Why Professors Can’t Teach

In 1949, the graduate dean at the University of Minnesota imagined that he had fallen asleep and woken up in 1984. The first thing he saw was a newspaper. It mentioned none of the “Orwellian horrors” that George Orwell had predicted in his novel. Instead, a banner headline blared “AMERICAN COLLEGE TEACHING REACHES A NEW HIGH,” with all-caps subheads that read “IMPORTANCE OF COLLEGE TEACHING NOW RECOGNIZED BY ALL” and “SKILL OF NEWLY TRAINED COLLEGE TEACHERS IN CLASSROOM AMAZES COMMUNITY.”

These phrases capture the perpetual dream of college-teaching reformers for the past century or more: to make undergraduate instruction into a truly professional enterprise, on par with research. But their reach has always exceeded their grasp. In the 1920s and ’30s, they introduced student evaluations; in the 1950s, seminars and televised lectures; in the 1960s and ’70s, ungraded classes and self-paced modules. Yet teaching remained a lowly endeavor, in status as well as quality: Hired mainly for their publications, many professors were woeful instructors. The problem was already apparent in 1903, when William James—who taught at Harvard for many years, despite never earning a PhD—wrote the most-quoted critique of college teaching: “Will anyone pretend for a moment that a doctor’s degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be a successful teacher?” By mid-century, when the Minnesota dean wrote his missive about 1984, calls to reform undergraduate instruction had already assumed a predictable rhythm. Committees would be formed, statements would be issued, and most professors would continue to teach in the same dull, uninspired manner. In 1957, another university dean wrote that the pattern reminded him of a snow globe he had owned as a child: You shook it up and the flakes scattered, but they soon settled down exactly as before.

In 1903, William James—who taught at Harvard for many years, despite never earning a PhD—wrote the most-quoted critique of college teaching: “Will anyone pretend for a moment that a doctor’s degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be a successful teacher?”

So it’s easy to be skeptical about the “Great College Teaching Movement,” the latest effort to improve instruction in higher education. For the past decade, several state university systems have established broad-scale initiatives to recognize—and upgrade—teaching. The leading force in this campaign is the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE), cofounded by a former New York City educational official, Jonathan Gyurko, in 2014. Gyurko holds a PhD—from Columbia University Teachers College—but he’s not a standard-issue academic; instead, he is trying to alter the standards that academics use to judge each other. 

Prior efforts to reform college teaching relied almost entirely on moral suasion: If you prick people’s conscience, the theory went, they will change. But nothing will really change, Gyurko says, until faculty have a clear incentive to get better. So ACUE has designed an online training course, which has been completed by 26,000 professors on 450 campuses. Some of them have received stipends; others are awarded new titles, like “distinguished teaching scholar.” Most importantly, perhaps, research has already demonstrated that students who take courses from an ACUE-accredited professor are more likely to complete them. So universities also have a clear financial reason to invest in teaching, which wasn’t as apparent in prior eras. Gyurko acknowledges the long history of failed reforms in this realm, of course. But “this time,” he insists, “it’s different.”

I hope he’s right. Yet it’s hard to imagine a real revolution in college teaching unless the big players get behind it, from the outlets that rank colleges to the governments that fund them. 

The good news is that both sectors are increasingly willing to use their leverage to improve college outcomes. The two dominant rankings bodies—the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which doles out coveted “research institution” designations; and U.S. News & World Report, with its famous (and infamous) “Best Colleges” guidebook—have both recently embraced social mobility as a factor in their own metrics, because most Americans think college should help students of modest means move up in the world (and because the Washington Monthly has been pushing them to do so for years). The federal government, too, is getting serious about enhancing “postsecondary student success,” with significant new grant programs to improve advising, career counseling, transportation, and mental health services. 

The bad news is that none of this money is going toward improving college teaching—even though better teaching is, according to research, one of the best ways to enhance outcomes for students, especially those who come from low-income and minority families. Nor are any of the rankings evaluating colleges and universities on the quality of their teaching. That’s because, even if they wanted to—and the Monthly certainly does—reliable data isn’t available. And the best way to get that data is for the federal government to require and pay for colleges to produce it. 

