Doug McKee is an economics professor, and he likes to think in terms of incentives. He also knows that the incentives for teaching at Yale are broken. On a Friday morning earlier this month, McKee leaned forward in his chair, across his desk at me. “At least in the Econ department, junior faculty are hired, and promoted, and granted tenure based on their research,” McKee said. “The incentives are entirely on research and very, very little on teaching.”
The day before, I had sat at another desk, two blocks down Hillhouse Ave., across from Tamar Gendler, PC ’87, who oversees hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Gendler told me, unflinchingly, “What we are looking for in our faculty is a convergence of two things: world leadership in scholarship and true excellence in pedagogy.”
But, Gendler said, if you are not a world leader in “pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge” in your area of expertise, “there are many, many other places that don’t have as their mission that every single member of their faculty be a world leader, that can happily take you as a teacher.” She added that this loss of a professor to another institution “isn’t, in the scheme of things, a loss to pedagogy.”
But paired with a lack of support for and recognition of exemplary teaching, Yale University’s insistence on world-class research could well be a loss to the students at Yale College. The University professes a dual mission: to be a world-class research institution and to support excellence in teaching. It is clear that Yale has succeeded in the first aim, but the second remains far from certain. This fall, a restructuring of the Provost’s office placed Gendler in charge of the faculty, and the University created a new Center for Teaching and Learning aimed at providing resources for professors to improve. But as Yale’s attempt to promote instruction reveals, the question of how to support both research and teaching—and whether this duality is sustainable, or even advisable—is something that the University is still struggling to understand.
***
“Yale sells itself as ‘the large research institution where you still have a wonderful undergraduate experience.’ And I think it’s true; that’s why I came here,” says Scott Stern, BR ’15. He sinks back into a couch in the Branford buttery and looks over at me. “But Yale is at risk of losing its soul because of its monomaniacal focus on research. I find it disturbing.” He shakes his head a bit. “It’s certainly not how Yale bills itself.” Stern, an American Studies major and a columnist for the Yale Daily News, recalled a conversation with his suitemates, who are STEM majors: “They were talking about how terrible the teaching is in their departments. I talked to them, and they said, ‘This is terrible. Yale has all this money and institutional fame, and the idea that they can’t get better teachers for us…’” Stern looks over at me and falls silent.
Tlalli Moya-Smith, SM ’16, a Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology major, told me she has had “phenomenal” teachers at Yale. “But, on the flip side, I have had teachers who were more invested in their research than their teaching,” Moya-Smith said. “You could tell based on their enthusiasm in class, their ability to relate to students and, frankly, to teach to students in a way that is helpful.”
Later that night, I talked to David Lawrence, CC ’15, an economics major and YCC Academic Chair. He nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose as he said, “Oftentimes, I think, professors are so focused on research that they don’t try to develop teaching skills. At Yale, someone who is an excellent researcher tends to be able to get away with not being a very good professor.” Lawrence said that it was unlikely that a student-led initiative could make substantive change in the quality of teaching. Instead, he said, “it really is the mandate of the administration at Yale to be thinking about how teaching can improve.”
Before talking to Lawrence, I sat with Jennifer Gersten, SY ’16, an English major, in Bass Cafe. The space around us was crammed with students and backpacks and end-of-midterm anxieties. After we spoke for ten minutes about professors, teaching, and her experience in the classroom at Yale, Gersten broke in. “I always feel bad complaining about any aspect of Yale. I feel this initial thought: ‘Stop complaining, because you have it so much better than 99.99 percent of the world,’” she said. But she continued. “At the same time, someone is paying for you to get the best possible education you can. And if that’s not what you’re getting, then you need to question why that is.”
***
A half century ago, Yale was asking that very question. In June 1965, the University published a report on hiring and tenure. In the report’s introduction, Political Science Professor and Committee Leader Robert Dahl, GRD ’40, posed the question at the core of the committee’s research: “Can Yale, or for that matter can any university, achieve and sustain greatness today both as an undergraduate college and as a university? The answer is far from clear or certain.” Dahl then explained the committee’s conclusions. “First, only a handful of institutions of higher education in the United States—or in the world—stand much chance of either acquiring or maintaining the highest quality in the two roles of university and liberal arts college,” he wrote. “Second, Yale is unquestionably one of these.”
