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WE IN Canada have, over the years, looked south both with envy of our colleagues below the border and with relief that we were not faced with their problems. We are still looking south with envy, but we can no longer think of the forty-ninth parallel as a barrier to the problems of higher education. If I may, I would like to underscore this change with my personal experience.
Last year in New York, a reporter asked me if I sympathized with the PC stand on nominations. Having just left Toronto one hour before, I had not adjusted my political barometer, and I responded that the PC nominations were a thing of the past, that what we needed was to scrutinize the NDP nominations. She looked at me as if I had just landed from another planet. I was quickly brought up to date on “political correctness”; then, after thanking her, I reciprocated with a short introduction to the distinctions between Progressive Conservatives and the New Democratic Party. Less than a year later, there are few academics in Canada who are not involved in the PC controversy.
Today a national debate is raging in both countries about topics that even a few years ago were of no interest off campus. It is alleged that higher education is in imminent danger of self-destruction because we who tend its institutions have abandoned the basic curriculum, because we have created self-serving tyrannical machines that neglect teaching in favor of esoteric research, because we have allowed a group of fanatics to impose political correctness on the academy and thus stifle free speech and academic freedom. The war has started and thus far we have been taking all the blows; but it is our turn now and, however limited our political influence in Washington and Ottawa, there is one asset we have: we can write, we can speak, and we know how to do historical research. What we lack in political power we can more than make up with knowledge if we have the will to speak up and, at the same time, to put our house in order.
The attack is coming not from our governments of elected representatives but from people who like nothing better than to heap scorn on the academy. And as a group we have not been forceful and effective in defending ourselves against such attacks. When criticized in the press, for example, we have accepted our lot as a class of high-minded, outraged professors writing letters to the editor that are promptly cut down to the blandest of mutterings from the fringe. We must respond as professionals who have years of experience to contribute to improving the welfare of the communities in which we live and whose youth we teach. It is not a popular thing to say, but it is my view that we have only ourselves to blame for our present low status in public esteem. Be it out of arrogance, indifference, or mistaken self-interest, we have allowed our problems to fester for years without attending to them. If the present drubbing serves to awaken us collectively to our responsibilities, it will have been a positive episode.
I want to take up the universities' purported emphasis on research and their concomitant downgrading of teaching. I dealt with this topic in my recent column in the MLA Newsletter (Summer 1991). I return to it now not only as a professional issue but as a political challenge that we must face. Writers in well-established publications in the United States and Canada have called attention to charges that universities have abandoned teaching and are madly chasing research dollars to the detriment of both students and the unhappy denizens of this world—the faculty.
The history of the higher-education reward system in the last thirty years has not been exemplary, to say the least. With the reform movement of the 1960s came the demand for better teaching in the university classroom. Like most reform-minded demands, it sounded good until one was faced with the practical issues of just how teaching was to be improved in institutions presumably expert in teaching and how it was to be assessed.
To deal with these issues, almost every institution of higher education in the United States and Canada has resorted to a plethora of classroom visits, critiques, questionnaires, and evaluation forms. In all this activity the aim was crystal clear, but the means devised to fulfill it have allowed a Trojan horse into the house of learning. Stated bluntly, the assumption that teaching and research can be separated is patently false, not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. We know that there are excellent as well as ineffective teachers among our most prolific publishing scholars and that teachers who consistently rank lowest in student evaluations are as likely to be nonpublishing as publishing members of departments. In short, good teaching cannot be enhanced by reducing the relative value of scholarly publications. We all realize that we have to recognize good teaching and improve indifferent teaching, but without leadership and consensus among chairs, there is little one department administrator can do in isolation. We can identify effective and ineffective teachers, but what evidence can we present to support our judgment in a quasi-judicial academic context? And even if we establish evidence, what do we do with it?
