Best-Teacher Awards Are Bunk

Julia Schmalz for The Chronicle

Each year, the journal The Literary Review bestows the Bad Sex in Fiction Award upon an author who produces coital-themed prose of exceptionally poor quality. I’d like to rejigger the prize for the professoriate and honor the Most Unrealistic Depiction of a College Class in American Cinema. My nomination, hands down, goes to the 2003 film Mona Lisa Smile, starring Julia Roberts. The actress plays Professor Katherine Ann Watson, an art-history instructor teaching on a one-year contract at Wellesley College in 1953.

There is so much askew in Mona Lisa Smile’s classroom scenes that I don’t even know where to start. How do we account for students who have memorized the entire textbook by the first day of class? How could a bunch of 20-year-olds know enough about scholarly mores to throw shade at Ms. Watson for not yet having her doctorate? I’m also confused as to why, by semester’s end, each student presents the professor with a well-executed painting of flowers. I mean, I get the allusion to their burgeoning, agentive, feminist consciousness and all. But when did “History of Art 100" become a studio class?

Not everyone at Wellesley offers heartfelt gifts to the freewheelin’ Professor Watson. The administration renews her contract only on the condition that she tone down all the liberal stuff in her lectures (and personal life). Professor Watson refuses to compromise her integrity. Upon her bittersweet departure, crestfallen students escort her taxi past the campus gate on their bicycles. As they complete their rolling salute to pedagogical greatness, they tear up over the loss of an Instructor Who Makes Us Think. And Love.

The question for me is not why a Hollywood depiction of college life is so off the mark. We humanists — who’d struggle to properly position and align our pipe cleaners in a shoebox diorama — ought not cast aspersions on the artists who produced a movie as pretty as Mona Lisa Smile. No, the question for me is why narratives about great teachers abound in hype and sentimentality.

This tendency is certainly not restricted to cinema. Even serious academic studies of pedagogy traffic in this sort of hyperbole. I think of Ken Bain’s 2004 book, What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard University Press). This thorough and well-intentioned study set out “to capture the collective scholarship of some of the best teachers in the United States, to record not just what they do but also how they think, and most of all, to begin to conceptualize their practices.”

Bain admirably deploys multiple metrics to identify his best teachers. His research abides by rules of rigorous scholarly inquiry. Yet even this trained academic can’t avoid excessive praise. “How does Ann Woodworth, a professor of theater at Northwestern University,” he asks, “lift her acting students to heights of thespian brilliance?”

The Harvard professor Michael Sandel, teaching a class of 700 students (!), is commended extensively. According to Bain, Sandel helps undergraduates become “good political philosophers” by asking them to imagine “fundamental issues of justice and understand their own thinking.” Bain is equally unconcerned about massified classes when he lauds another best teacher for asking pre-class questions of his 200 registered students.

Although Bain concedes that even the best instructors have bad days, his analysis loses sight of that truth. The educators he writes about appear to consistently elicit epiphanies in their young charges. The scholars are rarely shown to stumble during lectures. They never arrive late for class or lose their tempers with insolent seniors. Grade disputes, a fact of life for any college teacher doing his or her own marking, are nonexistent. The students themselves play but a supporting role in Bain’s analysis. They exist as fans. An audience. Reaction shots.

This sentimentalization of Best College Teachers strikes me as misguided and even a bit sinister. It fails to take into consideration how undergraduates today typically interact with their professors — just as it turns our attention away from those obvious structural factors that make it so hard for scholars to actually focus on their students.

A book that helps us pump the brakes on over-the-top depictions of inspired college teaching is the 2005 My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student (Cornell University Press). This eye-opening study was published by an anthropologist, Cathy A. Small, a professor at Northern Arizona University, writing under the pen name Rebekah Nathan. For any scholar, the premise of My Freshman Year is the stuff of night terrors. The author, a tenured ethnographer, matriculates (undercover) at the age of 52 as a student in the college at which she teaches. She even takes up residence in the dorms. This feat of derring-do reminds us that anthropologists are the professoriate’s last remaining daredevils, stuntpersons who will launch themselves off a 13,000-foot cliff in a wingsuit in quest of knowledge(s).

