Two assumptions underlie the Association of American Colleges' pilot program on teaching which seeks to establish partnerships between liberal arts colleges and research universities, as well as this series of talks by faculty about teaching. Most important is the belief that graduate students will benefit if they are better prepared for the transition from student to teacher, from researcher to working professional with a variety of responsibilities and scarcely sufficient time to fulfill them, especially in the initial years. The second is that there are different academic cultures in research universities training graduate students and in liberal arts colleges whose central mission is teaching undergraduates. Not only will many graduate students by preference or expediency take up positions at liberal arts colleges, but the differences might be exploited to improve the teaching capabilities of graduate students.
The distinctions between liberal arts colleges and research universities reflect the diverse, at times divergent, goals and responsibilities assumed by American higher education. This especially characterizes the period after the Second World War when scientific research became indispensable to the nation's military and economic strength. Yet ambivalence over the focus of American higher education has deeper historical roots, having manifested itself by at least the latter part of the nineteenth century.
It could be seen in the diffidence regarding the role of higher education as a source of intellectual and, as importantly, moral values. The latter had been so significant in the nineteenth century that the college president was commonly given responsibility for instructing seniors in the required course of moral philosophy, using such texts as Cicero's De Officiis.(1) By mid-19th century the classical curriculum and the prominence of moral education were being undercut by the need for increased technical and practical training. The millionaire Andrew Carnegie is said to have remarked of the even wealthier Vanderbilt that he wouldn't exchange that man's millions for his own knowledge of Shakespeare, yet he harbored doubts about the worth and purpose of education. He recognized that wealth alone couldn't create the tastes and values acquired through education, but at the same time proclaimed the uselessness of liberal arts for business. Of studying classics, he said that men "wasted their precious years trying to extract education from an ignorant past whose chief province was to teach us, not what to adopt, but what to avoid." These men would "waste their energies upon obtaining a knowledge of such languages as Latin or Greek, which are of no more practical use to them than Choctaw." To Andrew Carnegie, traditional education in the classics gave men false ideas, a distaste for practical life, and left them less educated than if they had gone to work instead of to college.(2)
Such views were not peculiar to Carnegie. Gradually the classical curriculum, seedbed of the liberal arts since the Renaissance, was replaced or supplemented with more practically oriented courses. This shift was linked in turn to a phenomenon that arose out of the Humboldt educational reforms in Germany: the research seminar. The acknowledged goal of the university research seminar was not only to turn professor and student into fellow explorers on the frontiers of knowledge, but to create new knowledge. The first graduate school in America, Johns Hopkins, adopted the German university as its model. That story is well rehearsed, and I will not pursue it here other than to note that the Hopkins paradigm for American graduate education defined research, and from research the development of new knowledge, as central institutional priorities. The effective, if not intentional, result of this shift to research and discovery of knowledge was to displace character formation and moral training from the focal point of higher education, a result already apparent in Germany by the mid-19th century.(3) Classics eventually became simply another academic subject, professionalized under the influence of Friedrich Wolf as Altertumswissenschaft, the autonomous and comprehensive science of antiquity.(4)
The doctorate remains to this day a professional degree, built around the research ethos of seminar work and the requirement that the dissertation break new ground -- proof that the holder of the doctorate not only is capable of developing new knowledge but has in fact done so. Thus the newly minted Ph.D. emerges from graduate school carefully trained in research techniques, looking for a job where he or she can put these skills to work. In the humanistic disciplines this will most often be an academic position that, whatever the holder's personal priorities or ambitions, the world at large refers to as "teaching". And indeed in the first year or two of new course preparations, whether at a university or four year college, "teaching" is likely to consume a preponderant amount of the new Ph.D.'s time, perhaps exposing in the process incongruities or disproportions between preparation and practice.