In short, the college classroom remains a black box, which almost nobody in power wants to open. Maybe they’re afraid of what they might find inside.

Hello, Teaching Excellence Movement Makers!” The speaker is the American University education scholar Corbin Campbell, welcoming the 500-odd professors, administrators, and policy makers gathered in Minneapolis for the second National Higher Education Teaching Conference. “Over these days, I encourage you to dream with me,” Campbell continues. “What would our system of higher education need to be if teaching excellence were valued and rewarded? What would faculty hiring, salary, reappointment, tenure, and promotion need to be? What would rankings need to be?” Campbell is the author of the most comprehensive study of contemporary college teaching, which showed that the quality of undergraduate instruction is generally lowest at elite research universities. Maybe that’s why there are so few representatives from Ivy League or flagship state institutions at the NHETC. It’s mostly people from regional state schools and community colleges.

So, what am I doing here? I teach at the University of Pennsylvania, which was number six in the nation in the last U.S. News ranking; it’s exactly the kind of “ivory tower” institution that “looks down on teaching,” to quote Campbell’s study. But I’m also the author of a book on the history of college teaching called—pointedly—The Amateur Hour. That doesn’t mean all instruction has been weak or ineffectual, which is how many people interpreted the title; it means we haven’t developed systems to develop, evaluate, and reward it. We give out teaching awards, which universities initiated in the 1960s to show that they did, in fact, value classroom instruction. But as I show in my book, several early winners of these awards were denied tenure because they didn’t publish enough. And everyone knew that you could make more money by finishing your book—and earning a promotion, which brings a hike in your base salary—than you could by winning a one-off teaching award. I was fortunate enough to receive the Distinguished Teaching Prize at New York University, where I worked before coming to Penn. I was called to the stage and introduced by my dean, who was reading from a pad at the lectern. Glancing at her notes, I saw that she had listed the books I had written. She proceeded to recite them, at an event where I was being honored for my teaching! It seemed absurd. And I wanted to know how it came about. That’s what led me to write a book about college teaching, and it’s also what brought me to the NHETC.

After Campbell’s rousing opening address, we heard a panel of students discussing their own experiences in college classrooms. Like the faculty and staff in the audience, the students reflected the broad diversity of American higher education: One came from a community college, another from a regional state university, and two from historically Black institutions. Two of the panel members were also “nontraditional” students, which is higher ed speak for someone who goes to college after the customary 18-to-22-year-old window. Despite their differences, the students agreed on one premise: Their professors matter, more than anybody else. That runs counter to the conventional wisdom at many colleges, which have hired legions of support staff to help bolster “student success.” But the most influential figures in the lives of students are faculty members. They can make or break you, depending on how well—or how poorly—they teach.

And the best teachers engage students in their own learning, as the panelists repeatedly told us. That’s consistent with a broad swath of research conducted over the past three decades demonstrating that students learn best when they practice the activities of scholarship—especially inquiry, analysis, and synthesis—instead of sitting inert while the scholar at the blackboard drones on and on. The panelists described wonderful instructors who had them create podcasts and other kinds of projects to apply key principles in their courses. 

But they also told us about teachers who simply beamed slides onto a screen and read them out loud: “death by lecture,” as we called it when I was in college. That’s been a recurring complaint of students since the early 1900s, when they routinely described college as a place where the professor’s lecture notes passed to the student’s notebook without passing through the brains of either. (The quip is often attributed to Mark Twain, although there’s no record of him making it.) We also heard about professors who assigned chapters from a textbook and relied on students to make sense of it. Confused by some of the concepts in her book, one student said she went to her professor for help and was rebuffed. “I’m doing my job, now you do yours,” he told her. That’s the traditional excuse of the inept college teacher: I taught it, but you didn’t learn it. And that attitude is alive and well on today’s campuses.

