.
NOTES
(See the linked online article
for author credits, full text and references)
Allan Tupper is concerned about
the type and quality of education Canadian undergraduate students are getting.
The co-author of No
Place to Learn: Why Universities Aren’t Working — a thought-provoking
book in which he argues that Canadian universities place too much emphasis
on specialized research and too little on teaching undergraduate students
— Tupper says that post-secondary education is in a state of crisis.
"I
don’t think that anyone is really debating the point that undergraduate
programs have been allowed to atrophy in many universities for a considerable
period of time,” he says. “Some will clearly disagree with why that has
been the case and what should be done about it, but I think the basic premise
is not really being challenged by anybody.”
According to Tupper, BA/70, DPA/71, MA/72, universities
are failing Canada’s undergraduate student body because the current system
rewards research findings more than the role of instructing and imparting
knowledge in the classroom.
"The larger point is that university research has become
far too narrow,” he says. “The undergraduate student is best served by
professors who think broadly about their fields, about how things interconnect,
about the larger issues in the field of study, not by professors who are
very consumed by their own ongoing research that is very specialized.”
"Canadian universities are doing an inadequate job of
getting the proper professors in front of the students. The place you want
to put your top talent is in the first and second year classrooms. Not
enough thought goes into who teaches undergraduate classes, and what their
skills are.”
The difficulty in improving undergraduate education, Tupper
says, is a nation-wide university system that promotes professors and disburses
perks, such as travel allowances, based on research findings rather than
teaching performance. But how can Canadian universities grapple with the
multiple priorities of providing a strong undergraduate education, and
attracting the best professors, while allowing professors to focus on research?
"We need to re-establish a better balance between the undergraduate experience
and other university functions,” says Tupper.
Most administrators agree that teaching is not a trivial
exercise. It’s a huge responsibility and it’s a huge undertaking. The challenge
of the 21st century university is to be able to recruit and retain the
best students and the best professors and to maintain a balance between
the emphases on teaching and research.
NOTES FROM AN ONLINE DISCUSSION WITH THE AUTHOR:
ALLAN TUPPER
Kennepohl, Dietmar. (2004) An
Interview with Allan Tupper. Aurora
Online
"The fundamental flaw of a PhD degree is
still that it's about research, it's about a form of advanced learning.
It is not about what a person will do as a practicing academic at a major
university. One of the duties there is to teach, but there's no instruction
in this." ~ Allan Tupper
In No Place to Learn:
Why Universities Aren’t Working we argued that we believed the most
important undertaking of a university was the teaching of undergraduates.
Principally,
the argument was that strong undergraduate teaching is foundational.Everything
else flows from it. No higher education system, no university, can ever
reach its potential if it is in any way lacking in its undergraduate program,
the logic being essentially that a very outstanding program of prior general
learning is required for advanced learning, graduate studies, and more
importantly for any form of serious research.
Teaching vs. Research
There are undoubtedly
areas in a large modern university where teaching and research reinforce
each other. But there are quite few, and they tend to be in the upper levels
of science and health sciences field, when there's a very close relationship
between a teaching professor and an advanced student. However, it's very
difficult to replicate that in other areas.
Given the nature of the university, given that undergraduate
students are at the heart of it (and numerically they're by far the dominant
students) and that they contribute a substantial amount of revenue to the
university as well, there needs to be some argument in place that justifies
universities' tremendous contribution to research. . . . .we believe the
essential requirements of undergraduate students are for general learning,
and the vast amount of professorial research these days is of the frontier
research variety, which is quite specialized.
I think that, in many instances, they are clearly contradictory,
because they consume professorial time. There's only so many hours in a
day. If the functions are quite different, if you're pursuing narrow research,
you're unlikely to be advancing or undertaking your commitment to students.
At the end of the day, it's not merely that they're isolated from each
other, that you can argue in that context that they take far too much professorial
time. In that sense, they focus the professors on other matters.
Another set of things you can look at is simply the amount
of time that research causes professors to be away from universities .
. . That is the principle source of disciplinary credentials and prestige.
