In the astrophysics department, my fellow astro graduate students and I are corralled in the basement with no sunlight and little contact with the outside world. Our mission is to convert espresso into a steady stream of research papers. These days my time is so fully devoted to research that I am essentially separate from the University’s teaching mission.
Graduate students at Princeton, for better or worse, have one of the lightest teaching responsibilities among their counterparts at other schools. The minimum teaching requirement from the Graduate School is for us to teach for one semester, though I know of people who obtained their PhDs without fulfilling even this minor requirement. While graduate students in some departments (particularly in the humanities) have to teach more in order to get paid, their teaching loads are still relatively light.
This contrasts with my friends who are in graduate programs in state schools. My friend at the University of Texas at Austin, for example, has had to teach entire undergraduate courses with hundreds of students on her own for several semesters. My teaching experience, in contrast, has been limited to being an Assistant in Instruction (AI) for a 300-level class of roughly 20 people.
The only prerequisite for a grad student to become an AI at Princeton is to attend a two-day training course in which we are taught some basic teaching techniques and University policies. The requirement is to attend the course without any evaluation or follow-up, and the only thing that was really hammered home was to not date the undergrads in the class (wait until after the course ends).
After that, we are let loose in the classrooms. After a semester of grading homework, giving precepts or presenting the odd lecture, the whole teaching experience is tossed into some dusty corner of our minds until we have to apply for a post-doctoral or faculty position at the end of our time here. Then, our teaching “experience” is summed up in a pithy sentence tucked somewhere inside the C.V. And apart from some whining in the ‘Prince’ from our unfortunate undergrads, we receive no concrete feedback (or consequences) from the University to reflect our teaching performance.
This is an early lesson for graduate students that teaching ability is way down on the list of qualities that academic employers look for. While most grad students chose to enter academia primarily to pursue a passion for research in their chosen fields, many of us also have a passion for sharing and passing on knowledge to others. For those of us who want to pursue a career in a research university, however, there is little incentive to develop as pedagogues. While all college or university faculty positions ostensibly look for teaching ability in the candidates, in practice it is almost irrelevant when applying for places at research universities. I know of people who were offered faculty positions despite having zero teaching experience, especially in the sciences. The only reason to work on buffing up one’s teaching resume is if one were specifically interested in a position at a liberal arts college, for which one would have to forgo doing much research.
Yet, the paradox is that positions in academia do involve considerable amounts of teaching. It’s just that teaching is regarded as an ornery duty to be saddled on the unfortunates who have to earn their keep, like untenured junior faculty or my hapless friend at UT Austin. It doesn’t matter whether you actually can teach well or not, so long as you go through the motions of teaching for the required amount of classroom time. I suspect that the janitor in my building is held to higher standards for his cleaning than most professors are for their teaching: A previous janitor was removed for not properly carrying out her duties, while I have sat through hopelessly muddled lectures from professors who have been teaching the same course for years, if not decades. There is little accountability of the teaching quality offered by the professors, in part because students don’t demand high-quality teaching. When you are sitting in a class taught by a famous professor, you think you are getting a good deal even if you are not learning very much.
To its credit, Princeton has retained its emphasis on education, and all professors here are required to teach. However, in the broader field of higher education, institutional attitudes have inexorably been tilting toward research at the expense of teaching quality and, I believe, further and further away from the Platonic ideal of the Academy.
Good scholarship and good pedagogy should not be mutually exclusive, and it is up to the consumers of education — the students — to demand the best teaching from their professors and not allow shoddy teaching to hide behind a research reputation. I look forward to my future students demanding as much from me.
Khee-Gan Lee is an astrophysics graduate student. He can be reached at lee@astro.princeton.edu.
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