A response to David Broder

David Broder, in an opinion piece in today's Washington Post, quotes Jim Hunt, the former governor of North Carolina, who says that to bring education costs down. "We have to look at productivity measures for college faculties," he said. "The course load may have to increase for some professors" (Hunt, quoted by Broder).

There are lots of reasons why simply increasing the course load won't solve the problem. See the articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, here, here, and here. (Sorry, these are by subscription.)

But I want to address the unspoken implication in David Broder's column: That faculty aren't working very hard and that we have lots of free time so that we can, without much inconvenience, simply take on more students. If I could reply to Mr. Broder, I would say . . .

Good evening, Mr. Broder,

Well, if you have your way and I end up teaching more students while still keeping up with my obligations of scholarship (not to mention those other obligations of "service" that are expected of faculty), perhaps you could help.

You could start now. It's 11:20 pm. I still have 9 more papers to grade by tomorrow so that the students will have feedback before they start working on the take-home final. (I have spent my weekend grading the first 20. A good paper can take 10 minutes. A bad paper can take an hour or more.) I'll give you the reading list and the paper requirements. I'm sure that you could help me by grading. (Throwing the papers down the stairs to see where they land is NOT an approved method.) Just remember that it is not OK just to put the grade on the paper. You must write comments on them, showing them where they have made conceptual errors, grammatical errors, and stylistic errors. Also, it is really empowering to tell them where they have made excellent points. Final comments should always be constructive, never cutting. Use this as a guide:

"Suzie, I see that you read some of the scholarly literature on the global political economy of basket weaving. Unfortunately, you have confused Adam Smith with Karl Marx. Instead of conducting a literature review, you have simply summarized some articles. Misunderstanding what those articles said was a definite negative. Also, you need to work on proofreading skills. Perhaps you should go to the Writing Center and ask for help on commas, as well. Grade: D."

OK? Should I send you the papers? Surely you don't have anything better to do tonight! When you're done with these, we can go over the grading of the doctoral students' seminar papers. They are more interesting, but still take a lot of time to go through.

The bloat in universities is not at the level of the professor. Our salaries do not go up as quickly as student tuition -- not nearly as quickly. I don't know enough about university finances to say where the money is going, but I suspect it's in health care costs, beautiful dormitories and gym facilities, and other non-teaching, non-research areas.

I think, though, that you have fallen into the trap of thinking that teaching two courses a semester is a breeze. That's two courses a semester plus preparation time plus grading time plus keeping up with the field time plus advising students, writing letters of recommendation, serving on University committees, and -- oh, yeah! -- fitting in time for our own research. (And a few million other tasks, as well.)

If you want faculty at major research universities to teach more, research will suffer. If the purpose of a research university is the production of "knowledge for the world," as my University's fund raising campaign claimed, then your plan will further exacerbate the weakening of American intellectual capital. Shouldn't our engineers and scientists be taught by people who know the cutting edge research because they are doing the cutting edge research?

But what about other fields that are less directly tied to practical things like R&D? At least the profs on the softer side of the university, you might suggest, should teach more. Perhaps you don't think that research into literature, ethnomusicology, or my own field of global political economy is particularly important. That these areas of study are fundamentally important to how we are an educated people, how we see ourselves in the world, and how we preserve and enhance our culture is, I'm afraid, something of an article of faith for me.

I'll say one thing for my own area of study, though. For the past 22 years, all students in my global political economy course should have learned one thing that Alan Greenspan didn't: Markets work efficiently and fairly only when government provides an appropriate regulatory structure that governs the market. Extreme deregulation and governments' abdication of their responsibility to govern markets brought us to what Susan Strange referred to in 1986 as "Casino Capitalism" -- with disastrous results.

Scholarship is worth producing, whether the result is something practical like a better software algorithm; possibly useful, like a more nuanced way of looking at world events; or just enriching, like the life lessons we learn from great literature. That's what research universities are supposed to do.

Dumbing the university down by making it a glorified high school will, in the end, have a negative effect on our collective store of knowledge.