A Very Rare and Valuable Thing

By Stella Baer | Monday, February 26, 2001

'Dartmouth College combines the best features of the undergraduate liberal arts college with those of the research university,' reads the College's mission statement. 'Dartmouth has a special character and is committed to fostering the unique bonds that exist between the institution and those who learn, teach, and work here. This character is rooted in...a devotion to a vital learning environment rooted in the liberal arts tradition. This environment depends upon a faculty dedicated to outstanding teaching, scholarship, and research.'

But can an institution of higher education be devoted to both the liberal arts education of undergraduate students and also to faculty research? Most Dartmouth students believe they are better off than students at other Ivy League schools in terms of class size, the number of classes taught by professors (as opposed to graduate students), and the emphasis on teaching—but is Dartmouth headed in the same direction as all the others?

At least one professor thinks so. 'Dartmouth is on its way to a process to destroy a very rare and valuable thing,' a Dartmouth professor, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Dartmouth Review. Unfortunately, the reality seems to be that Dartmouth simply cannot be both an undergraduate liberal arts college of the finest quality and a national research institution. 'There is a myth that is pounded (not completely untrue—most myths are not completely untrue) that teaching and research are mutually reinforcing. This is the line that universities in particular pound to 'square the circle.' But I'm not aware that it is true,' says the professor. 'I don't believe it's true, and I believe it is quite evident based on faculty surveys that most academics don't believe it, either. Most academics believe that teaching detracts from their research and their research detracts from their teaching—in other words, that there is a tension between the two.'

Perhaps the most significant impetus for a devotion to research above teaching is institutional prestige. 'If one focuses on a single institution and discovers that insufficient emphasis is being paid to teaching, it's very hard to blame the faculty there—or even the administrators,' observed Lynne Cheney, now Second Lady of the United States, when she was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. 'They are all caught up in a reward system that encourages research—that makes research central to status for both colleges and universities. There are, to be sure, teachers who devote themselves to their students, there are institutions that emphasize teaching, but in a system that has made research central to status, these tend not to be the teachers or the institutions with the most prestige.'

Furthermore, as the professor interviewed said, 'It is generally thought that anyone can teach, while not everyone can do research. So the way for [a college or university] to distinguish itself is through research.'

He notes money as another reason why increased emphasis has been placed on professorial research; no one offers grants for teaching. But the entire culture of the profession has also changed, mostly in the last fifty years: 'at liberal arts colleges it was never a matter of publish or perish, but at research universities it always was...and this idea has now infected liberal arts colleges.' Dartmouth's professors are, after all, the products of graduate institutions that place the primary emphasis on research; there is a trickle down effect of sorts, from the graduates of research universities to the liberal arts colleges at which they now teach.

According to the professor, the 'professionalization' of the teaching profession has also led to the growing stress on research. Johns Hopkins University was the first real research university in America and soon became the model for Ivy League schools like Harvard and Yale—transforming higher education so that 'a lot of academic life is now governed by professional requirements rather than academic requirements.'

The result of higher education's expansion after the Second World War is that 'a lot of articles and books are written now to satisfy professional demands and not academic ones,' says the professor. 'If you were to publish an article that no one ever read that would not necessarily be a reason not to do it,' since tenure decisions hinge centrally on the applicant's number of publications.

Which brings us to the actual 'research' on which professors are spending so much of their time. The professor interviewed acknowledged that, 'if an institution, hypothetically, were in the process of reinventing itself from a basically teaching-oriented liberal arts college to a research oriented university or hybrid, then there may be a justification for that, because, of course, research is necessary; universities are supposed to advance knowledge, and to contribute to knowledge. But the question then becomes, 'Is it knowledge worth having?' And I really doubt that it is. When faculty spend less time teaching and less time with their students to write articles that no one reads, then it is not a good reallocation of their efforts.'

In fact, of the millions of obscure academic humanities journals and publications put out by scholars regularly, 98 percent of the articles remain uncited after publication. Professors are publishing more and more articles (and have less and less time to read the articles others are publishing), and the saturation of research has made new academic work so increasingly specialized in the minutia of a particular field that the articles offer nothing worthwhile not only students, but even to other professors in the same discipline.

Academic conferences are incredibly dull because scholars' research has become so specialized that no one has anything to say, observed the professor who spoke with The Review. Even professors in the same departments can't discuss their research because their scope is so narrow. Essentially, professors are coming to know 'everything about nothing.' The result: 'the big picture is entirely lost.'

The hyperspecialization of research interests undermines true liberal arts education, which aims to give students a comprehensive, general introduction to 'the best which has been thought and said,' as Matthew Arnold put it. Last year, the National Association of Scholars examined English literature curricula at twenty-five top liberal arts institutions in the 1997-98 school year, and compared them to the 1964-65 and 1989-1990 curricula at the same schools. NAS identified a clear trend toward highly specialized courses at the expense of general education.

While the total number of English courses almost doubled, the proportion of foundational courses—dealing with major authors, periods, and genres—fell from an average of 58 percent of departmental offerings in 1964 to 44 percent in 1989 to 35 percent in 1997. In 1964, thirteen English literature programs required basic survey courses. In 1989, eight did. In 1997, it was four. The number of departments requiring English majors to complete a comprehensive exam plunged from twenty to two.

The overall trend, concluded NAS, was a marked shift in colleges' educational missions—from providing an overview to fostering specialization. (Studying film became a central component of many 'literature' programs by 1997, they found.) And so liberal arts curricula have changed—fundamentally—to accommodate professors' specialized research.

The culture of the university, too, has fractured. The professor interviewed also lamented that, while knowledge was once thought to be unified, the reinforcement of distinct departments with disciplinary boundaries came to dominate academe with the Johns Hopkins-izing of American liberal arts colleges.

Thus, universities have largely discarded foundational core curricula.

All of this isn't to say there aren't any good teachers. 'What is frightening is how many good teachers there are, given how little value [is placed on teaching],' says the Dartmouth professor. Ultimately, the College may be forced to discover some balance between existence as an undergraduate liberal arts college and, in the words of James Wright, 'a research university.' But it's likely to be at the expense of undergraduate students.

'I would have to revisit Dartmouth College fifteen years down the road and find that is just another research oriented university,' the professor said in conclusion. 'It would not be an advance for research, and it would be a detriment for the college... I would think that the students, if they were less instrumentally oriented towards education, would be more upset.'

A Very Rare and Valuable Thing

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