So almost by definition, the very logic of research in a modern university
is to divert professorial attention from students, which is a local matter,
towards research, which is a national or cosmopolitan matter, or international
in many ways in today's world.
The most damning rejection of the myth of mutual reinforcement
is the administrative practices of universities (and research granting
agencies) themselves.
First, universities and granting agencies sponsor programs
that provide teaching "relief," so that professors can have more time to
do research. This presupposes that teaching and research are competitive
rather than complementary.
Second, sessional lecturers do much important university
teaching. But sessionals are not required to do research. So either research
is not required for teaching or (unthinkably) universities knowingly staff
many classrooms with unqualified teachers.
And third, it is a common practice for departments to
reduce teaching for new appointees so that they will be able to do enough
research to get tenure. If teaching really improved research, this would
be a terrible disservice.
Reflective Inquiry
Whereas the term
"research" embodies many different activities and forms, it has come to
be seen as something very narrow, and principally about specialized professorial
research which contributes new knowledge, finds out things. But we argued
there are many different forms of research and one of these we call "reflective
inquiry", which used to be the obligation of all professors. That is,
it's a form of thinking about your field in broad terms - what we know
about things, what we think we know but probably don't, what's right and
wrong, what forms of further research are needed, what are the major questions
in fields, what are the major questions in other fields, how the fields
intersect. That's a form of research that involves very structured, very
disciplined and very systematic reading and thinking. It's very foundational.
It's a very prominent form of research that used to be the obligation of
all professors.
But nowadays it has come to be something that very few
people undertake. Our point about this is that kind of research, when you
see it as reflective inquiry -- broad and deep and structured thinking
about the world -- allows very close links between undergraduate teaching.
The undergraduate students want the general learning. They want to see
the big picture. They don't see specialized knowledge about professorial
research in the conventional way.
Research does and must involve much more than simply finding
out new things. There are endless numbers of types of research, but we
say reflective inquiry is clearly one. The manifestations of this are what
confuse people. Oftentimes it leads to major studies, but sometimes it
simply leads to better teaching. But nonetheless, it's a fundamental form
of research which says that a professor is a general thinker, not a specialized
expert.
Universities profess to be eternal beings, yet they change
all the time, and in some ways they're quite faddish. So one never knows
how societies will change and what forces will impact on universities.
There has been, simply looking at things like McLeans Magazine, been a
lot more attention paid to student issues, to the quality of teaching.
Should we be training
and licensing professors to teach?
I don't think
anyone who ever read those words or thought about them would deny them.
If you were told your kids who were going to go to grade one down the street
in the public school would be taught by a sessional lecturer or an amateur,
a person who's actually just a student, in a class of 600, you'd be at
the premier's door so fast you'd be burning up the pavement getting there.
People would be outraged. So why do you tolerate it in a different system?
Even with an expansion of university participation, universities
are still very distant from society. People within them really don't understand
them fully. For that reason, very few people, including democratic governments,
really ever take on universities in a profound way. There are very few
people in the general public who feel that they have the capacity to take
on a university. Over time that argument builds on itself, or that feelings
build on itself, that the university becomes in some ways untouchable to
public opinion.
Many people wouldn't think twice about intervening in
some matter with regard to the schooling that our kids have in an elementary
or secondary school. But when it comes to universities, they just don't
see the capacity. They're very deferential, and they really don't know
how to engage the system in any way that they could reform it. Moreover,
there's now this tremendous emphasis in society on the fact that all the
good paying jobs in society will demand minimally an undergraduate degree,
and probably some graduate one, and that there's not enough spaces to go
around. So you've got an institution that's very highly respected, that
seems very important, that seems very significant to a person's economic
future, that's also very intimidating.
Universities will always tell you that, contrary to critics
like us, students are quite pleased. Look at the surveys. This has been
noted often. Why do students themselves tolerate this sort of theory of
different teaching? Again, they don't know much different. They don't have
a vision or an ideal of an alternative university that they would participate
in. For those reasons, our thesis was they come into university in first
year with great ambitions, but they quickly catch on in the first term
that it's not at all like their vision suggested, and that it's a system,
just like any other educational system, and you play the game in a particular
way.
