Great description of what a teacher should be. If it’s true that the sort of teacher like John is disappearing (whom I’ve never listened to but will now), the explanation must be partly material. Simply put, the neoliberal university wants teachers who are replaceable and who function as if on an assembly line, delivering content (information) via PowerPoint that students can learn and then reproduce on a multiple choice exam. This is efficient for everyone involved in terms of teaching and marking and requires little expertise. A teacher as you describe John, on the other hand, is a source of knowledge rather than information; he understands the material deeply and it has somehow merged with his very being so that his teaching is charismatic and inspiring (I imagine the same could be said of the other two teachers you mention). But to develop this sort of sensibility requires time and effort; the way universities are increasingly being run works against this by denying tenure, health insurance, hiring adjuncts to teach courses in which they have little expertise…
I don’t want to be too tough on professors, because as mentioned I see this situation as an effect rather than a cause, but whenever a professor gets on Twitter and says “hey, I’m teaching such and such course, what books/articles do you recommend?” I cringe. Sure, we could be charitable and say they’re being curious and open minded, but in many cases I imagine they don’t have the deep expertise required to teach the course and actually need help from the hive mind. This situation is completely backwards. The course should be a natural outgrowth of the professor’s research and interests!
Anyway, thanks for the recommendation, and if anyone wants to read a short novella about a prof as described here, check out Stefan Zweig’s “Confusion.” The scene when the main character (a college student) wanders into the middle of a lecture and describes how the prof captivates his audience is incredible…
I honestly don't whether it's getting worse or not. One thought I've had is that much of what's different is that the job has become increasingly professionalized and specialized, which maybe means that the average quality of faculty has gone up somewhat while at the same time there is less and less room for free thinkers and wide-ranging intellectuals.
I don't feel like I have enough of a historical sense of the evolution of the university to generalize with much confidence about the trend line. When I was in school in the mid-90s, I had a few really great teachers, a bunch of solid ones, and a very small number of bad ones. Is that ratio different now? Are the great ones not as great?
I think you hit on it with the professionalized vs. free thinkers/wide ranging teachers. I guess I just feel like there used to be more, uh, kinda crazy and weird profs, and those were the ones I liked. The ones where their subject matter felt almost like a matter of life and death.
Really appreciate your description of what a truly great professor offers to students--the "dance of ideas"--which mirrors some recent thoughts of mine about a favorite teacher from college. But I think the questions of whether a professor is *too ideological* or *boring* tend to be intertwined. There are colorful ideologues who can dazzlingly weave disparate intellectual threads together, and rock-solid thinkers who completely lack the gift of gab or "the vision thing," but in my experience many (or most) of the ideologues are pretty darn boring and even the dryer end of open-ended scholars tend to find low-key ways to convey why they're so invested in their topic.
I don't disagree, but it's tricky. The computer science professor I mentioned in the post, David Gelernter, can come across as a total ideologue in his political writing, but in his teaching was wholly fascinating. I'm also not sure how many humanities and social science professors are actually ideologues in the sense that we would assume from the right wing critiques. In certain departments, certainly, but is your average political scientist much of an ideologue, for instance, or linguist, philosopher, religious studies, prof, etc. They're often captive to very rigid disciplinary methods and theories, but it's pretty orthagonal to politics.
Ha yes I've seen some of Professor Gelernter's commentary over the years! Re: ideologues there's often the issue of super smart people who are experts in their particular specialties being tempted to think that they're just the sort of savvy person almost as informed on all the other issues they're too busy to delve into quite as much. To desire to enter academia, let alone to get ahead in the sector, filters a ton for brainiacs with fundamental faith in technocracy and that many more grants to experts like them, and in "softer" fields the social pressures to go along to get along can get intense. Even as the worst ideological excesses of the past few years hopefully wind down, a certain convenient conventional wisdom that broad swathes of the public would dispute remains a minimal price of admission into much of polite society.
Thanks so much, Dan, I really appreciate it! (Obviously, your truancy is excused.)