What should you as graduate students look forward to in moving from graduate school to a full-time teaching position? An increasing number of Ph.D.'s have had teaching experience in some capacity or other by the time they enter the job market, as a section leader or running their own courses. From my perspective of the hiring process, as department chair at a liberal arts college, I can say that this experience is viewed as important if not essential. Even with this experience, the transition to assistant professor will have its challenges and surprises. There is, first of all, the demanding work load of the first year. New courses must be prepared, frequently covering material with which you are quite familiar but just as frequently moving into areas in which you are only generally competent. Even for an experienced teacher, preparing lectures for a new course is time intensive; it is all the more true for a first year instructor having possibly two or three such preparations each semester.
Faculty fresh out of graduate school have a tendency to overteach. A temptation to which many new instructors succumb -- wrongly -- is to assume that the freshman or sophomore sitting in their classroom will be as intrigued with the details of their research as were their advisors and graduate student peers. In like manner, I have seen many first year teachers, as well as plenty into their second and third years, mistakenly overload students with information and detail in fear of leaving out something significant. Lectures tend to become inclusive laundry lists, fabricated on the erroneous assumption that the more the instructor says the more the students learn. The converse of this is the anxiety that with all those bright students in front of you, some one of them may know more than you do or ask a question you can't answer. Many seasoned teachers remember the time spent preparing for the probing questions they might be asked, questions that in many cases were beyond the furthest reaches of the students' imaginations. Developing the confidence to say "I don't know but I'll find out" is an important step towards maturity as a teacher.
It is important not to lose the forest for the trees as you develop lectures. Specific information obviously must be conveyed in a given lecture, but it helps to remind students from time to time of the larger themes of the lecture as well as of the course itself. This shows them the significance of the material in the day's discussion and the rationale behind your efforts. Undergraduates in my experience prefer their learning organized with markers of where they are going and why they are being taken there. And even when you think you provided them with markers, you are apt to find that they have wandered to all points of the compass. There is a useful device to monitor how students experience the course as it progresses from day to day. It is the "2-minute quiz" which grew out of Richard Light's Harvard Teaching Assessment seminars. Give over two minutes at the end of each session for all students to respond briefly and anonymously to two questions: 1. What was the most important theme or point of the day's class? and 2. What is the most significant unanswered question from the day's class? I can virtually promise you that there will be times, perhaps numerous, when the theme you felt was so clearly articulated in your lecture will go unnoticed, underreported, or distorted by a large portion of the class. Discouraging, maybe disillusioning, but it will be helpful to your teaching to be aware of any disparities between the message you intend to transmit and the message received.
The preparation and educational background of your students will likely change over the span of a teaching career. Once we heard of the challenges in reaching a generation brought up on TV, which has now acuminated as the generation of MTV, and so on into the future. Classics is a discipline built around books, and you will have to devise strategies -- or will it be technologies? -- that can transmit and keep alive the excitement, vigor, and importance of the ancient world, its texts and Realien, for a generation of students not noted for attachment to books. On this at least, Allan Bloom was right, and the result is a decreasing level of skill in writing and in the capacity for critical reading. To some degree the elite institutions may be insulated from the degradation of reading and writing skills, but not necessarily. An instructor in Harvard's freshmen writing program recently lamented how hard it was to teach students to write when they didn't read (other than Stephen King novels). He suggested that if you wish to avoid the company of undergraduates the best place to go would be to the bookstores nearby!
Related to this is the often inadequate linguistic and grammatical preparation of college students, in part the legacy of pedagogical trends in the schools. It is perhaps my personal bias, but language skills did not emerge a winner when English was transmogrified into Language Arts in the primary schools. This situation will likely be exacerbated by the facts of demography. The greatest increase in college age population will not come in the groups that have traditionally pursued higher education in America, but in groups and locales that this nation has poorly served educationally and otherwise. What this means in the classroom is that language teaching will require attention to the means by which students can conceptualize and talk about language. College level Latin or Greek in many cases is the first exposure students have to a descriptive grammar, a fact which is often their motivation for taking the language. They come to learn the grammar they never learned in school.
