By Donald M. Taylor
I remember that first day with a dream-like vividness —give me a break, that was thirty years ago. So there I was, a twenty-five year old with a Ph.D. not 48 hours old, walking tentatively through the main gates of McGill University, my new academic home. I had no idea where the psychology department was, let alone thoughts of laboratories, committee meetings and the most intimidating of all, tenure. I veered right through the gates and was confronted with what to me was some medieval excuse for a building. Later I would learn to appreciate the historical elegance and uniqueness of where physics calls home, but at that moment my eyes were drawn to a plaque on a corner stone of the building. Against a deep red background the gold lettering described the remarkable accomplishments of Ernest Rutherford whose original research on the atom was conducted in that very building. Upon reading, this renowned scientist came to life. Having no clue about him as a person, I fantasized a bespectacled very ordinary guy poking around a laboratory, mind racing a mile a minute, and filled with a passion to understand the universe he was a part of. Those thoughts inspired me. My complete intimidation at the prospect of being the new social psychologist at McGill was replaced with a sense that if little Ernie could thrive here, hey why can't I?
I finally found my way up the hill to a 1960's ugly eight-story concrete box with hermetically sealed windows that housed the psychology department on the top floor. My first encounter with key members of the department was warm, encouraging, and filled with informal, but vital information. Their focus was expected and familiar to the point of providing me comfort. The location of my office and papers to be signed in order to get paid were dispensed with in a matter of seconds. The real issue involved where to find my laboratory. What this necessitated was departmental flexibility since much of my research was conducted in the field, in developing countries where intergroup tensions, my domain of study, were ongoing. I was given advice from an array of senior professors that I did and do respect enormously, and their advice is still very much a part of my thinking: "You gotta get a program of research going," "Keep doing the stuff that has paid off in publications, and that will buy you the freedom to try new and crazy ideas," "Don't waste your time playing around with small ideas," and "play with the big boys --in those days most were boys--in the discipline." Pretty heady stuff but the focus on research was what I expected and what I had been trained for.
It was only at the end of the meeting and as I headed for the door that I was casually told that my teaching began that day, that it was a course in introductory social psychology, that there would be some three hundred students, and that at the front desk someone would point me in the direction of the classroom. I swaggered into that first class and was confronted with an amphitheater overflowing with students; after all, this was, if not a required course, at least a necessary one for many students. The mood was electric for this was the early seventies, a time of student protest and they were focussed on their rights. So they shouted out loudly about the deplorable circumstance of having to sit in the aisle, and the overall size of the class in general. I responded equally loudly that if they didn't like it they could walk, and now would be a good time to do it. And so the class settled and I spent a semester with young bright highly inquisitive students who were determined to change the world.
I was happy to teach the introductory course to my discipline, and even happier when I was given the opportunity to teach a seminar in my specialty, intergroup conflict, for the second semester. What a perfect teaching profile: I got to expose a large number of students to the discipline I represent, and a small seminar to a select group of students committed to the particular area that was the focus of my research.
Thirty years later I still teach the same two courses, and on the surface little has changed. OK, so the introductory course has grown from 300 to 700 students, and my seminar has grown from 15 students to 200. But that aside, it's still the same old same old. Or is it?
Cosmetic but Profound Changes
I believe that much has changed, most of it invisible but certain to have a major impact on the essence of university education. But let's begin with the more obvious changes. First, the mood of the students has changed. Thirty years ago students saw themselves as prime movers and agents of social change. They took their own occupational future for granted, in principle if not in specifics. Their focus was on the state of the world around them including civil rights, unjust wars, and poverty. This made them vocal and challenging. Most of all they were anxious to intellectually engage social problems. So, beyond the fixation on grades that our system requires, students expected and wanted to talk to their professor, not just about what would be on the midterm exam, but about social issues.
Today the mood is different. Students are living through a time of economic uncertainty. The shift from a resource based to information based economy with its accompanying technology has made projecting a career path virtually impossible. Add to this the legacy of downsizing, rightsizing, and reorganization that have rendered job security and predictability obsolete. Small wonder that students today are conservative, cautious and pragmatic. The result is that they follow our institutional lead with a focus on grades and formal course requirements, and through it all students juggle a part-time Mcjob.
Second, there have been cutbacks in post-secondary education that are obvious at every turn. University has become a cafeteria where you pluck from a vast array of advertised offerings, many of which are not regularly available, a loosely connected set of formal courses, never once having to engage the cook. You sit down with your loaded tray in a large sterile room, hunch over your selections and devour them in no particular order. Upon completion, strategically placed signs point to where you dump your leftovers and where you stack your tray. And out you go, and no one saw you coming, and no one saw you going, have a great life.