Borrowing a page from a recent address to the ACLS by Derek Bok, outgoing president of Harvard University, I want to speak in favor of establishing an unimpeachable record of teaching, equivalent to the record of publications that a good curriculum vitae will readily give us. 1 I suggest that a combination of videotaping and improved student evaluations can provide such a record. I would urge institutions to require every new member of the department to keep a record of all student evaluations of her or his teaching and a videotape recording of at least one class each session, chosen at random. The teaching record should be taken as seriously as possible and should be thoroughly evaluated by an appropriate departmental or, wherever size warrants, faculty committee, and used not only in weighing promotion and salary increases but also in offering assistance to colleagues who can benefit from experienced and sympathetic assessments. Given the present availability of video equipment and expertise on our campuses, compiling a teaching record should not be a major problem. The all-important question is, What do we do with it once we have it? The only prudent and responsible answer is that we use it for the benefit of the individual teacher and, indirectly, for the benefit of all her or his future students.
Instead of allowing assessment to become a threat, we should be able to turn it into an asset. We can offer to help junior faculty members produce better and improved teaching presentations that will facilitate their future job-seeking efforts. In other words, in the interest of enhancing their performance in the classroom, we can help them look good. This means of evaluation will not produce more brilliant teachers—great teachers come about as rarely as genius does in any human endeavor—but it will help us attain competent teaching across the board and eliminate the odd case where a colleague is not cut out for university teaching.
Having been a department chair for seven years, two in Chicago and five in Toronto, I do not minimize the problems and difficulties implicit in my proposals—but consider the alternative. If we do not attend to the two-headed monster we have created, others will do it for us, and these (others are the various governments to whom we are fiscally accountable. The issue has been raised by the current debate on the direction of higher education.
A systematic attempt to build up a fair-minded and accurate record of teaching by using student evaluations and videotapes, as well as peer evaluations, will merely put teaching and research publications on the same assessment level. In most colleges and universities in which I have served, committees entrusted with the task of promotion evaluation will not accept a curriculum vitae that does not distinguish journalistic features and reviews from scholarly publishing. The reputation of the press that publishes a colleague's book is no longer sufficient for most promotion panels; they want to have a sample of the reviews published in scholarly journals. We have come a long way in distinguishing the publication of scholarly research from the publication of creative writing and from publication as an outreach to the community at large. These are certainly all worthy and valuable contributions for faculty members to make to society, but they are different and should not be confused.
As for teaching, most of us are reluctant to pry into a colleague's classroom, and we are somewhat embarrassed by excessive praise or criticism from students. We cannot have it both ways, however: either teaching is a priority or it is not, and if it ranks at the highest levels of a person's contractual obligations, then there must be an equitable way of evaluating performance. The video recorder can be used in the classroom with discretion and skill but, most important, with the full and enthusiastic support of faculty members, who will see it as a means of making their case for an impartial evaluation of teaching.
I cannot find much evidence in the cliché that good teaching, and certainly great teaching, can only be measured by the effects it has on students years after they have taken the course. Without denying that the effects of good teaching are for the long haul, I believe that there are clear and unequivocal results in the present.
I would like to propose a five-point plan with regard to teaching in the reward system:
We must take these five requirements as seriously as we do our other professional responsibilities: to meet classes, have office hours, and attend faculty meetings. None of the points I present is entirely new, but as a program of assessment they offer us a beginning for renewal and for responsible administration.
The point I want to make again, with the utmost urgency, is that if we do not put our house in order—and let me reiterate, I do not say or imply that teaching is not a major concern but rather that the reward system of the academy is unbalanced—someone else will attempt to do it for us. We must attend to the fair and equitable assessment of teaching as part of the reward system of higher education.
I submit that there are not two camps of researchers and teachers in higher education; dozens of groupings make up the profession. Some of us teach, do research, and publish our research; others teach, do research, and publish infrequently; still others fill administrative posts as well as teach and do research. There are always colleagues on research leave or holders of special grants who do only research; there are also, to be sure, some colleagues who teach heavy loads and who must make time just to keep up in their specialization. There are very few among us who do not teach and who do not do any research, whether or not we publish it. What brings us together is that we are part of institutions of higher education, and the principles, aims, and directions of those institutions bind us in far more profound ways than the specific differences reflected in our curricula vitae can separate us.
