The Publishable Perishable Professoriat

Campus Report ^ | March 31, 2009 | Daniel Allen

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The Publishable Perishable Professoriat

by: Daniel Allen, March 31, 2009

The University: An institution for research and scholarship, or an academy for advanced teaching and learning? The best represent both worlds, but worrying trends indicate that undergraduate students are suffering because teachers must devote their attention to inconsequential research rather than the learning of students in the developmental phase of their education. A study, sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), shows how teachers must focus on research in order to keep their careers, which creates a tradition of neglect toward undergraduates.

The study was conducted by Mark Bauerlein of Emory University, who begins his report by demonstrating the plummeting standards in undergraduate education. Students come to college expecting heavy work loads, major assignments, and long hours outside of the classroom. A study that Bauerlein cites shows that students actually “study two to six hours less per week on average than they thought they would starting college.”

Not only are students required to do less work than they expected, but the quality of their learning has been diminished. Teachers no longer spend significant amounts of time outside of the classroom engaging the students in discussions, and students have come to accept that visiting a professor for discussion outside of class is not the norm. “Full-time faculty members spend 62 percent of their labor on teaching, but their efforts aren’t sufficiently connecting with students,” Bauerlein reports.

Between 1980 and 2006, 3,584 scholarly pieces were written on William Faulkner, 3,437 on Charles Dickens, 1,776 on Emily Dickinson and 3,969 on John Milton. William Shakespeare is in a class of his own “with 21,674 separate pieces of scholarship and criticism.”...