Small provides a sobering counterpoint to the treacly narrative of inspirational college teachers. “Most professors and administrators,” she writes, “overestimate the role that academics plays in student culture, and as a result they magnify the impact of teachers and classes on student life and decisions.” One reason undergraduates are impervious to our influence is that they’re incredibly busy. They are cross-pressured by jobs, club activities, internships, romance, social obligations, and other classes. Put simply, students have a lot going on in their lives — and not much of it has to do with us.

A recent analysis obliquely buttresses this point. It argues that college students spend significantly less time studying than do high-school students (10.9 fewer hours per week). They show roughly equal commitment to educational and work-related activities. If we look at 50-year trends, full-time students are spending less and less of their day preparing for class.

Reflecting on her own discoveries in the field, Small raises a concern that speaks to the reality of contemporary scholar/undergraduate relations. “As an anthropologist,” she laments, “I was humbled to see how little I, as a professor, knew of my students’ academic world.” I think the converse of Small’s observation is equally true: Students have no idea who we are. They have no clear sense of how or why we became professors. They know little of what our job entails outside of the sessions we spend with them. They couldn’t distinguish a provost from a postdoc.

The bitter and undeniable truth is that most professors and students in 21st-century America are cordially estranged. The two groups lead parallel lives on campus, their only point of intersection being the occasional classroom spaces they happen to inhabit concurrently. As far as a professor is concerned, the students arrayed in front of him or her could just as well be a flash mob that assembles twice a week and takes notes as part of its performance. Professors and students do not necessarily think ill of each other. The truth is that they hardly think of each other at all.

The developments that resulted in this cordial estrangement are complex, and I certainly can’t expound upon them here. My best guess is that things started shifting in the 1980s. Maybe it was the increased emphasis on research that drove scholars away from the more avuncular relations they may have maintained with students in earlier generations. Maybe housing prices rose and it became more difficult for professors to purchase properties near campus. Maybe the spread of contingency made it hard for underpaid and undervalued academics to concentrate on mentoring. Maybe it was the expansion of the administrative class that inserted itself as a firewall between professors and students. Maybe economic trends forced more kids out of their study carrels and into low-paying jobs. Or maybe a growing awareness of sexual harassment in the 1980s had the positive effect of neutralizing campus predators, and the negative one of giving nonpredatory professors reason to distance themselves from undergrads — all the better to focus on research!

No matter what the reasons, the consequences are dismal. What has been lost, in both theory and practice, is the idea of meaningful and sustained relations between faculty members and those they teach. The student-professor encounter has become increasingly transactional. Office hours are perfunctory; students who do attend come only to discuss finals or to offer excuses for late papers. Mentoring has become a lost art, like the mid-range jump shot or album-cover design. That some schools advertise their “experiential learning” or “student-professor research initiatives” as perks and selling points indicates how rare these types of interactions have become.

Finding exemplary instructors in this context is at once hard and easy. Hard because we care so little about training and cultivating skilled teachers. Easy because the field is not exceedingly competitive; few scholars are actually vying for this honor.

Can I be perfectly frank with you? The whole discourse of Best College Teachers strikes me as bunk. Whether it’s Baylor University’s Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching (with a cash prize of $250,000), or those “Faculty of the Year” honors that are dispensed at every college according to a body of work that is, literally, inscrutable — it all seems off to me. I don’t doubt that there are some truly phenomenal instructors out there who have deserved these accolades (just as I don’t doubt that some duds have received them as well). Yet this system of tribute undermines a lot of what we aim for as educators.