Many today agree that this sense of exceptionalism is warranted. Gendler stressed that each of the 700 tenure-track professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences teaches undergraduates, a requirement that is not true of “any other institution of our research caliber.” Paul Bloom, Regan Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, who has taught psychology at Yale for over a decade and has served as chair of the cognitive science and psychology departments, backed up Gendler’s point. “I can’t think of a single place in the world where undergraduates get a better education than Yale,” Bloom told me. “I’m really serious about that. I love small liberal arts colleges, but I think that Yale beats them all.”
But Bloom also acknowledged that the hiring and tenure processes largely do not incentivize the teaching that would make Yale the pinnacle of undergraduate education. “We would never accept somebody [for hiring or tenure] just because they are a wonderful classroom teacher,” Bloom said. “If they don’t have a top-notch research record, it’s just not going to happen.”
While Dahl’s report went on to acknowledge the centrality of teaching, it upheld the primary importance of research in promotions. “[An] insistence on excellent undergraduate teaching as a condition for tenure, without a rigorous adherence to scholarly criteria, could lead to a deterioration in Yale’s scholarly contribution and hence its national and international stature as a university,” the committee members warned.
Nearly 50 years later, the University carried out its latest reexamination of the tenure process. In 2007, in response to long-time complaints about the process’s occluded standards and the unattainability of tenure itself, Yale created a track aimed at giving junior faculty a means to be granted tenure. In a 2011 progress report, Mary Miller, then dean of Yale College, wrote an introductory letter that echoed Dahl’s words. “We proclaim that teaching matters, but look at the contradictory messages we also give out,” Miller wrote. “We grant faculty leaders ‘relief’ from teaching, and we call it a ‘teaching load’ rather than a responsibility or, even a privilege, in that we teach engaged students who expect challenges. Despite much rhetoric about teaching, what do we do as an institution to reward it?”
***
“The most important reward structure in the University is tenure. If you are not a great teacher—” Scott Strobel pauses, and tilts his chair back, right leg propped against a low, glass-topped table that holds an assortment of what appear to be delicate-looking crustaceans. “You know, if you are not a reasonably competent teacher, then that should be actively discussed, and should be a topic of question for whether somebody should get tenure.”
Strobel’s office is tucked on the third floor of a building past Kline Biology Tower and the Geology and Geophysics Building, down a hallway lined with laboratories and fluorescent lights. He has taught at Yale for 20 years, but this year he has taken on a newly-created role: Deputy Provost for Teaching and Learning. When I asked him to explain his job description, he let out a short laugh and said he is still trying to figure it out—especially to understand what the scope of his oversight is. “At some point, you could say that everything in the University is teaching and learning. What isn’t teaching and learning?” he asked, with a shrug. Beyond his new role as provost, he is also in charge of developing Yale’s West Campus, runs a lab, and teaches undergraduates. “When somebody says, ‘Oh, I have no time for that,’” he says, giving a small, chagrinned grimace, “I just say, ‘You have no idea.’”
While nearly all of the professors who I talked with insisted on the dual importance of teaching and research, many of them returned to this same notion—that there are only so many hours in the day and, when pressed to make a choice of how to spend their time, research frequently and necessarily took precedence. Margaret Ferguson, now a professor at University of California-Davis and the president of the American Language Association, began teaching at Yale in the early 1970s. Ferguson called me from California and, after we spoke for 20 minutes about her time at Yale, she sighed. “Really, honestly? There was always a struggle at the level of how you were going to organize your time, the day, week, month, summer. How are you going to make the division of labor between preparing for class, grading papers, on the one hand, and trying to write your own articles?” Then, after a pause, “A lot of us didn’t get much sleep.”
