and assess the way we conduct our core academic business -- teaching our students."
On the face of it, this all sounds like a worthy and much-needed undertaking--Harvard has no business not taking teaching seriously, and owes its students pedagogical excellence. But the report ignores a crucial fact--that much of the teaching at Harvard is done by people who are not on the tenure track. As an AAUP report issued last month showed, 56.6 percent of all Harvard faculty and 45.4 percent of all full-time faculty are not on the tenure track.
By its own admission, the Harvard report
does not analyze the extensive instructional contributions of preceptors, teaching assistants, lecturers, and other off-ladder teachers in FAS. In the short space of time available to us, we could not accurately map the activities of these teachers, nor do justice to important questions about how to better define their roles, support their efforts, and foster their careers. These questions remain for others to consider, and we hope this will happen soon. Our Task Force has focused on ladder faculty and PhD students, because they are the FAS scholars expected to develop teaching and advanced research in tandem -- and because ladder faculty provide the core of institutional leadership in FAS.
In other words, the report Harvard has issued on teaching does not actually take into account who is doing the teaching at Harvard, and as such issues recommendations that apply only to a small percentage of Harvard teachers. Those recommendations are good ones, for what they are--mechanisms for encouraging tenure-track faculty to devote more time and attention to the teaching side of their jobs. But it's hard to imagine exactly how the quality of instruction at Harvard is going to improve if Harvard is not willing to address the fact that a large proportion of its pedagogical work is not done by tenure-track faculty members. To echo the report itself, "we hope this will happen soon."
Posted by acta online on January 25, 2007 at January 25, 2007 08:40 AM
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