Let me first say a word about inscrutability. How does any professor, let alone a panel of judges, really know what goes on in another professor’s class? Longstanding academic convention dictates that we rarely cross the threshold of a colleague’s classroom. We are seldom invited to one another’s lectures and seminars. It goes without saying that an unannounced “pop in” is strictly out of the question.

The door to a lecture hall could just as well be a police sawhorse — if that sawhorse stood behind a moat and was outfitted with a gun turret. Herein lies an unrecognized truth about American higher education: The inner workings of college teaching spaces are more or less unknown. Outside of that 60-minute theatrical set piece known as a “peer observation,” and the metric anarchy of a SET, or “student evaluation of teaching,” how does any nonregistered citizen know anything about what transpires in any college class? What goes on in there? Line dancing? Capoeira? Face painting? With the exception of a matriculated undergrad, nobody is in a good position to witness the commitment, or excellence, or inspiration of a college teacher.

Then again, even if we possessed high-def video of every college lecture ever given since the foundation of the University of Heidelberg, how would we achieve any consensus about what constitutes teaching excellence? Ronald Berk, in his inimitable Thirteen Strategies to Measure College Teaching (Stylus, 2006), identified, yes, 13 rather distinct instruments currently used to draw conclusions about a professor’s effectiveness. What I find fascinating about the tools that Berk elucidates for us is how so many of these indices are likely to yield radically different conclusions about who excels. One measurement is based on a professor’s self-assessment of his/her work in a class. One relies on student evaluations. Still others turn to external evaluators. Those could be very different from a metric that looks at, say, how much students learn across a semester or perhaps through the length of their college stay.

Which brings us to another problem with Best Teacher rhetoric: These types of prizes draw attention away from the fact that educating an undergraduate is a collective, not an individual, enterprise. The type of knowledge we impart in college is sequential. It is pointless to take a specialized course on “The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu” before you’ve taken “Introduction to Sociology,” “Social Theory,” “Stratification,” and maybe “Cultural Sociology.” The concept of an academic major implies the existence of a reasonably well-ordered curriculum. One great teacher cannot teach an entire curriculum. That takes a team.

I once had a colleague who taught a 200-level class. She loathed the fellow who taught the 100-level that was a prerequisite for her own. The latter was a campus legend. He was a flamboyant character who gyrated and twerked as he lectured. By the time his students cycled into her class, they knew exceedingly little about the subject matter. Her 200 regressed into a 100, because the guy in the 100 was teaching — well, she had no idea what he was teaching. He did win many Faculty of the Year awards, though.

The team metaphor reminds me of another thing that irks me about Best Teacher banter. Individuals on teams have different skills and strengths. Yet conversations about great instructors never seem to recognize that professors are better at some things than others. It’s as if great college teachers are always exemplary on all levels. You just rush them into any auditorium on a palanquin, press the start button, and they’ll start dishing wisdom around the class like an NBA point guard.

I sincerely doubt this is the case. Not all schools, classes, and learning contexts are the same. I don’t know if a popular professor at Yale would necessarily be a hit at quirky Marlboro College, in Vermont, or vice versa. I am a capable undergraduate teacher, but graduate students don’t dig the cut of my jib. Some professors have a knack for working with freshmen. Some don’t. This is actually a really important thing for a college to know about its faculty, because first-year students are at higher risk for adversity, like depression and dropping out.

If we thought seriously about teaching, we’d pay more attention to putting scholars in positions where they excel. We’d assess who was good at what. We’d know who works well with at-risk students or kids with learning disabilities, and we’d staff our departments accordingly. We are, I regret to say, a million, billion eons away from even starting a conversation of this nature.

But the most insidious thing about Best Teacher talk is that it conveniently distracts us from what truly ails American higher education: We have a lot of scholars who are too poorly prepared, poorly motivated, and/or poorly paid to properly educate undergraduates. This is a structural problem. Graduate schools fail to provide the necessary training in pedagogy. Administrations subject tenure-line faculty members to promotion criteria that render undergraduates an afterthought. Exploited, overworked contingent professors are forced to teach ginormous classes.

