Our Underachieving Colleges

At the end of the semester I ask students in my smaller classes to talk for 2 minutes about what they think they have learned. This semester, for the first time, I asked them to write out their reflections before we met, and then just talk for a minute or two in class. This produced a great deal more reflection than usual (and a lot of online interaction, which seems, among other things, to have committed me to hosting a couple of reunions next year). The class was on Values and Education, with the central text being Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries .

Ryan Michaelson asked me for a spring break reading recommendation about higher education and, as always when faced with that request, I recommended Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges . Here’s an excerpt from his reflection (used with his permission):

For the past 20 years, I thought that simply showing up to class and doing the assigned work would develop me as individual. It could definitely be said that I was being naive or ignorant but to be fair I feel that this how most children are raised. You go to school, get good grades, go to college, get a diploma, and then get a good job. That is the traditional story of development as a person. After reading Derek Bok’s book though, the inklings of doubt that many college students, myself included, have about college and education were finally put into words. Not to sound dramatic but reading Our Underachieving Colleges, for me, laid the final foundational pieces of a new outlook that had been slowly developed throughout the semester.

Not to sound dramatic, but a decade ago Our Underachieving Colleges had similarly powerful impact on me; it has been a major inspiration for me in my practice as a teacher ever since. I long ago promised CB that I’d write a review. It’s a bit late for that, but my student’s comment, especially coming at the end of that particular class, prompted me to give it (yet) another look and think about what I had learned from it. Here’s the somewhat stream-of-consciousness upshot.



Our Underachieving Colleges is about exactly what the title suggests. The claim is simply that, under existing budgetary conditions, we could be producing more learning than we do if we had a better understanding of how to teach well; and a better understanding is not enormously costly to get. The tone is, as befits someone who was President of Harvard for such a long time, moderate, and not at all accusatory: he understands that getting faculty to change their behavior is not likely to be accomplished by someone in his position through haranguing.

He articulates the purposes of an undergraduate higher education through the chapters of the books. This was the first eye-opening feature of the book. I went to college in the UK, and, having already specialized early in high school, studies nothing except Philosophy, conceived fairly narrowly as Anglo-American analytic philosophy largely without any of the normative bits (we had a compulsory ethics paper, but even that one could get away with doing mainly meta-ethics: ie, applied philosophy of language). I sometimes quip that I had received a vocational training in a discipline that just happens to be one of the liberal arts. Whatever they are. I’d been in the US more than 20 years, and was well aware that students take a wide range of breadth requirements, but nobody had ever properly articulated to me why: people would talk about ‘liberal education’ (a term that still seems to mean different things to different people), or ‘educating the whole person’ (which, manifestly, requiring them to listen to a professor talk 75 minutes at a time, 30 times a semester, with 300 other students with whom they never speak, doesn’t do). Long into my career I harbored the assumption higher education was about learning for a handful who really liked it (people like the professors) and a kind of sorting of the others into professions. Bok articulates with a little more precision than I had previously heard the goals of a liberal education: Learning to Communicate; Learning to Think; Building Character; Living with Diversity; Preparing for a Global Society; Acquiring Broader Interests; Preparing for a Career.

These seem reasonable to me. They balance the interests of the students themselves with those of the broader society, and give appropriately little weight to the interests of professors. Bok’s theory of what an undergraduate higher education is for is normative, and he largely takes it for granted, rather than arguing for it. The second illuminating observation is that if we agree with him (and I roughly do) that those are the right purposes, we then have a standard for assessing how well we are doing. I think I judge our practice more harshly than Bok does, and I confess that is partly the zeal of the convert, and partly compensation for believing, with considerable warrant, that I spent half my career underachieving in lots of the ways that Bok identifies. But he observes that we now have quite a bit of evidence about what makes for effective, and what makes for ineffective, instruction. And not only do most faculty not know much of that evidence, but many have little interest in knowing it. We don’t have an infrastructure around improving our practice as instructors (whereas we have a massive infrastructure around improving our practice as researchers). And a lot of what we do seems at odds with the goals we profess. Learning exactly how is what laid the foundational pieces of a new outlook that I developed in the subsequent months and years.

For example, most professors rate ‘critical thinking’ as a very important goal of undergraduate education. But a great deal of teaching and assessment depends essentially on rote learning. Bok cites a study showing, for example, that students who were successful in introductory physics courses had no better understanding of the principles of Newtonian mechanics than similar students who had not taken the course. Another study:

A review of audiotapes made in 19 classes in diverse subjects at the University of Texas at Austin found that 88.5% of the available time was taken up by professors speaking with only 5% being used for talk by students. Most of the few questions asked by professors were administrative in nature, or asked students to recall factual knowledge.

Put that fact in front of a selection of students at institutions like mine (as I have done) and most will nod and say that is roughly their experience: they will add that assessments have the same character (merely recalling factual knowledge, or merely applying remembered algorithms). Of course, critical thinking is not well-defined, and we don’t exactly know how to measure it, but none of those professors developed their fine critical thinking skills by simply knowing facts and spitting them back.