I have sketched some of the practical vicissitudes you may face teaching undergraduates. There are larger debates into which you will be drawn, and these will center on the very aims of undergraduate education and of the liberal arts. The professional writ of the graduate schools is relatively straightforward. You will not find a similar consensus on undergraduate education. For one thing its aims are more comprehensive, and to that degree its purpose more diffuse. Instrumental goals are regularly used as a warrant for undergraduate education. Cognitive skills, analytical skills, organizational skills, critical thinking ability are all promulgated as rewards of liberal arts education. These highly significant abilities are of course fostered by such an education, but are they sufficient justification for it? I would be surprised if you as classicists were devoting your professional lives just to fostering critical skills, and would despair of the discipline if you were. There are deeper values in you than that.
The ancient legacy of moral education and character formation keeps bringing back the unanswered question of education's larger purpose, of its content. While a specific moral program for liberal arts would certainly be disavowed at most colleges and universities (even colleges with strong religious traditions find a consensus on values under assault in an age of pluralism), there is the recurring sense that liberal education ought to have more than simply instrumental justification. Exposure to the breadth of human inquiry is a rationale, displayed in distribution or general education requirements of countless colleges. An appealing answer is that free and unhindered inquiry is the only necessary justification, but the appeal as well as usefulness of this Enlightenment value is vitiated by the sheer amount of knowledge now available. "What should an educated person know?" is a question at least in part about content, to which the slogan of free inquiry is not the answer. I don't have the answer, and I doubt that you do. Nonetheless you will need to be sensitive to its urgency and prepared to argue on behalf of Classics' role in understanding the modern world.
As Classicists you have a lot to offer in the debates over curriculum, over multi-culturalism, and other issues important to the process of education. You should avail yourselves of the opportunities to contribute to these debates. The shape of the discipline and the future role of Classics in undergraduate education will be determined by their outcome. You won't have all the answers, but questions can be worth more than answers, which is just as well for something as difficult as determining the components of the liberal arts curriculum. Your questions will reflect your experience of the worth and significance of Classics as a mode of inquiry and as a repository of cultural and intellectual values. It is important that these values be articulated, knowledgeably and with conviction, when such matters are discussed. The ultimate point of your knowledge should not be antiquarianism but the ability for you (and your students) better to understand and to live in your own world. As Socrates recognized, on this venue too questions are worth more than answers.
Let me in closing turn to more mundane matters. You will be entering the teaching profession at a time when academe is making major adjustments. There is a demographic bubble in the faculty ranks. Universities and colleges expanded greatly in the 60's and many faculty hired then are nearing retirement age. Much publicized predictions have warned of the shortage of faculty starting in the mid-90's as a result of these retirements. This suggests that there will be a seller's market among faculty, which if true should put upward pressure on salaries. At the same time education is experiencing even greater publicity from "sticker shock" in the form of resistance to the rapid growth rate of college tuitions. This means that colleges and universities are going to be caught in a squeeze between increased salary bidding and price resistance on the part of students and parents. Higher education is entering a difficult financial environment and will have to make some unpleasant choices about where it is going to put its money. The effects are as yet unknown, but you may feel the impact in such areas as decreased services and technical support.
Before you have this pleasure, you first have to get yourself into a job. What does your potential employer look for? As a rule of thumb, I think it is safe to say that a liberal arts college will value breadth over narrowness. A research university may hire someone to teach just archaeology, or history, or even as circumscribed a specialty as, say, archaic Greek poetry. Few if any liberal arts colleges have staffs large enough to accommodate this degree of specialization. Certainly there will be preferences of field, but versatility is critical. The model, as someone said, should be the "utility infielder", able to take up a variety of assignments. This may affect how you ought to present yourself in job applications. You will not necessarily need two different dossiers, but the covering letter you send can be crafted to play to your strengths vis à vis the institution to which you are applying. Your transcript is normally a part of the dossier, and you can always highlight aspects of that to stress the breadth of your competences or your deep study in a specific area. But be honest. Don't try to peddle yourself as an historian when anyone reading your transcript sees that you had only a course or two in history in amongst the heavy concentration of literature courses.
