American higher education has wallowed in crisis for decades but outmoded thinking continues to stifle needed reforms. For example, David Randall, like many others in higher education, believes that professors must be either “researchers” (with a small course load) or “teachers” (with a large load).
The best professors, however, perform both functions extremely well because teaching and research are complements, not substitutes.
At first blush, the concept of opportunity costs, the fact that resources expended doing A cannot also be expended on B, would seem to support Randall’s “either, or” supposition. But professors at elite schools like the new University of Austin (UATX) do not do A or B, they do AB. In other words, research and teaching are not separate activities, they constitute components of the same mission, to “prepare thoughtful and ethical builders, leaders, and innovators through open inquiry and civil discourse.”
Such impactful missions cannot be achieved through the banking model of education, where a teacher disseminates accepted facts and assesses whether students have memorized them for some short period. They bear fruit by cultivating creative and independent thinkers, students who know the accepted facts but stand ready to adapt, critique, or even reject them.
At UATX, many professors assign students full books each quarter (10-week term) but use their expertise to go beyond the text in response to student reactions in the classroom. That expertise comes not from writing a dissertation on a narrow topic long ago but from maintaining an active research agenda. They do not publish for the sake of it, but rather so they can bring their students with them to the frontiers of knowledge.
When my students wanted to debate the relative merits of North’s and Grenvilles’ policies towards Britain’s mainland North American colonies, for example, I suggested that they should consider those policies in light of the Laffer Curve, i.e., the upside down U-curve tradeoff between tax rates and government revenue. The assigned reading did not address the concept, so the students had to think about what clues the text presented and then ask questions to fill in the gaps, questions that I could answer because of my previous research on the monetary causes of the Imperial Crisis.
Weeks later, when studying the Tariff of Abominations through contemporary debates, students moved directly into a Laffer Curve analysis. The ensuing discussion helped with an article that I am coauthoring about that tariff. Clearly, teacher-researchers and great students can help each other to edge closer to Truth.
But what if you find yourself, as I did for 3 miserable semesters pulling a 4-4+ after the pandemic, in front of half-empty classrooms of students too distracted or tired from working or playing sports fulltime to complete the assigned readings? You still have an obligation to convey ideas as close to the bleeding edge of the research frontier in your field as you can. A so-called “master teacher” who helps students to understand outdated concepts has not really done them a service. Some claim to keep up in their fields of study solely by reading articles and books but that’s akin to a thoracic surgeon staying abreast only by watching YouTubes of other surgeons at work: helpful but not masterful.
Even the nation’s weakest education institutions matriculate some exceptional students whose brains brighten when challenged and even those beaten down by debt and work appreciate showing off what they can do when given a chance. I therefore edited a book, America’s Macroeconomy: A Quarter Millennial History, due out from Cambridge Scholars later this year. None of the contributors have a Master’s degree; many were high school students. It’s not the best book ever, but it makes a contribution and the authors reported learning much.
To avoid the “Long Night” envisioned by Randall, higher education needs re-enlightenment, not several generations of professor-serfs lashed to an imagined teaching-only grindstone. As higher education shrinks, professors who cannot connect with students and publish well will become increasingly unnecessary.
To save a higher education worthy of the name, professors need to revivify the intellectual goals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that privileged empirical observation, logic, and reason above base authority, ancient custom, and rank superstition. Post-modernism’s moral and intellectual degeneracy bankrupts the nation’s universities and ultimately the nation itself by denigrating and then degrading rational thought. It, not teaching load, constitutes the biggest threat to Western Civilization.
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