Can the Graduate Tiger teach?

What really piqued my interest were the comments posted after his column appeared. They revealed a striking variety of opinions, both about whether graduate students should teach and about the larger question of what kind of university Princeton is. This conversation is important, and I’m grateful not only to Yaron but to everyone else who has taken part for raising these issues.

A couple of commentators — one of whom, interestingly, is now a graduate student elsewhere — insisted that what makes Princeton special is its focus on undergraduates and that letting grad students teach would change this quality for the worse. Of course we should maintain the quality of Princeton’s undergraduate education. Faculty should continue to supervise junior independent work and senior theses, a task often allotted to graduate students elsewhere. They should run their own courses — also a task that grad students undertake at some excellent places — and teach at least one precept with their lectures. And they should always be available in office hours and outside them, on reasonable notice, both to their own students and to any other student who simply has a question. But I don’t see why allowing some senior graduate students to teach courses under careful supervision would ruin, or even change, this system — any more than we ruin it when we allow new assistant professors who took their degrees elsewhere and about whom we don’t know much yet — to teach courses, as we do every year.

But that’s a negative case, and there is a positive one, too. Some commentators noted that allowing grad students to create small courses could have real advantages. It would help us make up for the fact that we’ll have few visiting professors in the next few years, thanks to our financial crisis. More important, it would enable us to add some good courses to the curriculum. The commentator who noted that grad students’ “material will be up-to-date since they’ll be crafting a number of courses for the first time (whereas a number of professors don’t update their courses)” is absolutely right. And it’s not just the material that will be fresh. No one puts more time, thought or heart into teaching than someone who is giving his or her own course for the first time. Our undergraduates as well as our graduate students would gain from having our grad students’ first-time-out passion and energy focused on teaching here.

Some commentators argued that teaching experience wouldn’t help students on the market: As one of them put it, “the top schools couldn’t care less about teaching experience.” In my discipline, evidence of teaching ability matters a lot on the market at every level, from research universities to state colleges. Over and over again, I’ve seen a year’s work as a lecturer or a teaching fellow somewhere else give one of my students exactly the experience and confidence needed to convince a department that he or she is the right candidate: the one who not only has a brilliant thesis in hand but also is ready to step into the classroom and keep a bunch of students engaged.

Some people, finally, seemed to think that grad students who want to teach should simply go elsewhere. I disagree. Princeton tries to do several hard things at once: to give undergraduates a really good education, including experience in first-hand research; to give faculty the resources they need to extend the frontiers of their disciplines; and to train some of the best graduate students in the world. Each of these activities is vital, and none should be shortchanged. And training graduate students, in fields like mine, is not just about forming them as scholars. Smart people with degrees from the best schools don’t spent five or six years living on a pittance in the huts on Harrison Street simply because they want to be scholars or scientists — though they do want that. They also want to be effective, even inspiring, teachers, as their own mentors during their undergraduate years often were. If Princeton did more to make that happen, it would not be violating its core values, but living up to them.

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.