What we don’t see is an organized student effort to change it. In 1925, during an era of enormous growth in higher education, delegates from 20 different colleges convened at Wesleyan University to decry the poor quality of the instruction they received. “It is not that college boys have ceased to have a good time on the campus,” declared The Boston Globe, one of several national newspapers that covered the conference. “It is rather that an increasing proportion of them are wondering what college is all about and why they are there.” Likewise, after World War II, the ex-soldiers who flooded universities under the GI Bill loudly denounced their disorganized classes and disengaged teachers. “If pedagogic desks were reversed and the veteran in college now were given the opportunity to grade his professor, he would give him a big red ‘F’ and rate him as insipid, antiquated, and ineffectual,” one educator admitted. And in the 1960s, when federal grants and loans sparked another massive spike in the student population, campus radicals like Tom Hayden and Mario Savio indicted poor teaching alongside censorship, racial segregation, and America’s war in Vietnam. Decrying huge impersonal lecture classes, Savio said the modern university treated students like “raw materials” in a “knowledge factory.”

Teaching well is hard. It’s a lot easier to talk at students than it is to engage them. Asked to identify a single piece of advice she’d give to her teachers, one student urged professors to “put the fun back into class.”

But it’s also fair to ask what all this protest accomplished, and whether we can fairly rely on students to reform their teachers. Students did win the right to grade their professors—via end-of-course evaluations—and the result has not been a marked improvement of teaching; to the contrary, the evaluations have contributed to a reduction in students’ assignments and a dramatic inflation of their grades. (The best way to get a high evaluation is to lighten the workload and give everyone an A.) Student complaints also led officials to create smaller seminar-style classes, especially at the universities that were wealthy enough to staff them. 

Without any training for the task, however, professors who were weaned on the lecture system continued to do what they had done before: hold forth. An analysis of 25 recorded seminars at the University of Chicago in 1949 found that faculty members talked for half the time, if not more than that. And when the renowned psychologist Benjamin Bloom played back the recordings for students a week after class and asked them what they had been thinking, fewer than half of them recalled “active thinking relevant to the subject at hand,” as Bloom wrote. Some of them were daydreaming about their hot date that weekend; others were simply watching the clock and wondering when they could leave.

Prior efforts to reform college teaching relied almost entirely on moral suasion: If you prick people’s conscience, the theory went, they will change. But nothing will really change, the Association of College and University Educators believe, until faculty have a clear incentive to get better.

Teaching well is hard. It’s a lot easier to talk at students than it is to engage them. Asked to identify a single piece of advice she’d give to her teachers, one student panelist at the NHETC urged professors to “put the fun back into class.” They should construct “hands-on activities,” she added, by moving people around the room—and away from their “rows of chairs and desks”—so they can learn from each other. But another student on the panel cautioned that “fun teaching will be a challenge, if you don’t know what ‘fun’ means.” He’s right. Dull, didactic instruction worked well enough for most faculty members when they were students; indeed, it helped make them into professors. Why should they change? And what would change them?

The standard answer, which I heard repeatedly at the Minneapolis conference, is to alter hiring, tenure, and promotion systems. Across different kinds of institutions—from community colleges up to big research universities—professors who spend more time on teaching have lower salaries; the biggest earners, meanwhile, are those who devote themselves to research. 

Happily, some faculty members at the NHETC said their institutions were requiring job candidates to teach a sample lesson. Others reported that tenure committees were looking more carefully at faculty members’ teaching records, especially their student evaluations. But everyone acknowledged the problem with relying solely on the student reports, which one attendee likened to “Yelp reviews.” 

Any lasting solution will require universities to invest heavily in peer review of teaching, like we do with research. When I wrote my book about college teaching, I didn’t submit it to the undergraduates in my class to see if I had something important to say; it was instead sent to experts in my field, who have the knowledge to assess it. We also have an expanding knowledge base about effective teaching. What we lack are institutional mechanisms to evaluate professors in accord with it.

Nor do we have systems to prepare future college teachers for the job, as many people at the conference reminded me. At Penn, doctoral students who serve as teaching assistants undergo a three-day training before they enter the classroom. To become a credentialed scholar in your discipline, you spend many years taking courses and producing a piece of original research; but to prepare for teaching, a single three-day workshop will suffice. 

