The only solution is to be much more careful about who you offer tenure to, if you have to offer tenure. (In my experience, anyway, tenure is simply something that senior professors use to bully junior professors and get lazy about their teaching.)

I too have met many PhD’d professors who are incompetent teachers. But all other things being equal, it’s surely better to hire a PhD than someone with a Master’s degree, just because the PhD involves an extra five years of education. That has to be something we value! The five years is just long enough to begin to get healthily cynical about higher education–notice how many folks drop out of their programs before they finish their dissertations. It also confers a certain depth of knowledge–someone with only a Master’s level education is only two years ahead of the seniors s/he is teaching.

The lack of a doctorate is sometimes–not always–evidence that the professor lacked an interest in education, and simply wanted a job. The Master’s degree was the minimum requirement. I’ve had many colleagues who fell into that category. I’m not altogether sure that sort of lack of initiative needs to be rewarded.

Cheers,
Mark Adderley (www.markadderley.net).

I don’t know how unrealistic it is. Look, for example, at the Labor Program at Berea College. Students receive full tuition scholarships in exchange for their participation, as well as a stipend.

http://www.berea.edu/laborprogram/about.asp

Thank you for your comments. I too have found that one of the advantages of teaching at a Christian liberal arts college is that you can be more explicit about what you are doing, and thus with more integrity. Part of the reason why Fish and Meilaender wrote what they did is because their colleagues are being very explicit, and not in a good way. It makes hash out of the idea of a UNIversity.

As to your second point, I would object to the way the labor market in higher education is currently operating. Assuming the market as is, your comments make sense: that is, if we want to have standardization and high degrees of mobility among the professorate. Even then, however, I think the way we hire is patently absurd. In essence, we are being asked to marry someone on the basis of one date. Someone might show up very well for that one or two day interview, but a couple of years later you could have a huge headache on your hands. For that reason, I would like the academic labor market to be reconstructed so that no one is offered a tenure-track position on the basis of one interview. I recognize that this would alter the incentive system, but then again if everyone does it no one school would be at a disadvantage. This would give schools more flexibility in determining the rightness of a person over a period of a couple of years. I can’t think of any other labor market that does things as absurdly as the academy does, with the possible exception of the medical profession. But then again, soulcraft is both trickier and more important than care of the body.

Having been a full-time college/university teacher now for 18 years, I have seen enough people with doctorates who are incompetent to make me question the wisdom of the whole enterprise. I have been on enough searches to know that a) letters of recommendation are nearly worthless; and, b) in the pressure of having to make a decision with limited information, departments will often make decisions for very odd reasons. Since we know so little about their teaching abilities, their commitment to the school, or how they will handle tenure, we tend to hire them on other criteria, often arbitrary, with frequent bad results.

I’d observe, first, that it’s virtually impossible to teach without conveying, usually quite subtly and often without your own knowledge, your moral values. Stanley Fish teaches relativist moral values, but doesn’t, I’m sure, consider them to be moral values at all. The thing I’ve enjoyed most about teaching at a Catholic college is that I don’t have to pretend I’m not teaching with moral values. I can, in other words, be honest. More important than this, though, is the fact that my students don’t have the impression that I’m being completely impartial. I don’t give them the impression that I’m morally neutral, so they don’t have to decode that along with all the other matters they have to decode–the meaning of Dante and Chaucer and so forth.

I don’t think there’s any such thing as a morally neutral discourse. It’s nice to be able to quite pretending there is.

Second, on the matter of doctorates. Obviously, the possession of a doctorate doesn’t guarantee that its possessor is a gifted teacher. However, the possession of a doctorate rather than simply a master’s degree does guarantee a certain level of exposure to higher education–often breeding a certain healthy skepticism about the whole process–that is useful. It’s not perhaps useful in the classroom, but it is in the necessary “backstage” venues of committees, faculty meetings, and so forth.

One of the institutions at which I taught for several years had a habit of employing folks without doctorates. Part of the reason for this was financial–you don’t have to pay an MA as much as a PhD. I think there’s a real problem employing someone in an institution that supposedly holds education in high regard if the person has only one or two years’ more education than the institution’s graduates.

I wouldn’t exclude someone from employment on the mere basis of not holding a doctorate; but the MA would certainly have to demonstrate something so superior that it would make up for an additional five years of education.

Hiring is a matter that should be taken very seriously by all institutions and, unfortunately, it is now a buyer’s market. There are far more PhDs than jobs. It’s worth taking the time to find the right match–a person isn’t going to be happy in his or her job, after all, if he or she isn’t a good match.

Cheers,
Mark Adderley,
Wyoming Catholic College.

I recently had a conversation with a graduating senior who told me that her English major matched seamlessly to her Political Science major for in the former they were always reading literature that dealt with political and social issues. This comment depressed me immensely, and not only because (with apologies to Wilson and Peters) most English professors sound like idiots when they talk about politics, but also because students aren’t learning to appreciate literature as literature.

Such politicizing of all subjects reflects an absence of prudence and fidelity, virtues related to a good education. For this reason, Fish and Schroeder are right when they point out that professors ought to teach a discipline of inquiry and that education becomes dull when they politicize or indoctrinate. I don’t think anything in my essay gainsays this claim. Moral formation occurs in the nooks and crannies of education. For example, if I have the students reading Marx, I have an obligation to teach the text employing the virtues of generosity (what’s the best possible argument for the claim Marx is making here?), charity, honesty, and so forth, while at the same time locating such arguments within a larger understanding of what is good and true. These issues are not settled with reference to technique, but are enacted prudentially but those who know their stuff, but can communicate such knowledge in terms of the good life. Modeling would become decisive in this regard.

As a newly minted college grad from a small school where a degree of moralizing made its way into the classroom, when I read Fish’s Save the World on Your Own Time last summer, I found that the professors who did the most work in making me think about the life of virtue were the ones who fit Fish’s mold of good professorship. They were, by and large, good teachers of American Literature, English Romantic Poetry, Modern Philosophy and Philosophy of Language–that is, of the disciplines they were trained in. They published with some frequency interesting not overly-technical or overly-specialized work in subfields in those disciplines. And by and large, it was the material they taught me that led to a kind of moral education, rather than the sort of personal relationships and one-on-one attention you mention here–though such have been quite meaningful, as well.

I guess I’d like to hear from others: am I alone in experiencing this phenomenon? That is, were the professors who most inspired you to some kind of attention to the moral life (if they did at all) ones who ‘attended intentionally to your moral development’ or were they the ones who, in many ways, exemplified that moral life through work they did as conduits for and contributors to a largely disciplinary body of knowledge?

A string of thoughts:

Character formation happens in the early years.
You can’t trust the professorship with your children’s moral education.
They don’t even know what they believe in most cases.
There is no way to go back to the past.

Small is beautiful!

This would allow for great diversity – more than we have now – while enhancing honesty. I do agree with you, that such institutions will likely be much smaller than what we now have.

I have objection for someone who think that professors should be responsible for teaching a student what moriality they think should be best for this/that community.
In reading the essay and comments I invision a maze, some rats and cheese.
I am certian there already exist consiquences for a person who lies, steals cheats or plagiarizes. Is that not sufficient? That you want to use a “deft touch” to bring them to the correct moral conduct is mildly Owellian.
College’s cannot make utopias by redefining, however subltey, the morality of its students. A few students will, lie, steal, or cheat no matter what type of university thet be found in. You want to make cog’s, not educated adults ready for the real world.

leave the moral lessons up to thier parents and religion.
Dtenny