While liberal arts colleges do stress undergraduate teaching, the trend in recent years is for selective liberal arts colleges to emulate the research universities in their expectations of faculty. Selective liberal arts colleges are increasingly impacted by competition -- competition for future faculty whom the graduate schools have trained as researchers, competition for a shrinking or less accessible student pool, and competition for funds. The coin of the realm thought to attract all three, just as it was for the expanding universities in the 60's, is "academic reputation," which is judged to be advanced by the prestige of research more than by what occurs in the trenches of the classrooms. This has led to decreased teaching loads at Wellesley, Connecticut College, and other schools (from 6 courses a year to 5, sometimes to 4) as well as a semester's research leave prior to the tenure decision, to accommodate the shift in demands.
After you find your job, the next concern will be tenure whose standards will be affected by the situation just outlined. You are undoubtedly aware that the AAUP tenure guidelines specify that after 7 years of full time teaching a decision must have been made by the institution whether to grant tenure or terminate the contract. Since you must be given a year's advance notice, a decision is made in your sixth year. You should find out early, preferably during the hiring process, what the formal and informal expectations are. You will not be hired with a seven year contract, but normally with a two or three year contract, subject to renewal. As liberal arts colleges have become more competitive, they have set up mid-point reviews on whether to extend the initial two or three year contract for a further period. This review will not be as rigorous as that for tenure but it can lead to decisions not to renew. The upshot of the system is that, in the case of my institution, after three years your record is examined with a decision about renewal and progress towards tenure at stake. Since the process will take place in the winter of the third year, you have just two and one half years to impress your department and the college or university with your abilities. The three areas normally weighed will be your teaching, your scholarship, and your service to the department and institution. Allowance is of course made for being a new faculty member, and the relatively short time since hiring, but you do need to realize that while you have left behind doctoral examinations and thesis committees, the path to the promised land of tenure has imposed its own hurdles.
Are graduate schools such as Brown meeting the needs of liberal arts colleges? I believe strongly that they are. We are getting faculty well trained in the methods of the discipline, knowledgeable and enthusiastic about their fields, who usually come with some teaching experience. Are the needs of graduate students being met? I would venture that the answer is again yes, though perhaps not so unequivocally. More thorough preparation for teaching would smooth the transition from graduate school to an academic position. This could include attention to leading discussions, learning how to develop paper topics and examinations, being sensitized to differences in learning styles, and becoming aware of differences in interactions with male and female students, most of which won't be found in a textbook. In the final test, you can't learn to swim without jumping in.
1. Robert E. Proctor, Education's Great Amnesia: Reconsidering the Humanities from Petrarch to Freud, Bloomington, 1988, p. 199.
2. References to Andrew Carnegie from Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, New York, 1963, p. 259 f. Compare the letter of chastisement over choosing a Classics major sent to my Brown classmate Ted Turner by his father (originally printed in the Brown Daily Herald and reprinted, i.a., in the "Autolycus" section of Arion, 3rd ser., v.I, Winter 1990, p. 237 ff.): Classics would provide only "useless information" and set him "apart from the doers of the world".
3. Anthony Grafton, "Polyhistor into Philolog: Notes on the Transformation of German Classical Scholarship, 1780-1850", History of Universities, v. 3, 1983, pp. 159-192; Grafton notes (p. 174) that research had originally been justified on the grounds that it would lead to character formation (Bildung), but (p. 171) students complained that their teachers had neither knowledge of nor interest in the value of the classics, subjecting them instead only to Philologenpedantrie.
4. This shift inspired Nietzsche, in an 1868 letter to E. Rohde, to accuse "the philologists of our time" of "...joy at capturing worms and...indifference to the true problems, the urgent problems of life."