The United States faces a serious shortage of college teachers, and strong measures are needed to deal with it, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching said yesterday.
John W. Gardner, chairman of Carnegie's executive committee, recommended action on many educational fronts in an essay summarizing a discussion held by the trustees of the foundation. The essay was published as part of the foundation's annual report.
President Pusey and Thomas S. Lamont '21, a member of the Harvard Corporation, participated in the discussion.
Gardner said that while the nation's college population will double in the next 15 years, the doctoral output of American universities will not keep pace. In addition, he said, "only about half of future doctor's degree recipients will find their way into teaching, and they will be no more than a fraction of the number needed."
The essay blamed "the extraordinary rise in funds available for research" as the main factor keeping holders of doctorates out of teaching. Federal research funds, Gardner said, rocketed from $74 million in 1940 to almost $15 billion this year.
Other factors cited include the rise in consulting jobs with government and industry and the "reduction in teaching hours."
"The man with a glittering reputation is often lured with the promise of minimum teaching duties," he said. "Indeed he may be given the promise that he will not have to teach at all."
Suggest Changes
The essay recommended the following measures:
* The invention of a new degree short of the Ph.D. Gardner said, however, that "there seems to be little likelihood that such a degree will come into being."
* Efforts to shorten the period between the A.B. and the Ph.D., which now "averages six years in the natural sciences, eight in the social sciences and 10 in the humanities."
* Flexible plans to make greater use of graduate students, retired professors, and Ph.D.'s outside the universities.
* Encouraging women to take up graduate studies
* Enlarging the total supply of teachers by fighting economic and social deprivation and race prejudice.
* More efficient use of present teaching staffs and vigorous recruitment of Ph.D. holders by universities.
"Though all of these measures may be helpful," Gardner continued, "the college teacher shortage will never be solved without a thoroughgoing effort to reestablish the status of teaching."
"It would be folly to suppose" that this could be done "without the active collaboration of the federal government," he said. He suggested "programs of federal grants for graduate students that combine teaching and research."
Furthermore, Gardner said, there is a "crisis in values" in the universities.
Thanks to "the seemingly limitless supply of research funds, consulting opportunities, easy promotions and dazzling offers," he said, some young scholars "exhibit an opportunism that startles their elders. . . .In their view students are just impediments in the headlong search for more and better grants, fatter fees, higher salaries, higher rank."
Gardner commended Harvard's five-year Ph.D. program in history, which includes two years of teaching, and UCLA's plan of awarding reserve funds "to those departments that demonstrate that some importance has been given to undergraduate teaching." He advised universities to "exercise restraint in offering reduced teaching loads as an inducement to move.