I have never met anyone on a university faculty who did not recognize the importance of good teaching. The problem is not in recognizing this goal but, rather, in finding the means to assess good teaching. Every member of a promotion and tenure committee is skilled in reading the publication list of a curriculum vitae. Some service responsibilities are also readily recognized for their relative importance. The problem has always been how to evaluate teaching in a responsible and equitable manner. I think we are now in a position to solve this problem. But we must have the will to do it and to do it now. If there is a negative attitude in our universities and colleges, it is indifference to the problem by individual faculty members who have been treated well by the system. To such colleagues I can only repeat my earlier exhortation: if we do not put our own house in order and take advantage of new means to do so, we risk inviting others to act for us. One of the outstanding features of United States jurisprudence has been the suspension of judgment until an open and fair hearing has been conducted and due process of the law has been observed. Far from being a legal flourish that makes appeals possible, this feature, I contend, speaks to one of the deepest beliefs of civil rights: everyone has a fundamental right to her or his day in court. We must insist on the application of this principle in our case.
Make no mistake about it, we will continue to perform our responsibilities and will not be intimidated by “campus storm,” but I also want to make it clear that we must stop looking the other way and pretending that the inequities and problems in our reward system will go away if we just hold tight and ride the storm out. We are vulnerable because, collectively, we have not always had the courage or will to scrutinize the day-to-day reality of the classroom.
What should our agenda be for the nineties? We will certainly continue to teach, do research, and run our institutions to the best of our ability, but beyond these essential areas we must attend to the problems of responsible curriculum development, keep a balance between individual rights of expression and the harassment of others, and, of course, reform the reward system. The MLA will continue to serve its members in all these areas by providing means for a reasoned dialogue that must be greatly expanded. We also recognize that we have a political responsibility to speak out in support of our profession and provide leadership in attending to our renewal. I am often reminded that some of us are not part of the jurisdiction of the United States, and so it is and should be, but I am also enough of a pragmatic Canadian academic to know that one of the broadest intellectual and cultural exchanges between two sovereign nations exists between Canada and the United States. Not soon after the campuses in the United States caught the flu of “political correctness” versus racism, this epidemic spread north of the border. The problems we face in both countries are similar, for faculty members and students move with extraordinary facility between our institutions.
Some colleagues have questioned the wisdom of allowing ourselves to dwell on the extent to which our great institutions of higher education, like every other human construct, are flawed with inconsistencies, injustices, and inequities. If we stress these problems, they ask, do we not run the risk of denigrating the very achievement we so ardently advocate? Not if our learning includes a regard for truth. Does this truth mean that we must abandon the greatest legacy of free minds that our culture has achieved, the modern university? Of course not. Like most teachers in my field, I take seriously the importance of passing on the heritage of the languages and literatures I teach. We will be at far greater risk, it seems to me, if as professors of language and literature we become so frightened by intemperate attacks from outside our ranks that we refuse to ask difficult questions about our governance and the reward system that controls our professional lives. This is the risk of turning our universities into government-run vocational training centers. If that should ever come to pass, we would have truly betrayed our heritage.
The author is Director of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Saint George Campus, and a past President of the Modern Language Association. This article is based on a paper presented at ADFL Seminar West, 13–15 June 1991, in Vancouver, British Columbia.
1 Derek Bok centered his address to the ACLS on ways to improve teaching in higher education, and teaching assessment was only one of several important issues he treated. I am once again grateful to him for his careful attention to differences across the spectrum of higher education in North America and, in particular, for his innovative suggestions on the use of videotaping to assess teaching. This is a solution I have advocated since 1988, but he has done something about it.
© 1992 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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