Ha! Good to know.
Great description of what a teacher should be. If it’s true that the sort of teacher like John is disappearing (whom I’ve never listened to but will now), the explanation must be partly material. Simply put, the neoliberal university wants teachers who are replaceable and who function as if on an assembly line, delivering content (information) via PowerPoint that students can learn and then reproduce on a multiple choice exam. This is efficient for everyone involved in terms of teaching and marking and requires little expertise. A teacher as you describe John, on the other hand, is a source of knowledge rather than information; he understands the material deeply and it has somehow merged with his very being so that his teaching is charismatic and inspiring (I imagine the same could be said of the other two teachers you mention). But to develop this sort of sensibility requires time and effort; the way universities are increasingly being run works against this by denying tenure, health insurance, hiring adjuncts to teach courses in which they have little expertise…
I don’t want to be too tough on professors, because as mentioned I see this situation as an effect rather than a cause, but whenever a professor gets on Twitter and says “hey, I’m teaching such and such course, what books/articles do you recommend?” I cringe. Sure, we could be charitable and say they’re being curious and open minded, but in many cases I imagine they don’t have the deep expertise required to teach the course and actually need help from the hive mind. This situation is completely backwards. The course should be a natural outgrowth of the professor’s research and interests!
Anyway, thanks for the recommendation, and if anyone wants to read a short novella about a prof as described here, check out Stefan Zweig’s “Confusion.” The scene when the main character (a college student) wanders into the middle of a lecture and describes how the prof captivates his audience is incredible…
I honestly don't whether it's getting worse or not. One thought I've had is that much of what's different is that the job has become increasingly professionalized and specialized, which maybe means that the average quality of faculty has gone up somewhat while at the same time there is less and less room for free thinkers and wide-ranging intellectuals.
I don't feel like I have enough of a historical sense of the evolution of the university to generalize with much confidence about the trend line. When I was in school in the mid-90s, I had a few really great teachers, a bunch of solid ones, and a very small number of bad ones. Is that ratio different now? Are the great ones not as great?
I think you hit on it with the professionalized vs. free thinkers/wide ranging teachers. I guess I just feel like there used to be more, uh, kinda crazy and weird profs, and those were the ones I liked. The ones where their subject matter felt almost like a matter of life and death.
Really appreciate your description of what a truly great professor offers to students--the "dance of ideas"--which mirrors some recent thoughts of mine about a favorite teacher from college. But I think the questions of whether a professor is *too ideological* or *boring* tend to be intertwined. There are colorful ideologues who can dazzlingly weave disparate intellectual threads together, and rock-solid thinkers who completely lack the gift of gab or "the vision thing," but in my experience many (or most) of the ideologues are pretty darn boring and even the dryer end of open-ended scholars tend to find low-key ways to convey why they're so invested in their topic.
I don't disagree, but it's tricky. The computer science professor I mentioned in the post, David Gelernter, can come across as a total ideologue in his political writing, but in his teaching was wholly fascinating. I'm also not sure how many humanities and social science professors are actually ideologues in the sense that we would assume from the right wing critiques. In certain departments, certainly, but is your average political scientist much of an ideologue, for instance, or linguist, philosopher, religious studies, prof, etc. They're often captive to very rigid disciplinary methods and theories, but it's pretty orthagonal to politics.
Ha yes I've seen some of Professor Gelernter's commentary over the years! Re: ideologues there's often the issue of super smart people who are experts in their particular specialties being tempted to think that they're just the sort of savvy person almost as informed on all the other issues they're too busy to delve into quite as much. To desire to enter academia, let alone to get ahead in the sector, filters a ton for brainiacs with fundamental faith in technocracy and that many more grants to experts like them, and in "softer" fields the social pressures to go along to get along can get intense. Even as the worst ideological excesses of the past few years hopefully wind down, a certain convenient conventional wisdom that broad swathes of the public would dispute remains a minimal price of admission into much of polite society.