To be considered for tenure, Ferguson said that she and her colleagues had to write a book on top of an already-demanding teaching load. “I would stay up all night preparing lectures, do my nine-o’clock lectures, and go home and go to sleep—for a little while. People said to me, ‘Oh you shouldn’t be spending your time grading those papers. Where there is triage to be done, it is your research that counts,’” Ferguson recalled. Still, she said that administrators made clear that they wanted professors to excel both in scholarship and teaching. In 1982, Ferguson was offered tenure at Yale, and three years later, she won the DeVane medal for the best undergraduate teaching at Yale.
Ferguson said she was “very surprised and very touched” to have received the teaching award after getting tenure. It becomes clear, too, when looking at the DeVane medal winners, that excellence in teaching by no means translates to tenure.
Steven Gillon, who began teaching history at Yale in 1985, won the DeVane medal in 1993. He recalled the morning he won the award. “A colleague approached me and said, ‘I’m really sorry to hear the news that you won the DeVane medal. You know, it’s the ‘Kiss of Death’ for a junior faculty member—everybody knows that it’s the ‘Kiss of Death.’” Gillon said that his colleague told him that every junior faculty member he’d known of up to that point had left the University a year or two after winning the medal. “He was joking, of course,” Gillon said. “But it was a dose of reality on a day that I wanted to just savor the moment.” Gillon told me that he had entered Yale without any expectation of receiving tenure and “loved my time at Yale.” But, by the end of the year, Gillon had left the University.
As Stern described in a column in the Yale Daily News last fall, only one of the six untenured professors who have won the DeVane medal since 1988 went on to get tenure at Yale. The phrase “Kiss of Death,” Stern found, originated in a 1999 article on teaching awards and medical school departmental longevity. The study’s authors reported a strong association between teaching awards and shortened employment. “The article said that it is, to some extent, real, and to some extent perception,” Stern said. “But even if it is not necessarily a trend, if this is what young scholars think is reality, it’s going to shape the way they act.”
McKee, the economics professor, adamantly agrees. “These big prizes that go to very few people are really broken,” McKee said. “They incentivize people to spend a lot of time teaching, to win these prizes, and then they sacrifice their research.” McKee paused. “Frankly, it’s evil, because you are incentivizing people to not get tenure, and that’s just wrong.” It is this gap in priorities—and the mutually exclusive nature of qualifications for teaching awards and tenure itself—that Yale’s latest effort to improve its teaching attempts to address.
***
Jenny Frederick, Director of the Center for the Teaching and Learning, hopes to rid the University of this split. When we met in her office in the Hall of Graduate Studies, she apologized for missing our first meeting—she had triple booked a half-hour slot.
In August, the University combined eight pre-existing centers, including the Center for Scientific Teaching, the Center for Language Study, and the Writing Center, to create the Center for Teaching and Learning. Frederick explained that the CTL has a tripartite goal: learning, learning to teach, and teaching, with three underlying focuses of online education, academic technology, and assessment. While it offers academic help to students, the Center will also provide resources for professors including workshops and one-on-one mentoring.
“The goal is twofold: to showcase excellence—to make teaching a more public activity—and to facilitate conversations between faculty members,” Frederick said. “The people who come here for academic appointments are excellent. They’re at the top of their fields. In general, they want to be excellent at everything. So why wouldn’t they take advantage of opportunities to improve their teaching?”
Strobel, who oversees Frederick’s work at the CTL, was more blunt. “Nobody wants to suck at what they do,” he said. “So if a Center for Teaching and Learning can provide a resource that, in a relatively easy way, can help people teach better, that’s a great outcome.”
Frederick and Strobel understand that the CTL can only do so much; the workshops may not immediately shift the quality of teaching, and they may not immediately reach the faculty who most need to improve. But they believe that the Center holds the capacity to start a much-needed dialogue about teaching. “I could go around talking to people until I’m blue in the face, saying, ‘Here’s a good idea for your teaching,’” Frederick said. “But what’s much, much more effective is faculty talking to faculty.” Strobel added that his goal, and the goal of the Center for Teaching and Learning, is “to make teaching a more public process, in the sense that what happens in the classroom isn’t just between me and my students. [It’s also] between me and all the rest of the faculty in the University, and what I’m doing well I can share, and for what I’m not doing well, I can expect that there will be commentary about how I can improve.” What Strobel knows, too, is that outside of the CTL, individual departments have made—and have seen success in—their efforts to improve teaching on their own.