The likelihood of great college teaching actually happening on your campus is infinitely lower than the likelihood of great research being produced. This has much to do with the fact that administrations won’t make the financial investments required to facilitate good teaching. A report by Steven Shulman, of Colorado State University’s Center for the Study of Academic Labor, echoes those sentiments, arguing that universities “do not seem to care about anything other than driving faculty costs to the lowest possible level.”

Seen in this light, Best Teacher chatter assumes a more sinister countenance. It asks us to gawk at those who somehow overcame immense, and correctable, structural obstacles. It turns our attention away from the manner in which contingent instructors are treated. A Faculty of the Year award is a laurel wreath that a college places on its own flaxen hair. Christening a Best Teacher is like a lily-white company congratulating itself on its diversity after hiring one African-American executive VP. It’s like a catastrophe-inducing oil conglomerate releasing an ad about how it installed a dozen wind turbines in the name of sustainability.

Tributes to Best College Teachers do to professors what high fashion does to women — enslaves them to preposterous and unhealthy expectations of what constitutes the beautiful in pedagogy. I still don’t have an answer as to why conversations about best teachers trigger exaggeration and confetti drops. That sort of hyperbole, in any case, is inimical to the type of balanced analysis that educators value and impart. I, for my part, could just as well do away with the entire vainglorious discourse. Less noise about best teachers might let us finally concentrate on the challenge of producing lots of good ones.

But let me be clear about something: On every campus in America, you will find good teachers. These are contingent or tenure-line professors who are skilled, inspired, and committed educators. What is my metric for gauging their quality? First and foremost, I look for scholars who actually want to be in a classroom with undergraduates. That noble impulse is mercilessly assailed, and usually ruthlessly expunged, after a decade of graduate school. I’m always intrigued by a scholar who could endure that experience — which does everything it can to assassinate one’s passion to educate — and emerge with their love of pedagogy intact.

Good teaching, however, is not like religion; it takes more than faith. Solid instructors are individuals who (somehow) develop real pedagogical skills. And I’m talking about banal stuff: crafting a smart, challenging, ideologically balanced syllabus; sticking to that syllabus; always being on time (a perennial challenge); pacing a class session properly; developing that weird teacherly inner siren that starts blaring when your students (1) have no idea what you’re talking about and/or (2) have not really done the reading.

The teachers I admire render really complex ideas with clarity — that right there is the heavy lift of college instruction. They find pedagogically sound ways to piss off their students. And one other thing: They inspire thoughtfulness. They actually manage to get otherwise distracted 18- to 24-year-olds to think about matters they’d never have thought about otherwise. Good teachers aggressively infiltrate young minds. The trespass extends for years, and not necessarily in ways that those infiltrated minds find pleasant. That’s my preferred “learning outcome.”

I’m sure I could conjure up a dozen other attributes, but then I’d end up mimicking the florid cadences of the folks I am criticizing. So let me just add that good college teachers endure semesters in which everything inexplicably and catastrophically goes wrong. Having stuff go up in flames — all good college teachers experience, and even solicit, conflagration.

In any case, for now I’ll repeat that scholars such as the ones I am describing may be in the minority, but they really do exist. They exist in spite of the absurdities of the tenure system. They exist in spite of the collapsed job market. They exist in spite of thoughtless and frugal college administrations. These people share one psychosocial characteristic: They exist in a tensile relationship with their own profession. They do not share the priorities of their research-obsessed colleagues and managers. Good college teachers, then, don’t necessarily do what is in their own professional interest. They do what’s in the interest of their students. That, at least, is something Mona Lisa Smile intuited accurately.

Jacques Berlinerblau directs the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. This essay is adapted from his new book, Campus Confidential: How College Works, or Doesn’t, for Professors, Parents, and Students (Melville House).