Lehrman American Studies Center

“A-quality faculty always hire A-quality faculty. B-quality faculty always hire B-quality faculty. But C-quality faculty NEVER hire A-quality faculty.” These were some of the most memorable parting words of one of my colleagues as she parted from one academic job to another. She was trying to emphasize the importance of hiring excellent faculty for she was convinced that bad hires are not only difficult to remove but have long-term negative consequences on future hires. This made me think about the question which this blog’s title poses: can C-quality faculty ever be turned into A-quality faculty?

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In a February article in The New York Times, “Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes,” and in a subsequent commentary blog by Michelle Cottle of The New Republic, “An A for Effort? Talk About a Lousy Idea,” we see on display a culture of entitlement at universities, where students believed they deserve a high mark for their efforts and not for their results.

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I wonder how often we have thought about what constitutes effective teaching from the perspectives of our students. We often discuss effective teaching among ourselves, our professional peers, and those sympathetic to our approaches, methods, and assumptions. But have we ever wondered what effective teaching is from our students’ vantage point?

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My syllabi are to have course outcomes, measurable course outcomes, the sort of outcomes a scantron can measure. But such a model is fundamentally antithetical to liberal education and ought to be resisted by a "solidarity of the shaken."

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Prior to its decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), the Supreme Court’s decision in Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978) was the first major case concerning the constitutionality of college and university admissions policies. The admissions procedure at the University of California-Davis Medical School was challenged as an unconstitutional violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, in addition to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The admissions policy reserved 16 seats for disadvantaged minority students, out of an incoming class of 100. Only African American, Chicano, and Asian-Americans could compete for those seats, if they also demonstrated that they were the victims of racial discrimination. The petitioner, Allan Bakke, argued that his grade point average and MCAT scores were superior to those disadvantaged minority students who were accepted.

Justices Brennan, Blackmun, White, and Marshall did …

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We faculty often lack a pedagogical conscience. Are we hard on ourselves and our pedagogical assumptions and practices? Do we dissect our own pedagogical habits and beliefs? Or do we heap blind self-praise on our teaching with little self-critique?

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Often you hear that liberal education is useful for the business world, perhaps because liberal education does not become obsolete, or because the liberally educated write better. Nay, I say, if Newman is right about liberal education, it is a liberation from foolishness, not primarily a liberation from utility.

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Part of the impetus to institutionalize education is that we are heirs to a long and deep intellectual tradition. We are often rightly proud of this tradition, even when there are aspects of it that we are opposed to, but we must learn it anew in the form of a tradition handed down to us. Unlike other animals, with their instinctual knowledge, we humans must learn from the beginning. This tradition therefore has to be classified and organized to make the learning of it more effective and efficient. Although this is required for learning, it can also lead to a fossilization of our knowledge where we can know a tradition but not truly learn it.

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Does teaching ethics turn students into relativists? Should ethics be taught from within traditions to avoid relativism, or does that foster ideology?

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In a previous post, I reflected on two basic questions that all college faculty must continually address: what do the best teachers know and understand and how do great teachers prepare to teach. Obviously, the implication of these questions is that those who ask them really do desire to be great college teachers. Those who don’t may never ask these questions or care about the answers.

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