Vocationalism, Academic Freedom and Tenure
6th August 2012
Stanley Fish looks at an important subject.
The standard rationale for academic freedom is that the business of the academy is to advance knowledge by conducting inquiries the outcomes of which are not known in advance. Since the obligation is to follow the evidence wherever it leads rather than to a “pre-stipulated goal” (a phrase Riley takes from my writings), researchers must be free to go down paths as they suggest themselves and not in obedience to a political program or an ideology. That is why (and again she is quoting me) “the degree of latitude and flexibility” that attends academic freedom is “not granted to the practitioners of other professions.”
But, Riley observes, “a significant portion of [the] additional degrees that colleges have added in the past few decades have been in vocational areas,” and those areas “simply do not engage students in a search for ultimate truths,” but instead have pre-stipulated goals. “Do we need,” she asks, “to guarantee the academic freedom of professors engaged in teaching and studying ‘Transportation and Materials Moving,’ a field in which more than five thousand degrees were awarded in 2006?”
Here we see quite plainly put the two incompatible purposes being served by ‘universities’ these days: As teaching institutions, and as research institutions. The reason undergraduates go to college is to be taught; the reason professors go to college is toresearch, and the tenure process is deliberately designed to reward those who research whether or not they are any good at teaching.
However much it may be the business of a university to ‘advance knowledge’ at the graduate level, the reason we give this job to professors rather than firemen is because the former are trained for the job, and that training is accomplished the same way that grade school and high school prepare people for life, by imparting facts and skills through rigorous training that does not depend on ‘conducting inquiries the outcomes of which are not known in advance.’
August 7th, 2012 at 06:58
Part of the problem is the still-pervasive belief that teaching is a commodity skill: Anyone can do it. Once one accepts this premise, the problem becomes one-dimensional; find the most knowledgable person in the subject, put him/her in front of the students, and let him/her talk about the subject. Thus the lecture format was born, and has remained the primary method of university teaching since the middle ages.
Needless to say this places the primary burden for learning on the student, who must absorb, integrate, and incorporate what he/she hears and sees in a manner sufficient to repeat it back on an exam. Thus the traditional emphasis on sending only the best and brightest to university, because they are the most apt to be successful in gleaning information and insight from the instructor regardless of said instructor’s skill–or lack thereof–in transmitting what he/she knows.
This is fine as long as the institution–and the public–does not judge performance on the number or quality of the graduates it turns out. After all, it’s the student’s responsibility to learn, not the university’s responsibility to ensure that he/she learns. But this expectation has changed; now universities are judged not only by how knowledgable their faculties are (the Old Standard) but by how many degrees it profers. In order to maintain credibility and support within the community the university must either secure better teachers or lower degree standards, or both. Hence the ‘watering down’ of the value of a Bachelor’s degree.
What’s the answer? I don’t know. But we either have to start recognizing that teaching requires a different skillset from knowing, or return to the days when students were thrown out of the boat to sink or swim on their own.