In a previous post, gesta argued that academics in the humanities should be valued for their contributions to human understanding. Clearly I have a much easier job explaining why mathematicians and scientists should be valued, as we improve the lives of everybody through our work on technology and improvements in physics.
Excuse me whilst I kill myself laughing.
Many people are willing to accept that the use of scientific knowledge to improve our lives through advances in medicine and technology is a good thing. However, this frequently has little effect on their perception of academics; the cool new gadgets that they buy are designed, built and sold by private companies. Clearly no academic in their ivory tower would have a clue how to do this, or they’d have set up their own company and made lots of money.
More worrying to me is that this attitude is not just expressed by those with no experience of academics. The problems with communicating science in the media, chronicled in detail by others, clearly have an effect. However many of the responses to the article cited by gesta are from (ex) students, complaining about poor teaching and dull scientists putting them off for life. If students are deriding academics as boring and out of touch, where are we going wrong?
First, in the ruthless reality of universities, undergraduates are worth less than research. That is not a statement about the worth of students to the academics, whatever students may feel, but a statement of financial reality. The numbers that I can find for one university suggest that undergraduates account for about 20% of the income; research, either from private industry or government funding, accounts for three times that amount.
This leads to a clear attitude at “management” level. I have certainly heard that the best way to advance my career is to concentrate on my research and not on teaching. Given that academics are already experts at research, but have to learn to become good teachers, this is certainly an easy route to take. It follows that much of the teaching is done by those that “have to” rather than those that “want to”; it is implicitly felt that teaching is a distraction from what is important.
Second, there is often a difficulty in connecting the teaching of “interesting” science with the basics that have to be covered in the first couple of years of an undergraduate course. If students are fascinated by, say, astrophysics, then a course on the basics of linear algebra seems like a pointless waste of time. To those already expert the necessity of such fundamentals in learning General Relativity is clear; explaining that to students can be hard.
Finally there is what I call the “disappointment of knowledge”, where learning how a scientific result or theory comes about actually kills off interest in the subject. A good example of this in academic circles is the famed Four Colour theorem, the proof of which used a computer to burn through all the cases. Presentations of scientific theories that are this devoid of content – and everybody has their own tastes in this – inevitably put students off.
Is there a solution? I do not see a simple easy single solution – not even one that would be wrong, to misquote. Work by universities and authorities to improve the standard of university teaching are seen as essential now that tuition fees are in place, but are often bitterly resented by academics. Whilst such resentment is indefensible, the quality of the courses run is pretty indefensible as well. Until the imbalance between research income and teaching income is addressed undergraduate teaching is always likely to remain a lower priority.
However, another more crucial feature is the lack of understanding as to what academics are trying to teach in the first place. It is totally impossible to bring undergraduates up to the cutting edge of scientific research in 3 or 4 years. Instead academics are trying to instill the methods required to work independently and scientifically, the broad scientific models or theories that are currently thought best, and the critical tools necessary to evaluate results, models, theories and methods. If this is not made explicit to the students then the “disappointment of knowledge” appears all to easily. This, at least, is an area that academics could tackle.
Instilling the need for independent learning in our students is a constant challenge if my evaluation feedback is anything to go by. Part of the problem is that their idea of value for money with the advent of fees is what they deem to be a good final result, not the quality of the education received, and that includes their ability to be proactive in their learning. I find it depressing that the introduction of tuition fees and top-up fees in September, has led to a devaluing in education for its own sake. I know I valued the quality of education I received far and above the quality of teaching partly because I was privileged to go to university when grants still existed. Education cannot be measured in monetary terms. Perhaps we should adopt the French system, but I have a feeling despite the (lack of) cost, the students would like it much less.
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