These efforts are typically directed by centers for teaching and learning, which universities created for the same reason they established teaching awards: to show they care. But if we were truly invested in teaching, we wouldn’t need a special office devoted to it. “A Center for Teaching and Learning?” an emeritus professor at Colby asked in 1992, after the college started one. “I thought that’s what the whole college was.” 

It isn’t, of course. Unlike earlier eras, when so-called teaching colleges didn’t expect you to publish, professors at Colby need to produce research to get promoted. And most of them hold PhDs from elite research universities like my own, which give short shrift to teaching in their doctoral programs. In that sense, the ACUE online course for faculty members is a kind of remedial training: It’s substituting for what the faculty should have studied in graduate school but didn’t. As a professor friend of mine likes to joke, he learned how to teach the same way he learned how to make love: on the job.

And that will continue, until our colleges and universities decide it’s in their own interest to change it. Yes, as many conference attendees told me, we need stronger incentives for faculty members to step up their teaching game. But where is the incentive for their institutions to make that happen? At present, the best way to move up the U.S. News ladder is to devote more resources to research, and also to advertising. As Corbin Campbell has written, some schools have actually improved their rankings by taking money away from faculty development and putting it into marketing; that enhances their reputational “profile,” which in turn generates higher evaluations from colleagues at other institutions. In a recent national opinion survey, which asked respondents what makes the “best” university, the most popular answer was “excellent teachers”—ahead of excellent researchers, high student graduation rates, and well-paying jobs after college. Yet students and their families have no way of knowing which schools recognize and reward teaching and which ones don’t. 

To be fair, U.S. News does factor in several elements that are ostensibly related to teaching: graduation rates, faculty salaries, student-faculty ratios, the percentage of professors who teach full-time, and the amount of money spent per student. All of this data might be important, for different reasons, but it’s a poor proxy for instructional quality. Does a professor who makes more money teach better? Probably not, given that the best route to improving your salary is attending to your research. Are full-time faculty more effective than the hordes of adjunct instructors universities have hired over the past few decades to cut down on labor costs? Not necessarily: A famous 2013 study at Northwestern University found that students learned more from adjunct professors than they did from full-time ones. (The economic exploitation of adjuncts—many of whom earn a subsistence wage or worse—is a separate problem.) Does the amount of money expended per student indicate stronger teaching? Not if the university is plowing that money into new gyms and student centers—in higher ed, we call that the “Edifice Complex”—rather than into the improvement of instruction.

It’s worth noting that U.S. News also publishes a separate list of schools that offer the “Best Undergraduate Teaching,” based on surveys of college presidents, provosts, and admission deans. These assessments aren’t factored into schools’ overall ranking, and with good reason: To put it bluntly, they’re a joke. What do “top academics”—as U.S. News calls the polled officials—know about teaching at their own institutions, let alone at others? And why should we care what they have to say anyway?

Even U.S. News knows that its teaching assessment is meaningless. “These rankings focus on a very important part of the undergraduate academic experience that is not always directly measured in a college’s regular peer assessment survey results or in its overall rank,” the magazine reported. Translated: We know that teaching matters, but we don’t know how to judge it. So we won’t even try, and we certainly won’t include it in the rankings that really matter.

Back in 2001, the Washington Monthly suggested that the National Survey of Student Engagement, which asks students to estimate how college has enhanced their academic skills, could serve as a proxy for teaching quality. But most colleges refuse to release their NSSE data, despite the Monthly’s repeated pleas that they do so. And students’ self-reports of academic engagement—like their evaluations of courses—turn out to be weak predictors of what they have learned. 

Five years later, Monthly higher ed guru Kevin Carey argued that we should evaluate teaching via students’ performance on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which measures analytic reasoning, critical thinking, and written communication. In their influential 2011 book, Academically Adrift, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa showed that most students made only modest gains on the CLA during their college careers. All of us want students to develop the kinds of skills that the CLA appraises, and I’m glad that a handful of colleges have publicized students’ scores on the test. (Most schools don’t—who wants bad publicity?) But it’s hard to know whether students’ CLA performance reflects the quality of the classroom teaching they receive. When I was in college, I learned much more from editing my campus newspaper than I did in my coursework. And the CLA might simply reflect students’ precollege opportunities—which track closely with their parents’ wealth and education—rather than anything they experience in college.

