BBUT WHATEVER the University does about salaries, it may have to be less selective about who it hires in the future. Because of the competition with other schools, the criteria for teaching ability in judging a teaching applicant may be hard to meet.
The Task Force on Pedagogical Improvement also recommends that departments work to improve the teaching ability of teaching fellows, which theoretically would improve graduate students' prospects in the job market and the quality of undergraduate instruction.
It is clear that teaching fellows are an increasingly important part of the undergraduate educational experience. They have taken over much of the instruction in introductory mathematics and language courses. They staff the sections of General Education and middle-group courses. And they play such an overwhelming role in the tutorial program that in many departments their numbers violate current Faculty legislation which says 70 per cent of the undergraduates in departmental tutorials must be taught by Faculty members.
Since teaching fellows play such an important role, it seen sensible to recommend that they have more opportunities to improve their teaching skills. But such a recommendation is dangerous because it obscures several more fundamental problems. First, departments often award teaching fellowships as a part of a graduate student's financial aid, and the selection process may not take teaching interest of ability into account at all. And second, it would be better for undergraduates if departments not only improved their teaching fellows but replaced many of them with Faculty members, especially in tutorials which play a pivotal role in many concentrations.
With the present size of the Faculty it is unnecessary for graduate students to do as much teaching as they do at present. Rosovsky's 1974 Letter reveals that between 1952 and 1974 the size of the Faculty grew by 102 per cent, but the undergraduate population grew only by 14 per cent. During that time, however, the proportion of courses in which undergraduates enrolled actually decreased by 28 per cent.
Where did all those additional Faculty members go if they were not teaching more undergraduate courses? They went two places--to concentrate on research and graduate students and also into small upper level courses.
In the '60s, federal funding for research soared and lured many professors away to new labs and projects. ("It was the federal money that corrupted us," an administrator said earlier this month.) The funds also created another distraction by spurring the growth of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS)-- a 45 per cent growth in the number of students between 1952 and 1974.
IN THE DECADE ending in 1972, the number of 200-level courses (primarily for graduates) rose by 57 per cent, while the number of lower level courses grew only by 14 per cent. The effect of the disproportionate growth is evident in figures for 1974-75 which show that while 43 per cent of the courses the Faculty offered had fewer than nine undergraduates enrolled, these accounted for only seven per cent of al enrollments. Only about 12 per cent of the courses had over 50 persons, but they included fully half of all enrollments.
Thus, the Faculty is teaching more small courses, but these are primarily for graduate students. Meanwhile, undergraduates have become more clustered in the big lecture courses where they have contact with teaching fellows instead of actual Faculty members.
And so, in the past couple of decades a serious imbalance had developed between the amount of teaching resources devoted to GSAS and the amount left over for the Colleges. As Rosovsky said in his 1974 letter, "Plainly, we can identify inequities--from the point of view of the average undergraduate--in the distribution of teaching resources."
The Task Force on Pedagogical Improvement did not deal with these serious issues of resource allocation--such matters are the domain of the Task Force on Educational Resources. The pedagogy report,k with its proposals for greater evaluation of and improvement in teaching skills, focused on the quality of existing teaching and, as a result, its recommendations are for cosmetic improvements that, while necessary, will have little impact on the far more important problem of the present quantity of undergraduate instruction.
THE TASK FORCE on Educational Resources will not complete its report until next fall. Whitlock said recently that the group's study has taken much longer than expected because of the difficulties involved in determining how resources could be better distributed between the Colleges and GSAS and among concentrations.
By next fall, it the educational resources task force deals strongly with these issues, especially now when GSAS is shrinking in size, its report could very well supplant the report of the Task Force on the Core Curriculum as the most change-provoking document to come out of the University's review of undergraduate education--a document that the Faculty will not be able to ignore.