"College Professoring", by O. P. Kolstoe, Southern Illinois University Press, Feffer & Simons, Inc., London and Amsterdam, 1975, 150 pages.

Summarized by J. T. P. Yao, 7/16/00

"Just as the professor expects to exert an influence on the institution with which he is associated, so also does he expect the institution to exert an influence upon him. He expects the institution to support and facilitate his scholarship so he will, over a period of time, get better - hopefully, become the best in the world in his field. It is here that quantity and quality become confused. ... Any institution which prizes the ease with which faculty can pursue knowledge richly deserves its reputation as an academic fumble factory. Unfortunately, in order to justify extensive libraries, laboratories, equipment, and faculty most universities seem to think that a substantial number of people have to be available to use the facilities. Therefore, there is often a relationship between the size of an institution and its quality. Big and good go together. … Most professors find, however, that being left along is often as good as and sometimes better than being helped. … Thus, the desire to pursue scholarly interests, ideally with institutional sanction and support but at the very least with a minimum of institutional interference, looms as a major reason for choosing to become a college professor. Most professors prize freedom to pursue their scholarly interests above all other employment conditions: security, titles, and money. …"

"… The university setting therefore is ideally suited as a dwelling place for untried ideas. … The fact that ninety percent of the discoveries have come from institutions of higher learning makes it obvious that the chances of producing useful ideas are very high. … Tenure essentially guarantees to the college professor that … he is encouraged to explore the world of ideas with no concern for their practicality. …"

"The reputation of any department depends upon a great many things, but by and large the dominant factor is faculty expertise. …"

"Fundamentally, college faculties are hired to teach. Since most universities have at least eighty-five percent of the student body made up of undergraduates, it is obvious that the greatest probability is that new faculty will teach undergraduate classes and more than likely, the correlational law of newness will apply. … In many schools, no one may become a member of the graduate faculty until he has a record of publication of independently conducted research. … It is necessary, therefore, that the new professor collects some publications in scholarly journals. … Thus a delicate balance is struck between the professor's accountability to the institution and to the scholarly discipline which enslaves them. Their work load is an extended tightwire act between the two."

"… Although universities are publicly justified on the basis of educating the next generation, only about a third of a scholar's time is actually spent in a classroom. The rest of it is spent in finding out what to teach, for it does little good to teach something that is not true or to teach something which is true only under certain circumstances and then be unable to specify those circumstances, or to teach something in such a way that no one can understand it. It is almost ironic to call people teachers who devote more than two-thirds of their time to searching and less than one-third to teaching, yet society does just that because the payoff from the division of labor has been so unprecedented and unexpected."

"… A teacher can do little more than set conditions for allowing others to learn. A more eloquent statement of the same thing is that 'nobody can't teach nobody nothing.' The consequence of this observation attests to the functioning of a teacher as a manipulator of the learning environment. … Preparation cannot be a simple matter of having a great deal of information. If such were the case, a computer would be a superb instructor. Not that information is not important, but is not the fact by itself, but rather the interaction effect. … Proper preparation requires that the instructor not only be in command of accurate information, but also that the information be organized and related to information from other areas. Personal experiences and humorous anecdotes may spice up the presentation, but they are no substitute for solid information. Scholarship is essential to good teaching. By itself, however, it is not enough."

"The second attribute of effective teaching is communication. … The actual form of a class is usually dictated by size, content, level, intent, and location; so most professors find themselves victims of the class assignment rather than masters anyway. … Obviously the opportunity for effective communication is greatly increased if the students know almost as much as the professor, if the group is small, if the students are interested in the subject even before they take the class and if the professor considers the students kin (i.e. departmental majors). … Somehow they must develop communication to a fine art if they expect to get even moderately good evaluation ratings from their students. …"

"Most scholars have a collection of dandy papers, manuscripts, and studies of acceptable quality which were rejected by professional journals as unsuitable for publication. … One of the problems of doing research on a currently popular subject is the probability that others are doing much the same thing. … The law of supply and demand is as operable in academia as in economics. Another common reason for seemingly unreasonable rejection is the failure to relate the paper to anything previously written in the area. … Provincialism is another frequently unrecognized reason for rejection. … There is a constant need for critical evaluation of all academic efforts of a research nature. …"

"… Tenure guarantees his scholarly right to self-determination, but it does not protect him from his own incompetence. Proving incompetence is so difficult, however, that the road to tenure is deliberately strewn with obstacles designed to assure that competence has been demonstrated before tenure is offered. …"

[Readers who are interested in this book are encouraged to read the original version in its entirety. Other summary notes on faculty reward systems are available on the Internet at http://lohman.tamu.edu under the heading "Summaries of Papers ..."]

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