Professors should put their research first, introduce talented protégés to the richness of their disciplines, and vary their courses to stay up on the latest developments in their fields, right?
Hogwash, says Bill Coplin, who for 43 years has taught “Public Affairs 101: Introduction to the Analysis of Public Policy” to 10,000 Syracuse students, about 70 percent of them freshmen. Another 30,000 high-school students have taken the course through instructors trained by Coplin and his colleagues.
He urges others to teach the same course repeatedly, too. Your department, administration, and scholarly associations won’t reward you for it. In fact, they’ll view you with suspicion and mild disdain, but they’ll tolerate you, he says, because your students will love you and you’ll become valuable to the college.
Thinking of himself as an artist and refining his course into an artwork has made him happy. He has written a new academic self-help book, The Happy Professor (Rowman & Littlefield), so that you can be happy too. All you have to do, he writes, is forget everything you’ve heard about nurturing every last one of your students, no matter how irresponsible and lazy they are; how to manage your career; and what a liberal-arts education is for.
The bulk of the faculty, the way they teach, they’re still targeting some mythological gentleman and scholar.
Is college a comprehensive survey of the best that has been thought and said? Nah, says Coplin. It’s about preparing students for successful careers and effective citizenship. Coplin talked to The Chronicle about why professors talk too much, how teaching undergraduates is like training a dog, and why he hopes his book will start a revolution.
Your book is called The Happy Professor. Is that a reasonable expectation for the majority of academics?
Most undergraduate professors’ main goal is to create protégés, and that is really not the purpose of undergraduate education. To be happy, you have to prepare kids for careers and citizenship. I don’t know how many people want to do that.
You’re 79. How long into your career were you when you got happy?
It was a process. I was still publishing and still in the academic game, but I didn’t see myself as a scholar. I always wanted to treat the social sciences as a set of tools to make good decisions. Then I got this opportunity to do that in the public-affairs program.
Academe’s a very different place now than when you started. Do younger colleagues ever say, “Hey sure, you’ve had this fulfilling career because you came in at a more optimistic time when universities were growing?”
I don’t talk to many of these people. I have my own program, so I’m not in a department. I’m not on committees. I don’t socialize with them.
Oh, so maybe they haven’t heard about your views, and when they read your book they’ll ask you about them.
Yeah, I’m a little worried. They love my students, though. They say, “How come your students are so involved?” And I want to say it’s because I teach them something they need, not something you want. They all think that I’m charismatic and that the students follow me around like puppies. I think they follow me around because I promise that I’m going to tell them how to get a job, which is why most of them think they’re in college. That is at odds with the liberal-arts people. They tolerate me because my students are the best students in the university.
You advocate a minimalist approach, teaching undergraduates key skills for career and citizenship rather than a maximalist grounding in a discipline. How and when did you come to that position?
It came to me when I wrote the book. Then I realized, “How am I different?” I think the faculty is way over the heads of the majority of students. It’s a closed system: lecture, reading, tests. I don’t think that promotes thinking and problem solving. Here come these masses of kids that are being recruited into a pretty esoteric discipline — a form of religion the professor believes in — and that’s very detrimental to 80 percent of the students. My religion is skills and experience.
Even though the GI Bill of Rights is 75 years old, you write that undergraduate education hasn’t really adapted to it yet. What do you mean by that?
Well, before the war a lot of students were from rich families, academically gifted families. But the run-of-the-mill-normal person didn’t go to college and did not go to a good high school and was not raised in a family where there were intellectual discussions at the dinner table. Then they flocked into the colleges, which I don’t think adjusted to that. The bulk of the faculty, the way they teach, they’re still targeting some mythological gentleman and scholar. These regular undergraduate kids want to get jobs.
Professors need to accept, you write, that a few students just aren’t ready to learn and take responsibility for themselves. That seems to run contrary to the exhaustive outreach that many colleges practice these days.
The whole culture has been dominated by this, “Oh, you can do it. You can be anything you want to be.” It’s all the way up through high school, and they get to college and they want their hand held.
I recently got a dog, and it’s being trained, and the trainer said to me, “Yeah, what you do is don’t hold the leash tight. Let him walk where he wants and then give him a correction when he does something wrong.” I said, “You know what? That’s exactly my teaching philosophy: Give them as much freedom as you can, and then pull the leash.” They have to develop enough confidence in themselves to make decisions.
You recommend teaching a course repeatedly, treating oneself as an artist and that course as one’s art. Do your younger colleagues chafe at that idea?
Most teachers who teach freshman courses view it as a huge burden and won’t do it for long. The few teachers who do it tend to be disrespected. So that shows where the administrators are. I use undergraduate TAs, so that means I need to teach it every semester because I’m training my TAs for the next semester. You know, it’s sort of built up into this whole system. Our most successful teachers at Syracuse have been teaching the same course for years.
Do you hold out any hope that the academic reward system could actually be changed to encourage teaching over research?
That was the hope in writing this book, and at the end I say maybe this will be a revolution. I think it’s a very tough battle, but all the forces favor it. You know, the online schools, the increase in tuition costs, the decline of the humanities.
You discuss how Dale Carnegie principles can help with diversity training. How does that work?
Well, Carnegie basically says don’t criticize, condemn, or complain. He also says smile. That is not the way most people interact. To me, diversity is you treat each other as human beings. As soon as you use the word “diversity,” you’ve put the majority of the white students on edge even though most of them are left wingers anyway, so they’re multicultural in attitude. I don’t have patience for trying to brainwash kids to feel guilty about being white. I think people should be nice to each other. Put people from different backgrounds on a team to go solve a problem, and you know what? They’ll get along fine. They’ll solve the problem. They won’t solve the problem. They’ll become friends. They won’t become friends. At least they’ve interacted on a concrete thing rather than on “how I feel,” which I think is not healthy.
You criticize most professors for talking too much. What’s the cure?
First of all, you have to cut down the goals of your lecture. What do you want students to learn? Well, there should be three things, not 22 things. There’s this study that shows professors usually wait three seconds when they ask a question, and if they don’t get an answer they start talking. Just keep your mouth shut.
I go to the lowest common denominator, which could be criticized. I believe in simplification. My course has 20 concepts, 10 major ones. The rest is applying them. There’s a downside to the way I do all this, but I want to educate most of the students most of the time.
Any thoughts of retiring?
No, I’m going to drop dead in the Maxwell Auditorium.
Well, that will provide some experiential learning for your students.
Exactly.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Alexander C. Kafka is a Chronicle senior editor. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.