***
In a second-floor classroom in Linsly-Chittenden on a Monday afternoon, Professor Fred Strebeigh, PC ’74, English 120 course director, is in high gear. The last few students hoist on backpacks and trickle out of the classroom as Strebeigh perches on the edge of the oval table at the center of the room. He runs his hands through his peppergray hair, and leans forward towards the woman seated in the wooden chair next to him. “Gina! I mean…” Strebeigh pauses, casts his eyes around the room, searching for the right words. He is positively beaming. “I mean… This is a classic example of good, close reading for craft.” Strebeigh pauses, and glances down at the page full of notes in front of him. “Very cool, your opening question, which was looking at ‘Squashed,’ the Susan Orlean piece, and looking at structure as a servant of drama—that idea was just perfect.”
For the next 12 minutes, Strebeigh breaks down, minute by minute, the class that Gina Hurley, a PhD candidate in Medieval Studies, had just led. He notes the questions she asked, how the class responded, how she encouraged the students and led the discussion to its logical conclusion. “This piece became a really neat lesson—thanks to you—in the ways that an author gets a whole lot out from an interview subject who isn’t giving anything to her. That was neat.” He looks up at Hurley. “It was a classically beautifully done class.” Strebeigh has reached the end of his notes; Hurley puts down her pen, and moves to pack up her bag. She lifts it onto her shoulder, then pauses. “Thank you, again, for letting me do this,” Hurley tells Strebeigh. “It’s been really wonderful, really instructive for me.”
A few minutes later, I sit outside of the classroom with Hurley, who has a master’s degree in English and had just completed three weeks of observation in Strebeigh’s classroom. The observation is a core component of English 990, a graduate student course that Writing Center Director Alfred Guy leads. Through the course, each graduate student observes an English 120 section for part of the semester and then teaches part of a class on her own. Hurley said she was grateful that the graduate school facilitated her training in the classroom. “By having these sorts of experiences in place that are required for PhDs, Yale is showing that it’s willing to develop both sides, to operate on this teacher-scholar model rather than abandoning the teaching side in service of the scholarship,” Hurley said.
The observation system in English 990 mirrors a system that is in place for the English 120 faculty. Strebeigh started the observation program in the spring of 2002. Each English 120 professor is required to visit at least one class session a semester; then, at the end of the semester, the faculty meet. Each professor shares a best practice—what Strebeigh describes as “the one thing that’s worth perpetuating within a teaching system”—that he or she observed.
Strebeigh, who originally conceived of the program, explained his rationale. “We only really gain from developing new strengths. With an ever-increasing number of new strengths, there is no time in the seminar left for the weak spots,” he said. “The system of open invitations to visit is the best strengthener of teaching I’ve ever seen.”
When I ask him why this policy has not spread to other departments, Strebeigh simply remarks that the 75-minute investment of watching a colleague teach feels “quite small and the reward seems high.” So, I ask again, why hasn’t it spread? Earlier, he had noted that nearly all of the professors who teach English 120 are non-tenure-track faculty. Still, in the same breath, he insisted that this fact did not explain their willingness to commit time to improving their teaching.
The extent to which this dialogue around teaching is localized, and still largely inaccessible to current and future teachers, becomes clear when I meet John Valdovinos, an Engineering PhD and a postdoc at the Yale School of Medicine. At the Center for Engineering and Design at 15 Prospect Street, I sit with Valdovinos at a low module table. Light pours in through the open lab space behind us where students crowd around lab tables and 3D printers. Valdovinos tells me that, while he wants to be a great teacher, there are no resources for him to improve. “I have zero interaction or experience here with teaching,” Valdovinos said. He said that he emailed several professors in his department about training opportunities for teaching earlier in the semester. None had responded. “I love research, don’t get me wrong. I find great pleasure in doing it. But I don’t know what’s going to happen when I do get that faculty position, and I have to go in a class and…teach.” His brow tightens. “An academic should be a great teacher, a great researcher—a great scholar, basically. And we’ve turned to the point where it’s just a great researcher. Because you bring in the money, and that’s pretty much it.”
