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A related cynical view is that (maybe delving too) deeply, it’s the primary goal of few individual professor’s–and that people become professors and find satisfaction in professing in diverse ways. Also I think a lot of professors deeply identify as “professors” and, ala Ivan Tribble, have an idea of what a professor is that doesn’t square with the most modern and enlightened findings about good teaching. Many seem to view their teaching styles as personal and an expression of who they are. So I suspect we’re running up against something deep and entrenched in this blog squeamishness. That doesn’t mean necessarily that, ala Planck’s line about the acceptance of new scientific theories, the institution won’t evolve any faster than the old fogeys die off…but I suppose it might. At any rate, I think righteous resistance is par for the course.

When I think of it, it wouldn’t surprise me if this hubbub didn’t get bigger than that which occurred over the intro of ethnic studies. The professor-student relationship is an ancient tradition and key to the whole concept of the university. Note we don’t beg for data or analysis regarding whether the taboo against teacher-student sex and romance makes sense. Certain aspects of the role of the professor just seem obvious.

This much I can say — the book begins by laying out the parameters of the study, particularly how they determined who the “best” teachers are. The criteria had to be flexible enough to fit a wide range of disciplines, yet firm enough to be comparable across those disciplines. While student feedback was used, it was far from the only or most important criteria — the authors note that many of the professors they found most effective were not particularly well-liked by students, though most of them managed to earn the respect and appreciation of their students, even when grudging. Other criteria included performance on standardized tests, such as the LSAT or board exams, or exams given across a department within a school. E.g. if 12 sections of Chemistry all use the same final, then a prof whose students score consistently higher than those in the other 11 sections must be doing something noteworthy. Completion rates, law/med/grad school acceptance, publication rates, and other factors were all considered where applicable.

Two main themes have stuck out for me so far. One is that the best teachers seem to have a highly developed sense of how humans learn. The other is that the best profs tend to work against the kinds of hierarchy mentioned above — encouraging meaningful discussion as among equals has been a keystone of many of the practices. Interestingly, a lot of the profs in the study did not use graded assignments much — though I’ve yet to come across the part of the book that explains how they reconcile this with the end-of-semester requirement to assign a grade. I can’t believe that the best profs are just handing in a roster of A’s across the board, at least not without serious challenge from their administrations.

The book is not without some problems, notably in the “best practices” approach to research design (e.g. what if the worst profs, the ones they *didn’t* study, do exactly the same thing?) but I’ll save my critique for when I have time to deal with the book more in-depth.

Ironically, the more hierarchical university where I previously worked was also worse at providing this kind of guidance – so faculty tended to cultivate an “aura” (not all faculty, of course, but organisational culture favoured this approach) that tended to infantilise students, while also explicitly adopting a “students are adults – they should be free to sink or swim” attitude toward guidance. To me, this seemed a serious abdication of responsibility…

In my experience (not simply with uni students – I have also, e.g., designed high school curricula, specialised curricula for students with learning disabilities, etc.), it actually doesn’t take all that long to get students to the point that they can take appropriate initiative in directing their own study. But you have to support them while they orient themselves, cultivate their own sense of intellectual curiosity, develop a sense for their own strengths and weaknesses, etc. Faculty expertise can be very helpful to students engaged in this process; faculty “aura”, however, tends to get in the way – if only by establishing the professor as a sort of uber-Freudian-father-figure, with whom students need then to break to establish their own intellectual independence… ;-P

Perhaps I am misdiagnosing the cause of my students’ surprise, but the point remains that maintaining certain kinds of distinction between professors and students can distinctly impede students’ ability to master skills that are absolutely central to higher level academic work.

The other side of the coin is, of course, that undergraduates come to us fresh from nearly two decades of schooling in which learn what the teacher tells you to learn and regurgitate on exams is the norm. It isn’t enough to simply say, let’s get rid of these barriers. Simply tearing them down will leave most of our students in a blind funk. We need to think about a process that weans them away from schooling and prepares them to function more independently.

