XYKADEMIQZ

I was on my school’s subreddit the other day, and I stumbled upon a thread where a student was frustrated by how little contact they had with their instructors, how little the instructors seemed to care about teaching, and how much was being left to TAs. Most of the responses in the thread were in agreement, with a few chiming in that this was a research school and professors were here to do research, so they were  literally not paid to care about teaching.

This is an issue that’s been bothering me more and more the older I’ve gotten. Yes, this is a research school. We faculty come here largely for our promise in research, and the recruitments in recent years haven’t even bothered to pretend there’s much beyond the potential for fundraising that’s a criterion in hiring.

But the issue really bothers me. First off, our salaries are paid from “hard money” (as opposed to “soft money,” which refers to grants), of which a large portion comes from tuition dollars. So even on a purely intellectual (and perhaps more than a little cynical) level, we should care about teaching because student tuition is critical to our bottom line.

But it’s really more than that. I teach large undergraduate courses more often than most in large part because  I love working with undergrads. Working with older teens and early-twenties students always breaks my heart a little because they are so brand new, moving in the world in these grownup bodies that might fool someone into thinking they’re actually adults when the reality is that they are so young, so largely clueless, so open and curious and hopeful, so vulnerable and apprehensive about the future. If you don’t appreciate what a privilege and responsibility it is to share your knowledge and excitement about your field with young people, if all you see is a hindrance to writing another proposal or taking another call from a program manager, if all the grading and office hours in your class are held by your TA, I’m sorry but what kind of teacher and person are you?

College is a formative experience for our students and we owe them our very best. Yet, quite a few of my colleagues work hard on finding ways to not interact with undergrads, to not do grading, to not hold office hours. To not teach large classes because they are a ridiculous amount of work (I’ve been advocating for splitting everything into smaller sections, but our enrollments have become insane and we just don’t have the manpower to staff a lot of smaller sections; we’ve been hiring a lot, but people have been retiring a lot, too). When I bring up the importance of teaching and service to the institution, it makes me sounds like a loser because winners do only what they want. Winners spend time on research, and losers like me and the others who actually do nontrivial work for the institution are supposed to pick up the slack that is necessary for the functioning of the department.

I hate the hypocrisy. I hate that we’re all saying one thing (we’re committed to our educational mission!) but doing another (we’re actually only committed to research and fund raising). I hate that bringing it up gets one dismissed as not having one’s priorities straight.

God, sometimes this job sucks. But it still sucks way less than most other jobs, because a few times a week I get to go into the classroom and talk with big kids about physics and math, and for a bit all is right with the world.