A third way to evaluate teaching is by tallying the resources that institutions devote to it. Do they provide stipends or other incentives for professors to take the ACUE course or other kinds of faculty development classes? If the university prepares graduate students, how much does it expend on training them to teach? But as Corbin Campbell told me, these measures are also imperfect proxies for teaching quality. A budget line for instruction doesn’t tell you if it’s getting better (or worse). 

The federal government is getting serious about enhancing “postsecondary student success.” But none of this money is going toward improving college teaching—even though better teaching is, according to research, one of the best ways to enhance outcomes for students, especially those who come from low-income and minority families.

The best way to judge teaching, she said, is through direct observation. In her 10-year study of college teaching, Campbell and her research team watched 732 instructors on nine different campuses with an eye to whether their teaching embodied academic rigor—that is, if it challenged students to “think in increasingly complex ways”—and also if it promoted active learning, such as experiments, debates, role-playing, and so on. For example, students in courses about American politics learn more from engaging in simulations of Congress than they do from listening to a lecture about it. You might imagine that all of our universities are working hard to reform teaching so it reflects what we know about it. You’d be wrong. Overall, Campbell found, regional state universities tended to have stronger teaching than flagship state institutions. And both outpaced private research universities, where undergraduate instruction was the worst of all. But here’s the larger point: From the outside, nobody can tell the difference. And surely the elite schools want to keep it that way.

They must have breathed a sigh of relief when the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education (administered by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education) announced the first major overhaul of its university classifications since it created them in 1973. When she heard that the reform was underway, Campbell told me, she hoped Carnegie would recognize schools that enhanced teaching. No such luck. It reduced the number of research dollars and doctoral students required for designation as “Research 1” and “Research 2” institutions, which will allow a wider array of schools to claim those titles; it also announced plans to create a new classification reflecting the degree of social mobility that institutions generate for their students. That, too, is fine—in many ways, it’s great—but it tells us nothing about how much these students are learning, or how well their professors are teaching. More schools will get the research designations they want, but none of them will have to show that they’re doing anything substantive to improve the instruction that their students receive.

No rankings evaluate colleges and universities on the quality of their teaching. That’s because, even if they wanted to—and the Monthly certainly does—reliable data isn’t available. And the best way to get that data is for the federal government to require colleges to produce it.

Nor have the White House or Congress shown any interest in improving teaching. Instead, at a moment when nearly 40 percent of college students don’t complete their degrees, the big focus has been on increasing retention and graduation rates. Joe Biden’s administration has distributed nearly $100 million to colleges and universities via the Postsecondary Student Success Grant initiative, which funds “evidence-based retention programs” involving child care, counseling, tutoring, technology, and transportation—in other words, everything except classroom instruction. These other factors can certainly help students stay in school, and of course they’re worthy of support. But there’s also evidence showing that better teaching improves graduation rates and overall levels of student learning, which isn’t a part of the conversation at all. A bipartisan bill to permanently reauthorize PSSG does mention funding “efforts to recruit and retain faculty and other instructional staff.” But there’s no reference to efforts that might improve their instruction; indeed, the words instruction and teaching don’t appear in the measure. Its other examples of projects to increase student retention lie outside of the classroom: expanding student support services, enhancing career counseling, and so on. Like the top echelons of higher education, it seems, D.C. officialdom is content to let college teaching off the hook.

But that also provides an opportunity for bold action, if we can find leaders with the will—and the courage—to take it. In his 1963 magnum opus, The Uses of the University, University of California President Clark Kerr admitted that teaching remained the weak link in the otherwise booming system that he did so much to build. “Educational policy from the undergraduate point of view is largely neglected,” Kerr wrote, denouncing professors who neglected their students in favor of their research. “How to escape the cruel paradox that a superior faculty results in an inferior concern for undergraduate teaching is one of our more pressing problems.” Two years later, Wisconsin Democratic Representative Henry Reuss convened committee hearings to expose how federal grantmaking was “diverting scholars from teaching”; in its recommendations, the committee said that faculty receiving federal dollars should be required to spend at least part of their time in the classroom. 