Professors in effect buy their students' support or acquiescence
by high grades. In order for them to really cut short their teaching and
put less than adequate effort into teaching, they compensate that with
high grades so the students don't rebel. . . . there's certainly
a wide concern about grade inflation in universities.
The fundamental flaw of a PhD degree is still that it's
about research, it's about a form of advanced learning. It is not about
what a person will do as a practicing academic at a major university. One
of the duties there is to teach, but there's no instruction in this. So
in that sense, it's a form of advanced education. PhD programs that are
required for admission into the professoriate, are absolutely at variance
with the demands and duties and core obligations of professors. We make
a lot of recommendations about that. We don't get into the licensing, but
we say we've got to teach professors a lot more about teaching, offer much
more enhanced programs of professional development and intellectual development
in that area.
University regulations specify that teaching and research
should have equal weight in the assessment of professors. But in fact research
has a far greater priority than teaching at every stage of a professor's
career. When promising undergraduates are recruited for graduate school,
they are selected because of their promise as researchers, with absolutely
no regard for their potential as teachers. As graduate students they receive
no instruction on how to teach.
When professors are considered for tenure or promotion,
a central part of the assessment is a judgement solicited from professors
at other universities concerning the research publications of the candidate.
These outside assessors know nothing about the teaching abilities and accomplishments
of the candidate.
The education of doctoral students should include compulsory
courses on teaching and on the role of universities in society. Professors
should be concerned with these matters throughout their careers, and graduate
study is a crucial formative period.
At major career junctures -- tenure and promotion -- professors
should be allowed to present only a limited number of publications. This
reform would be advantageous both to professors, who would be able to concentrate
on quality rather than quantity, and to students, who would encounter professors
who had more time to think.
If you could start
a university from scratch, what would be your ideal university?
Universities would be student-centeered, not professorial-centered.
Universities would be teaching and learning centered, with a very heavy
emphasis on general knowledge. . . .there would be also a recognition of
diverse types of research, and an appreciation of them and a reflection
of those. Particularly the ones like reflective inquiry that genuinely
support teaching and research. . . . it would probably proceed at
a slower pace.
There would be a lot more focus on students and a lot
less on a frenzied kind of research treadmill. The research that would
be undertaken would be aimed at much deeper questions and much longer term
perspectives, as opposed to articles on very discrete things that are essentially
written for other professors.
We would substantially reduce the number of non-permanent
professors. Professors would be the principle instructors. There would
not be the current army of sessional lecturers, part-time lecturers, and
so on. Not to in any way diminish their contributions, but to critique
the system. There's no doubt in our system professors would be in the classroom
more, and work with students more. . . .
It would have the student first, not the professor. It
would have the undergraduate programs as the preeminent obligation. It
would have the professors in the class much more, and it would have a very
wide ranging form of research, not a narrow one in the sense of simply
doing more frontier research.
Universities would probably look physically different.
. . places where people wanted to be, as opposed to places where
people commute to and leave quickly. A lot of common space and teaching
space and space for people to interact, public space as we call it, has
been given up to other purposes. We also say the physical structure of
universities should begin to again reflect the essence and central role
and contributions of students and learning. . . . the sign of any good
university course is that the students are actively engaged amongst themselves
outside of class. To do that properly, you've got to have space and facilities.
We started the book off by looking at the norm of teaching
in big universities and we have given alternatives and the principles.
I think those are as clear a set of principles as has been written anywhere.
If you really want to think about five or six ways to guide your university
life as a professor, here's a good start.
Allan
Tupper, formerly a political science professor at the University of
Alberta, is now Associate Vice President (Government Relations) and Professor
of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. A native of
Ottawa, Dr. Tupper is a graduate of Carleton University (BA, DPA, MA) and
Queen's University where he received his PhD in Political Studies in 1977.
Related Links
Allan
Tupper at UBC
Dalhousie University's Campus
Reads, The Idea of the University, No Place to Learn, Why Universities
Aren't Working. Review by Terry Anderson, Athabasca University
UBC Press
Kennepohl, Dietmar. (2004) An Interview with Allan Tupper.
Aurora
Online
Why
universities aren't working By Dr. Tom Pocklington
