An active faculty

The easy answer to this question is to replace “priority” with “parity.” But a better answer is to give priority to the appropriate criteria in each case. Quite apart from the fundamental importance of education to human society and culture in general, as a practical matter teaching must have a high priority because it is student tuition that supports the institution, and the latter in all honesty should give students their money’s worth. But the criteria for judging teacher quality should include not just classroom performance, but how a faculty member participates outside of class, in staff meetings, and on other public occasions at which the member shows his educational knowledge and competence before an audience of colleagues qualified to judge it.

Students alone should not be expected to judge teaching ability. It is too easy for their impressions to be formed by the popularity of a spectacular standup lecturer who may be just a better political performer and not someone who really understands how students learn by doing instead of just by listening.

On the other hand, research of a specialized, scientific kind, is often highly rarefied and escapes the public domain into thin air. Yet without informed support, the public domain itself becomes empty, atomized to pieces. The other trouble with “research,” as it is commonly judged, is that it depends too much on publication and the latter all too often is market-oriented, not education-oriented. Even as an academic market, it still tends to prioritize novelty and innovation, and those are not sound criteria for education, which should show as much respect for perennial wisdom as for innovation, the lasting value of which is often questionable.

My predecessor as provost at Columbia, Jacques Barzun, said a lot in a few words when in his classic version of the Columbia Faculty Handbook he addressed the issue of how much publication should count in tenure decisions. “Publish or Perish” was the standard dictum. Barzun said, “Publish or Perish—Perish the thought.”

The essential point is that faculty should measure up to genuine public standards, not just exhibit popular appeal, and in academia the public standard should be educational—neither just academic in the research sense nor grandstanding before a popular audience. How one performs at discussions of educational issues, especially curricular ones, should be a consideration—in public gatherings, in college settings, or by participation in community exchanges in print, such as The Canon affords—with an audience that includes students and teachers as peers in the educational sense, both lay and professional at once.

We are fortunate to have The Canon serve this function for curricular issues as the Arts and Sciences faculty meetings these days more often serve the purpose of labor union representation (faculty interests versus the administration) than they do the interests of degree programs and the college community.

The author is the John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University. He was provost from 1971-1978. From Columbia, he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1941, a Ph.D. in 1953, and an honorary Doctorate of Letters in 1994.