Alas, these and other recommendations over the years have had little sustained impact. But my conversations at the NHETC convinced me that we now have the chance to make real and lasting change, in ways that eluded previous generations. 

First, we have a much stronger research base about what constitutes effective college teaching. At a time when scientific authority is under enormous fire—and when its defenders put signs on their lawn declaring that “SCIENCE IS REAL”—the research clears the way for a university to make a more persuasive political argument to its faculty and trustees: If you truly believe in the power of science, you need to apply it in your own classroom. 

Second, we have strong evidence that better teaching practices can generate what the business-oriented types call a return on investment: Improved instruction means more students will stay in school, which means more tuition dollars, which means more money for faculty and everybody else. Finally, the coming “enrollment cliff”—the expected decrease in students, thanks to an overall decline in the American birthrate—will make the competition for those tuition dollars even fiercer than it is today. A forward-thinking university that provided data-driven proof of its teaching excellence “could have an important market advantage,” Campbell has written. That could have “trickle-down effects,” encouraging other institutions to follow suit.

The cynics will tell you that none of this is possible, and sometimes the cynics are right. Writing in 2009, my Penn colleague Robert Zemsky argued that institutions could never improve their standing by improving classroom instruction. “It is clear that learning does not matter in the marketplace,” Zemsky wrote. “Instead, the market favors selectivity, brand names, national visibility, winning sports teams, and, in the case of the nation’s medallion universities, major research portfolios.” The Carnegie Classification’s recent broadening of the “research university” category could reinforce or even accelerate that trend, as more and more institutions charge after that title and the status it brings. 

But it could inspire others to turn toward teaching, which might resonate more strongly with a skeptical public. The overall reputation of higher education in the United States is at a new low, as a Gallup survey confirmed last year. And it has plummeted among every constituency: young and old, Democrat and Republican, white and nonwhite. Colleges “rely on public confidence to maintain their viability,” a Gallup researcher said, discussing the survey. “If you have a society of people who say, ‘I’m not confident in higher education for a variety of reasons,’ it would follow that folks would stop engaging with that institution and enrolling and paying tuition dollars to those universities.” Message to faculty, and to the leaders who manage them: If you want to hold on to students—and to their tuition checks—teach them better. The job you save might be your own.

At Penn, doctoral students who serve as teaching assistants undergo a three-day training before they enter the classroom. To become a credentialed scholar, you spend many years taking courses and producing a piece of original research; but to prepare for teaching, a single three-day workshop will suffice.

But you can’t do that without a shared understanding of what “better” means. And that will almost certainly require a new ranking system, which is the kind of thing American academics love to hate. One of my deans at NYU began every year with the same speech: The U.S News & World Report rankings were specious and irrelevant—and we weren’t ranked highly enough. Everyone chuckled, but we also got the point. In a competitive marketplace, rankings will always matter. And just as teachers will instruct what’s on a standardized test, colleges will alter their practices to match what rankings value. That’s why the Monthly created its own college rankings, back in 2005: to promote public service and social mobility, which had been ignored by U.S. News. Now it’s time for yet another ranking reform, which will evaluate good teaching like Corbin Campbell did: via sustained observation of professors, to see if they’re behaving in the ways that help students learn.

And that, in turn, will require a major investment of federal dollars. In his invaluable book on college rankings, Breaking Ranks, former Reed College President Colin Diver notes that a Campbell-style evaluation of an entire college’s instructional program would be prohibitively expensive: You’d need to train evaluators, conduct multiple class visits for each course, and provide assistance to teachers who fell short. For many institutions, that would break the bank. And that’s precisely why we need the federal government to help them out. The first step would be to provide grants to schools that are taking steps to establish such programs; the next would be to reward those that show measurable improvements in instruction. That would take time, and a whole lot of money. But things of value cost something. And if you’re not willing to sustain the cost, you probably don’t value them enough. 

We can improve college teaching if we, as a nation, decide it’s worth improving. We won’t achieve the kind of revolution envisioned in 1949 by the Minnesota dean who wanted the importance of college teaching to be “RECOGNIZED BY ALL.” But we will surely get better, and that will be good enough.

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