Research Universities Need to Improve Their Teaching. But More Money Won’t Help, a Philosopher Says.

The undergraduate education provided by research universities could be greatly improved without much expense. Not only that, but making big public investments in such universities is the wrong approach for improving educational attainment or equity. That’s the provocative argument of a paper scheduled to be presented at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting on Saturday.

The Chronicle caught up before the meeting with Harry Brighouse, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who wrote the paper. We discussed his ideas and how they’ve been received so far. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

Q. So what’s wrong with the teaching happening in universities like the one where you work?

A. I have a hunch, which is that professors are considerably less good at teaching than they think they are. And the hunch is based on the fact that we don’t train teaching assistants to teach, that we select and hire professors without any regard to their ability or potential as teachers, and that we don’t then give them further training or professional development.

And the incentives in the system are all focused on research, and not improvement of one’s teaching.

The final part of it is, I think teaching is really difficult. It’s a very difficult, complex skill that needs to be learned.

Q. What would fix it?

A. There are three huge interventions that would help. First is careful, ongoing training of TAs. Ongoing training during their first two years of teaching, in which they are systematically observed by faculty who have been trained in observation protocols. Also that they observe each other, and they regularly are prompted to convene and discuss problems of practice.

The second thing is to work with very early assistant professors. What we typically do is someone goes into your classroom once a semester, maybe. Much better would be, again, for them to be given training, for them to be convened and given incentives to participate in other kinds of professional development.

The third thing would be to simply — this is quite hard to do, so I’m not saying it’s not difficult, I just don’t think it’s very expensive — incentivize departments to regularly and systematically meet as groups discussing problems of practice. My department does that now. We have a monthly brown-bag, bringing in experts or discussing, for instance, how do you make a productive discussion happen in a lecture class? What type of feedback do you give students on their papers? Problems of that kind.

Q. Are universities poised to move in the direction you’re describing?

A. Universities are large organizations that are very slow to move. I do see at the administrative level, since 2008, there’s an increasing anxiety about the job market when students graduate.

Liberal-arts colleges within research universities are increasingly feeling competitive pressure from the professional schools. That’s a point where they have good reason to start paying more attention to the quality of the teaching and learning going on, because that’s one of the things that will help keep students in liberal-arts majors.

Q. You’re not merely saying teaching could be improved without a big financial investment. You actually argue that the teaching of undergraduates is not the right place to make such an investment. It struck me as a strange argument for a professor at a public university to be making.

A. I’m trying to make an argument that seems right to me, not one that serves my interests. One observation I make in the paper is that public funding — as opposed to state funding — of higher education has not decreased.

Q. “Public” here is putting federal, like financial aid, and state together?

A. Yeah. So as state funding has declined, federal funding has increased dramatically. Now, it doesn’t necessarily go to public institutions.

I find it quixotic for people to argue, as many do, where we should be putting money is in higher education.

If what you really care about is educating the population, then we have good reasons to believe that the place you want to start, you want to really be investing, is in early childhood, K through 5, 7, whatever. You want to be investing there until you’ve got saturation. And I don’t think anybody thinks that we’re anywhere close to saturation.

If you care about educating the population more equally, well, higher education would be a strange place to start, given that half the population doesn’t go to college. So if you care about maximizing education, you’re going to want to invest early, and if you care about equalizing education, you’re going to want to invest early.

Of course, there are plenty of other things that we waste money on. And if you can take the money the government wastes on, you know, privatized prisons, and if the only place you could then spend it would be higher education, then yes, I’d be all right with spending it on higher education. But I’d rather spend it on early childhood and K-8.

I’m also struck by the reaction of people who are not in universities but went to them as undergraduates — how low their opinion is of the quality of the instruction they received.

Many people have fantastic stories about great professors, but everybody has stories about classes which really were a waste of their time. And I trust those stories. I get it from so many different people, people who think universities are fantastic, and we should be increasing funding for them, who all spoke about improvement in public education. Yet almost all have stories which are sort of embarrassing to hear, about experiences they had when they were in college.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.