or: How research institutions are killing education in the U.S.

At the beginning of my junior year as a science major at a very well-regarded state university, I received a syllabus from a professor which stated, “I do not care about this class.” (It also said elsewhere, “I do not care if you cheat. I care if you get caught cheating.”) He then proceeded to explain that what he really loved to do was research, and since virtually all of his funding, salary, and promotion opportunities depended on the results of his research, there was no reason for him to care about the class. The professor then broke down his priorities: he could get anywhere up to about a 2.5% raise at the end of the year; of that, about 1.5% depended on his research progress and ability to bring in grant money, 0.5% was guaranteed by the union, and about 0.5% depended on his teaching evaluations. “So,” he said, “the difference between me busting my buns all semester and doing jack shit for this class is a couple hundred bucks, and that just isn’t worth it.” Over the course of the semester, the professor attended maybe half of the classes; all exams were open-book; and his involvement in the laboratory portion of the class was minimal at best.

At first, I was extremely frustrated at his cavalier attitude toward shirking the responsibilities of his job, but I quickly realized that his attitude is one shared by many professors at research universities across the country, though the vast majority of them are not nearly as forthcoming and honest about it. I recalled numerous classes that consisted of professors doing one or more of the following: reciting sections or showing slides from the textbook without adding any illuminating explanations, avoiding the topics that should have been covered and instead talking about their interests or interesting people they had met, or just ignoring student questions so they would not actually have to think about the material they lectured on.

The problem is multifaceted, but primarily has to deal with the way money works in the sciences at research universities and the way that professors are trained.

As mentioned previously, if you are a professor, most of your funding and salary comes from grants, sometimes provided by corporations like DuPont, Google, or Chevron, and sometimes provided by government institutions like the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, or the National Institutes of Health. In order to become a tenured professor, you need to demonstrate to the university that having you around is going to cost them virtually nothing. Sure, they’ll give you an office and some lab space, but your salary, your graduate students’ tuition and stipends, any lab techs’ salaries, any equipment or instruments you want to use, and all material costs (chemicals, cells, etc.) are almost all coming out of the money you bring with you. On the other hand, if the university were to hire a professor whose sole job was teaching, that professor’s salary would have to come out of the university budget. It should be immediately apparent why the former is immensely preferable to university administrators. Therein lies the first problem: research universities prefer to hire researchers who can maybe do some teaching on the side, rather than teachers whom they would have to pay to teach. This policy leads to many universities hiring fantastic researchers who have little to no pedagogical experience or acumen. Rather than ensuring that students understand the necessary concepts, these professors often prefer to use grading curves on otherwise failing classes as a magical tool to keep students complacent without actually teaching them or as a way to punish students for working together to learn, since only a few people are allowed to get A’s or B’s, no matter how competent they are.

“But wait,” you might say, “these people are experts in their fields! My university loves to brag about how many of their lecturers have the highest degree in their discipline! They clearly know their stuff and can teach it!” There are several problems with this line of reasoning: firstly, a lack of comprehension as to the breadth of professors’ areas of expertise and secondly, a gross misunderstanding of the requirements for obtaining advanced degrees, especially PhDs, in the sciences.

So let’s say you’ve gotten your bachelor’s degree in some scientific field. Congrats! That degree essentially states that you have a wide but relatively shallow knowledge in that subject. You decide you should go to grad school for your PhD in the hopes of becoming a professor someday. You might assume a professor’s training will include some classes in all the subdisciplines of your field to deepen your knowledge, classes on how to teach and design curricula and experience teaching, and doing some cutting-edge research on a subject you’re interested in. You would be mostly wrong. Most PhDs will receive little or no formal training in pedagogy after they receive their bachelors, and are just assumed to be qualified when they become professors.

Even in graduate school, research is king. Your first and most important job is to find a research group and join up with them. From there on out, pretty much your only goal becomes doing enough research and getting enough results that you can write an incredibly detailed book on one tiny question in a subdiscipline of a subdiscipline of a subdiscipline of your field. If you want to get out within 4–5 years, you need to have laser-like focus on your research topic, whether your topic is lasers and their reaction to a specific plastic, a single gene within a mutant species of fruit flies, or a possible way to remove some pollutants out of drinking water (if you had infinite time and money). Most classes you take will not be to broaden your knowledge, but rather to deepen your knowledge of a very specific topic. If and when you walk out of there with your degree, you will know a massive amount about one very particular thing, and not much more about everything else than you did when you got your bachelors. Congrats, doctor! You now have a PhD and know no more about how to teach a class than you did when you went in.

Some (but not all) schools in the sciences do require their graduate students to act as teaching assistants for some time: almost never more than three semesters. During this time, the student will likely attend class, prep and run a teaching laboratory, prepare and host discussions, hold office hours, grade homeworks, lab reports, and exams, and answer student questions via email outside of class. By contract, many TAs are “limited” to working no more than a set number of hours per week on TAing (usually about 20), though it is nigh impossible for them to competently perform all their duties in the time allotted.