I still remember the shock and delight of my first semester in graduate school. I had gone to ask Prof. Jack Roberts, whom I’d met at a summer program in quantitative anthropology, what I should take this first semester. Roberts replied, “The whole point of being a graduate student is to stop being a student.” He pointed to the library sitting across the quad and added, “Why don’t you go over there and find out what you’re interested in?”

More importantly, though, I’m not sure our only options are to “treat students in all respects” as peers, vs. to maintain a strict hierarchy (even if mutually constituted by the expectations and practices of both professors and students). I have studied and taught in the past in an extremely hierarchical university, and am currently studying and teaching in an extremely non-hierarhical one. As a student, I vastly prefer the less hierarchical version and, as a staff member, I find it also suits my teaching style (i.e., fewer staff here engage in behaviour that strikes me as borderline bullying, while a number of staff at my previous university probably crossed this line… Of course, my previous university may have been an extreme case – I was always struck, because I also working in the private sector at the same time, by how much worse students were treated by many professors, than even the most junior employees would be treated in most workplaces…)

I don’t know whether students perform better abstractly in a more or less hierarchical system. My guess would be that intensely hierarchical systems can generate a degree of existential angst that some high-performing or otherwise better adapted students might find motivating, while more borderline students or students who don’t “grok” academic culture quickly would be more likely to drop out before getting an opportunity to find their feet. But I may be over-extrapolating from too limited a pool of examples…

Nevertheless, in neither institution was the distinction between professors and students unclear. The difference, mainly, relates to whether the distinction involved quasi-unavoidable differences – e.g., the professor sets the ground rules for the standard of work to pass the course, knows a bit more about some things than the students (hopefully), remains sufficiently aware that the student is in a structurally vulnerable situation, and therefore avoids abusing that situation with inappropriate intimacy, etc.

Going beyond this, to present some kind of “aura” in a professorial role, seems to me to be counter-productive to conveying core academic skills – critical thought, evaluation of evidence, complex argument, etc. And, in this respect, I think you’ve hit on a salient comparison when you mention the priesthood: cultivating an aura makes absolute sense, when you’re speaking about an institution that wants to cultivate an appreciation of mystery. If a university, however, is trying to cultivate this kind of aura around its practitioners, it seems to me that this is a fundamentally self-undermining (and arguably also unethical) approach for an institution dedicated to the search (as unfashionable as this might sound) for scientific truth – a search that contains within it the premises that there are better and worse interpretations of empirical evidence, that existing interpretations are hypothetical in character and therefore can be contested by, and need to defend themselves again, competing interpretations, etc.

I was struck on my latest round of student evaluations that a fairly large number of students mentioned being surprised by that fact that I would tell them when I personally wasn’t sure of something, and when the academic community as a whole wasn’t sure of something, and encourage them to argue with a hypothesis I put out. Now this is simply bizarre: how can you teach at the university level and not lower the aura barrier enough to let students in on the “secret” that we are putting forward hypotheses, which can be contested and which we must be able to defend with evidence, reasonable argument, etc., if we want people to agree with us?

Perhaps I am misdiagnosing the cause of my students’ surprise, but the point remains that maintaining certain kinds of distinction between professors and students can distinctly impede students’ ability to master skills that are absolutely central to higher level academic work. Abolishing this kind of aura of authority, and accepting students as prospective equals so that they get some practice reasoning through and debating significant issues, is essential to mastering these skills. This doesn’t mean breaking down all barriers – some barriers are protective for students, and others are unavoidable since the professor objectively *does* have structural power over students’ marks. It does mean, though, asking yourself whether a particular barrier falls into one of these categories, or whether you are just using a barrier to remain in a personal cofort zone that does little to facilitate student learning.

Yes, but one could view these people as parasites on the system or free riders. The answer to the implicit question “What if everybody did that?” is unclear.