All of the professors with whom I talked recalled a nearly complete lack of training in graduate school before they entered the classroom. Gillon, the DeVane medalist who now teaches history at the University of Oklahoma, mused, “The odd thing about professors is that we receive no training in what it is we do for a living. We are trained to be historians; we are not trained to be teachers.” Bloom—who won the Lex Hixon prize for teaching in the social sciences at Yale 10 years ago—said that for the first seminar he taught, at the University of Arizona, he had received no formal training. “I was a train-wreck. I was awful. You wouldn’t believe how bad I was. And because I was bad, the students hated me. And because the students hated me, I had a difficulty time teaching.” Bloom grimaces, gives a little shake of his head. “You know, no one wants to be a bad teacher. So there is a tremendous impetus for improving.”
Bloom thinks that this intrinsic incentive should not be ignored. “I think people are driven by intrinsic goals. And the sort of external incentive that matters a lot, in some ways, is respect,” Bloom said. “One of the many things that I really like about this place is that good teaching is respected.” Gendler agrees: “Yale is one of the few institutions where there is a culture of competition in teaching excellence.”
It is far from obvious, though, how to make this professed commitment to teaching a reality. Even Strobel admits, “I’m not sure if I’m in a position to do anything about it. But I’ll try.” He agrees with McKee, the economics professor, that reforming the teaching prizes is likely necessary; he hopes to create, as a different type of incentive, a “Dean’s List” for teaching. “It’s something you can put on your resume,” Strobel said. “If every semester you teach with some version of quality, you could receive some kind of recognition. It would both be motivating to retain that level and motivating to achieve it.” Frederick, the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, agrees. “It becomes much more like, ‘Hey, you’ve been [at Yale] for three years, and you haven’t been on the Dean’s List? What’s wrong? What’s going on?’”
In addition to reforming teaching prizes, Frederick and Strobel hope that the Center for Teaching and Learning will spread the system of observation that is in place in English 120. “What if, even on a small scale, we could create an environment in which Yale faculty get to experience what’s happening in Yale classrooms other than their own?” Strobel asked. “Wouldn’t that start a dialogue?”
***
In his high-ceilinged office in the shadow of Kline Biology Tower, Professor Paul Tipton, the chair of the physics department, tells me that he is trying to start the conversation. Tipton is creating a program of voluntary peer-to-peer classroom visitation in his department, similar to the English 120 faculty observation model. “But what as a department are we not going to do, if we start really trying to put the effort into taking our teaching to the next level?” Tipton asked. He described colleagues who are already stretched to the brink and said that it was difficult to imagine the tradeoff that would necessarily occur for teaching to become a priority. “No one wants us to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to tolerate a lower level of research activity.’ So what are we going to ask them not to do?” He folds his arms across his torso. “Something’s got to give.”
Bloom said that while some might be “surprised” to learn of the primary importance of research in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions, “at the same time, teaching is really, really valued here. And can somebody who isn’t a great scholar be a tremendous teacher?” Bloom looked up and continued without hesitating: “No.” He acknowledged, though, that this confluence is difficult to achieve. “The truth is, the time I spend teaching Intro Psych isn’t going to help my research program, and vice versa,” Bloom said. “For some reason, sometimes people like to say everything is all wonderful. But some things are zero sum.”
While McKee told me that a fundamental change in hiring, promotion, or tenure is unlikely, he agreed with Bloom that the motives behind such a change could be misinformed. “Yale is happy doing what it does, and even if they did change, it would be bad for Yale,” McKee said. “We would end up with people who do worse research, and the prestige would go down. People wouldn’t want to come.”
Tipton, for his part, said he has trouble imagining how to resolve the dual mission. “We’ve decided that you can’t possibly be the world’s leader in undergraduate education if you aren’t also a world leader at research,” Tipton said. “It’s just a tension that I think we’re going to have to live with.”