The absence of discussion is not restricted to large lecture classes, and STEM. I’ve been teaching a 100-person class this semester, and one of the students asked to take another course from me next semester because “I have just finished my [unnamed social science but not economics] major, and I still have another year to go so I have some freedom”. I knew she was enjoying being able to discuss ideas in my class, so I observed that I am teaching much smaller classes next semester. The course on love and sex will be very discussion heavy, whereas the political philosophy course (an upper level intro for majors) will be more lecture/discussion:

“So, that will be like this class, then?”.

“Oh no, there’ll be much more discussion than in this class, there will only be 24 students, so no more than a third of the time will be me talking”.

“Really? This [100 person lecture] class has had more discussion than any other class I’ve taken”.

“Oh, that surprises me. I thought that there are plenty of small classes in [unnamed social science but not economics] major”.

“There are. I’m in two 20-person classes right now. But the professors lecture the whole period. They assign us two books a week to read, but that’s too much, and we don’t need to read them because their lectures tell us everything we need for the exam, and there’s no accountability in the classroom. All my upper-division classes have been like that.”

Some of Bok’s analogies are funny. He offers a plausible explanation for why teachers are so averse to discussion in the classroom:

Teaching by discussion can also seem forbidding because it makes instructors uncomfortably aware of their shortcomings. Lecturers can delude themselves that their courses are going well, but discussion leaders know when their teaching is failing to rouse the students’ interest by the indifferent quality of responses and the general torpor of the class. Trying to conduct a discussion with apathetic students is much like giving a bad dinner party

The sentiment, if not the analogy, rang true with me at the time, and still does. I confronted the problem head on during the fall after I read the book (2007) when I taught a small freshman class. The first three weeks I would come into each class with about 45 minutes of lecture prepared on the assumption they would ask questions and discuss things. But they couldn’t. They just stared at me and took notes, and it gradually became clear that they thought I was telling them truths that it was their job to repeat back to me. If I hadn’t had Bok’s guidance I think I’d never have taught that class again – in fact, I now teach it regularly, and really seem to have gotten the hang of getting them to read, think, and discuss, with me and with each other, in a way that is both engaged and disciplined.

My dad always says the most important things for a teacher is to know which questions to ask. Once you have decided to make students do intellectual work in the room you have to figure out how to structure that work to get the kind of thinking that you want from them.

Bok says:

A well-constructed course can avoid [students being discouraged from thinking carefully about ethical questions by persuading them that all such questions are inconclusive] if instructors make sure to include moral dilemmas of varying degrees of difficulty. Even when truly intractable issues arise, close analysis can at least dispose of much shoddy thinking and thereby clarify the nature of the underlying dispute. Students can gradually overcome… easy relativism… as they come to observe that some arguments are more grounded in fact and reason than others.

This passage helped me ask the right questions. I had recently devised an exercise about the aims of education: asking students to rank order a list of 13 aims and talk about their weightings. The first time I did it, it failed. The students were engaged and interested, because they had never had any such discussion before. But they wouldn’t make arguments, and they reached consensus too easily. So, the next time I did the exercise, I gave them the same list of 13, and required them to list just 5 to recommend to a school board. Magically, not only was the discussion lively and engaged, but students were forced to make arguments, because they had to cut some stuff off the list. That’s the guiding principle now for my questions: force the students to make trade-offs, and to give reasons for preferring one thing over another.

I also learned, inadvertently, the value of explaining one’s goals to one’s students. I assigned the book to a smallish group of students (a class in 2009 exclusively for students who had endured the almost disastrous 2007 course). Almost immediately students started discussing the ethnic studies requirement on campus. Like many campuses ours introduced an ethnic studies requirement for all students and, as you can imagine, that immediately became a source of competition among departments. Every one of the students in the class had already fulfilled the requirement, and every one of them testified that the purpose of the requirement had never been explained to them (not even by the professor in the class). This shouldn’t be hugely surprising: the first time I taught my large lecture course I was completely unaware that it fulfilled a business ethics requirement, because nobody bothered to tell me, and nobody bothered to ask. Of the 14 students 3 had positive experiences in ethnic studies, the others had viewed the course as a waste of time; all of those students said that if they had understood the purpose (which Bok articulates) they would have been happier to take the course and would have tried harder to learn from it (as opposed to trying to get an A, which is all that mattered to them). I now, always, talk to students about the point of the course I am teaching; and this is most important when teaching a requirement-fulfilling course. I introduce the business-ethics-requirement-fulfilling lecture course which I teach most semesters by saying something to the effect of “I know that many of you wouldn’t take a philosophy course if it didn’t meet a requirement. But I am grateful to the Business school for sending you to us: I really enjoy teaching Business students, and I design the course and my pedagogy with the aim of making sure that the experience will be genuinely valuable for you” and then specify the ways it will be valuable.

One final taster of the book. Re-reading my original copy (which is well-leafed, and much marked up, with hundreds of underlinings, rather uncharacteristic for me), I came across this passage, with three words scrawled in large letters across the page. The passage?:

Other [students] simply do not understand the basic principles. Many professors skip over these concepts too quickly, because they are so familiar with the ideas that they cannot appreciate how confusing this material can be to students or how often undergraduates come to the course with misunderstandings that make it harder for them to comprehend. In these circumstances bright undergraduates frequently use rote learning to pass the course without truly understanding the basic principles involved. So long as professors assign questions similar to those discussed in class, students can rely on their memory to find the right answers and their instructors never realize how little understanding they possess.

My (2007) scrawl?: “I DO THIS”