Last October, Madhukar Vable said farewell to two teaching prizes that he had won a decade earlier. He packed the plaques in envelopes and shipped them back to the university and state offices that had awarded them.
His packages included long letters about the condition of higher education. Too many colleges, Mr. Vable wrote, chase prestige and research grants at the expense of undergraduate instruction—and his own institution had penalized him because he had not done the same. “A dedicated teacher is becoming THE SUCKER in the system,” he wrote. “I will continue to do my best in teaching and scholarship, but I am no longer willing to perpetuate the hypocrisy that excellent teaching ... is still valued at Tech.”
“Tech” is Michigan Technological University, a small public institution where Mr. Vable has taught mechanical engineering since 1981. And in recent weeks, his protest has given rise to a broad debate on the campus, where undergraduates have held forums to argue whether he is right or wrong, and where administrators have contended that research actually supports good teaching.
Mr. Vable’s letters have not received official replies, and they might easily have slipped into obscurity as just another angry gesture by a disgruntled faculty member. (Not long before he returned his awards, Mr. Vable had lost a grievance hearing over his salary and rank. He won tenure in 1990 but has never been promoted to full professor, and his salary now lags significantly behind those of his colleagues who have won the university’s research prizes.)
But his letters caught the attention of a few members of the student government, and his complaints are now the talk of the campus, in Houghton, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In public meetings and on a Facebook page devoted to the affair, some students have strongly supported Mr. Vable. One Facebook entry reads, “Vable is the man plain and simple. HERO.”
Other voices on the Facebook page just as strongly disagree, with students saying that research experiences have been the strongest parts of their undergraduate education. Those experiences would not have been possible, they say, if the university were not adding graduate students, hiring high-profile scholars, and pursuing federal grants.
Then there is a third faction. Some students say they aren’t prepared to endorse one side or the other but would like to find evidence that would let them decide. Is the university shortchanging undergraduate instruction or isn’t it? Last month the student government sent the administration a long list of requests for information about how faculty members are rewarded and how tuition dollars are spent.
“I would like to get real data about how the money flows and about how student evaluations of teachers have changed over the years,” says Auriel Van der Laar, a third-year student who has helped organize two public forums about the debate. “We’re undergraduates. They’ve trained us to be inquisitive, to want to solve problems. So I think they should let us look at the data. If nothing’s wrong, we’ll go on our way and everything will be fine.”
But it is not clear that any numbers will resolve the students’ questions. Mr. Vable says some of the damage to undergraduate education at Michigan Tech and elsewhere is done when distracted faculty members, eager to get back to their labs, brush off questions from students during office hours. That kind of thing isn’t easily quantified.
Conversely, Michigan Tech’s provost, Max J. Seel, says investing in research quickens the intellectual pulse of the entire campus, offering students chances to work on cutting-edge topics. That, too, is hard to boil down to a number.
“The basic question is to find an equitable solution to the challenge of being at a research university that is building doctoral programs, while at the same time maintaining excellence in undergraduate education,” says Mr. Seel. “Where I strongly disagree with Madhu is when he gives the impression that research undermines resources for teaching.”
Moving the Goalposts
At the heart of Mr. Vable’s complaint are his department’s tenure-and-promotion guidelines. Those guidelines were revised in 2000, shortly after he had received the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award and a similar prize from a statewide association of governing boards.
Under the revised criteria, faculty members are given many more points for supervising graduate students than for teaching undergraduate courses. “I can teach an undergraduate course with 44 students and get only three points,” Mr. Vable says. “But a faculty member who supervises a graduate student gets 19 points and can be released from course duty. So that totally skewed the algorithm.”
Mr. Vable has never been near the top of the mechanical-engineering department in terms of journal publications or external grants. His CV lists only one graduate student whom he has supervised during the past decade.
But the professor argues that he should be credited for his dedication to undergraduate instruction. He teaches 120 undergraduates during a typical semester and says his average course-evaluation scores range between 4.4 and 4.8, compared with a campus average of 4.0. Since 2002 he has written two editions of a materials-engineering textbook for Oxford University Press. And he does publish peer-reviewed research, albeit slowly—one or two papers per year.
“Research is crucial to undergraduate education, I absolutely don’t deny that,” Mr. Vable says. “If you can bring research into your classrooms, that adds excitement to your teaching. But unfortunately it’s become structured as an either-or proposition. To spend time in the lab, you don’t have time to do teaching. And that, to me, is where the problem is.”
Ms. Van der Laar and two other undergraduates say they are generally satisfied with the quality of teaching at Michigan Tech. They say that their classes are reasonably small, and that they have never had trouble getting help from faculty members outside class (though they have heard of such things happening to others).
But they do have a nagging sense that their tuition money is subsidizing the salaries and stipends of professors and graduate students who spend little time in classrooms.
“I have unfortunately had a few professors here who are not very good at teaching,” says David M. Smeenge, a junior who is majoring in biomedical engineering. (Neither he nor Ms. Van der Laar has taken a course with Mr. Vable.) “But on the flip side, I’ve also had some absolutely fantastic teachers.”
The best part of his education, Mr. Smeenge says, has been his work in a laboratory.
“I’ve been a research assistant since my first semester, and it has really amplified my learning,” he says. “I’ll go into a class, and they’ll talk about a specific polymeric structure, and I’ll say, Oh, yeah—I’ve worked with this chemical. I know this structure.” Time in the lab also allows students to decide whether and where they want to pursue graduate school, he says.
For those reasons, Mr. Smeenge says he is not sure what to make of Mr. Vable’s arguments. He worries that labs like the one where he works would vanish if faculty members were not given the time and resources to build them. At the same time, he says, something about the professor’s plea rings true. Mr. Smeenge wants faculty members to be given stronger incentives to spend time with undergraduates and to improve their teaching.
Mr. Seel, the provost, says he and his colleagues keep an eye on faculty members who seem to be neglecting their classroom work. A pattern of bad course evaluations will sometimes lead department chairs to refer faculty members for counseling at the university’s teaching-and-learning center.
“I firmly believe in the unity of teaching and research at a doctoral university,” Mr. Seel says. “And hopefully discussions about how to achieve that balance will never end. Those discussions are healthy for all of us.”
Mr. Vable, for his part, believes Michigan Tech is still far out of balance. Last month students in Michigan Tech’s College of Engineering named him one the college’s best three instructors. He used the occasion to write an open letter to students. “We are creating a system where teachers and scholars are on divergent paths,” he wrote. “Instead of trying to become the MIT of the Midwest, we should ... embrace our history of undergraduate education rather than run from it.”