For all of this additional effort, most TAs are given zero additional money on top of their normal research stipends. The only difference is that now part of their stipend comes from the university and only part of it comes from their research advisor. Again, it doesn’t matter if you do a great job or a crap job, you will get paid the same amount. In addition, while you are teaching, you are often expected to continue working on your research for 50–70 hours a week, on top of the 20+ hours you spend teaching. Since doing research actually gets you paid and gets you closer to completing your degree, it is easy to see how graduate students, the professors of the future, fall into the exact same “research first, forget teaching” attitude. As for the TAs who do care about their students, they are often left with the undesirable task of attempting to teach their students all the subject material that they should be learning in lecture or lab, but are failing to because of an incompetent professor. This sacrifice, in turn, often punishes dedicated graduate student teachers by causing them to fall behind on their research. These attitudes toward graduate student instructors sends a clear message to potential future professors: research first, students if you get around to it.

Additionally, because most school ranking systems determine placement primarily by research funding brought in, many students at “top” universities learn far less than their counterparts at smaller schools or community colleges. I have seen many freshmen entering the worldwide top-ranked schools who begin to think there is something wrong with them because they cannot learn from the poor lecturers at the “best school” for their major. They are even more confused when they go to professors to ask questions during office hours and receive the kind of reception that one of my students described, where she came in to ask a question about not getting credit for any of the homework she had done. The professor responded, “I don’t give a shit about student performance. Get out.”

Even the class curricula in major universities tend to follow the money. While teaching a first-semester introductory general chemistry class, I noticed that virtually none of the laboratory experiments in any way related to the course material that should have been covered. Instead, the students were doing labs that were more appropriate for second- or third- year organic chemistry students who already had a strong background in chemical principles. Upon investigation, I discovered the reason the labs concerned polymers and biofuels instead of actual general chemistry topics like precision and accuracy or acids and bases: the lab development team was sponsored by a grant from an energy company to create “green chemistry” experiments for undergraduates. As a result, the students struggled through the experiments for which they had no background knowledge and did not receive the hands-on enrichment of a lab in the topics they should have been learning, just so the university could bring in more money.

You may also argue that universities give students a chance at “research experience.” Of course, so do many internships at companies or outside universities, and in order to perform worthwhile research, you always need a strong foundation of knowledge from classroom learning, which is often severely lacking when you have mediocre teachers.

In recent years in STEM fields, retention of underrepresented groups, primarily women and minorities, has become a growing concern. Unfortunately, because the professors are so unqualified to teach and often prefer to teach their interests, rather than appropriate course material, many of the courses are designed in such a way that only the people with the most privileged academic backgrounds (AP Calc, AP Physics, AP Chem, AP Bio, etc.) can reasonably succeed. It is challenging, but not impossible, to make introductory classes that allow for students who are behind to catch up, while also reviewing and deepening the knowledge of more advanced students. Using active learning methods, including problem-based learning, or peer-led team learning, which encourage students to review basic concepts and then proceed to in-depth examinations of principles to encourage understanding, analysis, and synthesis in their evaluations, is a huge boon both to more advanced and to struggling students. Unfortunately, because of their lack of training in pedagogy, many professors are unaware or unfamiliar with these techniques and resort to ineffective lecture approaches that leave many students behind unnecessarily.

Of course, there are always some exceptions. I have been tremendously lucky to have studied under and worked with some professors who are genuinely concerned with student performance and want to make sure that their students have a broad yet deep comprehension of important scientific principles. That being said, of the best professors I have had, a disproportionately large number have been teaching profs, for whom classes were their primary or only focus. The fact of the matter is that the way the university system is run in the sciences works against such dedicated teachers and tends to produce professors who are lackluster at best.

The end result is that many people who are teaching really have little to no desire to do so and are forced into it as a side job, on top of being a researcher, personnel manager, grant writer, scientific journal author, peer reviewer, and, often, the head of a small startup company or a university or department administrator. Even if they have the drive to teach, many of them lack the skills to do so. In some regards, you can’t blame them for prioritizing the money and their interests, but this set-up is certainly not conducive to a learning environment.

There is an episode of Futurama called “Mars University,” in which we see a glimpse of Professor Farnsworth’s teaching career, which is aptly overlooked in every other episode in favor of his inventions. When asked what course he was teaching, he responded, “Same thing I teach every semester, the mathematics of quantum neutrino fields. I made up the title so that no student would dare take it.” When Fry describes an interest in taking the course, Farnsworth declares, “Please, Fry; I don’t know how to teach. I’m a professor!”

When the academic system in this country is such that it encourages professors to adopt such Farnsworth-esque attitudes toward teaching, is it really a surprise that the young people of the U.S. are continually falling behind almost every other developed nation in the knowledge of the STEM fields and general scientific literacy?