higher education

Below is the first part of an article appearing in today's "Yale Daily News." For the full article, click here.

One of the Yale Admissions Office’s favorite selling points to prospective students — that, unlike at many other large research universities, all of Yale’s tenured professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences teach undergraduate courses — is widely believed by students and faculty.

But it’s not that simple. In fact, there is no policy requiring professors to teach undergraduates, and in any given semester, a handful of them, for a variety of reasons, do not.

According to this year’s Yale College admissions viewbook, “100 percent of tenured professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences teach undergraduate courses.” Interviews with professors in several departments reveal that faculty members believe this to be a rule. However, Deputy Provost J. Lloyd Suttle confirmed Thursday that no such policy exists.

Indeed, a search on the Online Course Information Web site reveals at least a dozen Yale faculty members who are not teaching undergraduate courses this year. In many cases, Yale College students still have the opportunity to be taught by these faculty members if they enroll in graduate-level courses, and administrators said that (while they do not have formal records) they have not identified any professors who routinely do not teach undergraduates.

Still, admissions representatives often use the idea that professors must teach undergraduates to emphasize Yale’s focus on undergraduate teaching.

“Most of the tour guides when discussing the introductory biology courses will mention that, even at the introductory level, there are Yale’s most renowned professors in the classroom, for example [Nobel laureate] Sidney Altman in MCDB 200: Molecular Biology,” tour guide Matthew Sheehan ’11 said.

While Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeff Brenzel said he understands that scheduling conflicts can preclude professors from teaching undergraduates in a given academic year, he said he still believes Yale expects all tenured faculty to teach undergraduate courses.

“Our viewbook states that 100 percent of tenured faculty in the Arts and Sciences teach undergraduates, and we convey that to [prospective students], because that is Yale’s expectation,” Brenzel wrote in an e-mail.

As I sat down to compose this note I proimised myself I wouldn't get worked up. Today during some somewhat relevant googling I happened up one of those Term Paper Mill sites. You know the ones. You've been assigned to write about Mercutio's relationship to Romeo and you find on the web that this company will sell you a 5-page paper on said topic. Everyone in academe (on one side of the paper-assigning divide or the other) has pondered this, at least briefly. I always assumed that if one of my students bought a ready-made paper from such an enterprise, I would notice it immediately--either because of the odd and invariably somewhat off-the-point presentation of the argument or because it would be badly argued and poorly written too.

But the price. Here's the kicker. Today, looking for a quick e-text of Stevens's poem "Mozart, 1935" (readers of this blog will know that I am somewhat obsessed with this poem)--I was too lazy at the moment to walk to the shelf for my copy of the book--I found a 5-page paper "interpreting" this poem. The cost: $59.75. I was so chagrined that I was very tempted to buy a copy and then...what?....expose? rail against? these people. What's more, the little summary reading of the poem remarkably resembles my own reading of it (in a book and at least two articles, the latter available online). Is it possible that I would have been buying a hack-job remix of my own article on the poem? (Click on the image above and left for a larger view.)

I think I would have asked for reimbursement from my university-sponsored research fund for this expense. After all, it would have been research. No?

How desperate would a student have to be to use one of these sites?

As Stevens says, "Play the present."

A year ago (3/20/08) I wrote this:

In today’s NYT “Thursday Styles” section the lead story, under a huge photo of a famous crusty TV law prof, is a story about “the professor as open book.” Wow! News! Now students and others can discover their professors’ red wine preferences, their favorite films, their social-networking profiles, “friend” them. Or not — or not — if the academic in question does not choose to put such stuff up, which is most often the case, even at this late date into the internet age. So what really is the story here? The key perhaps is where the story runs: the “Style” section, not the higher-ed page/half-page in the main first section. This story befits the My Space/You Tube/no-one-is-private-anymore craze and has nothing to do with academics or education or the professoriat per se.