These are important changes in the mood of students, and the infrastructure to support education, but they are obvious ones, ones that any long-term teacher recognizes. But there have been other changes. The changes I am concerned about in this essay are less visible, they are gradual, but they are profound. They involve technology and bureaucracy in the face of too many students and too few dollars, and ultimately the essence of the university experience. It is time to reflect before it is too late.
The groundwork for my concern can, perhaps, best be delineated by describing structural changes that I have noticed to the course I teach, all designed by well-meaning educators to deal with an increase in students during a time of shrinking resources. The accumulated effect of these fine-tuning changes has gone by unnoticed, but its impact has been to transform the essence of the university experience.
The Teacher and the Student
The creeping bureaucracy and technology designed to address the "more students, less money" dilemma has an ultimate impact on the heart of the university experience--the relationship between teacher and student. When I first encounter a student I, like most, begin with some basic assumptions. I assume the student is bright, motivated, and above all relatively honest in terms of the purpose and content of our interaction. Oh sure, a student might invent a question for the sole purpose of appearing intelligent, or ruffle their clothes and mess their hair to drive home the impression of being overworked. But these are minor deviations to an overall impression of integrity.
I hope that students approach me, and my teaching colleagues, with the same basic assumptions. I hope, despite wide variations in our styles, that students' begin with the hypothesis that we are basically honest with a genuine desire to create an environment for the student to learn and get ahead.
Either of us may begin with the assumption of honesty in the relationship, only to abandon that premise in the face of disconfirming evidence. The result would hardly be a relationship that is conducive to learning. Nevertheless, the operating principle for both student and teacher is clear: "I will assume you are honest, until you prove me wrong."
How destructive would it be if the operating principle were the exact opposite? What if the principle was, "I will assume you are dishonest, until you prove me wrong"? If such a reversed principle was widespread the effect would be disastrous from a pedagogical never mind purely human perspective.
But this is precisely the effect that our modern education is producing. Let's begin with a striking example, and then review a litany of lessor realities whose cumulative effect reinforces this fundamental change in the relationship between student and teacher.
Cheating on Exams: When you have a large class, examinations become a nightmare. Seven hundred students squashed into an amphitheatre has the university consumed with the potential for cheating. Moreover, the large number of students dictates that the examination must be in multiple-choice format; easy to grade by computer, pedagogically ridiculous, ah, but oh so easy to cheat. The university's response to this potential reality is to dream up a complex series of practices designed to stay one step ahead of students, all of whom they assume will cheat at the drop of a hat. And who precisely is going to take on the policing role? The front-line teacher.
The professor is first required to create a multiple choice exam, the only format that lends itself to instant computerized grading, rather than feedback from an experienced grader. Next, through the magic of computers, the teacher generates a number of different versions of the examination, varying the question order and possible answer order, all as a disincentive for cheating. The next step involves ensuring that the students are not in close proximity to write the exam, snuggling is fine for listening to lectures but not for exams where everyone will cheat. So, now we spread out the 700 students by commandeering a number of additional classrooms. Of course then we need an army of invigilators to catch the crooks. No problem, we engage our graduate students who are supposed to be learning to be effective teachers and turn them into exam cops. But wait, we can go one step further by orchestrating a fixed seating pattern. That is, every student will be assigned a seat in a room, and any student who chooses the wrong seat will be penalized. That way we avoid friends sitting together and we can actually apply a computerized logarithm to highlight cheaters whose wrong answers correlate highly with each other.
From teacher to police officer in a heartbeat. The role has changed. The professor's default assumption is that the student is a dishonest cheater, a perception that is reciprocated by the student. Anyone who has taken introductory social psychology 101 knows about the famous Zimbardo experiments: Take normal students, arbitrarily divide them into prison-guards and prisoners, and guess what? Each student acts out his or her role with frightening authenticity. Turn professors into police officers and that's what you get, a climate of distrust, increased dishonesty and mutual competition to beat the system.
The role of teacher and student has now been fundamentally changed. The teacher begins with the assumption that students are fundamentally dishonest, out to obtain the highest mark with the least effort, by hook or by crook. The student perceives the teacher as someone who is plotting their destruction, waiting for them to slip-up so they can prevent them from achieving their goals.
Cheating on Essays: I still can't bring myself to base a student's grade for a course entirely on multiple choice exams. So I require an essay worth 35% of the student's grade. Well, it's not exactly an essay but rather an eight to ten page research proposal designed to address an important social psychological issue of their choice. Even this exercise is a compromise since for years I actually required the students to conduct an experiment, and produce a ten-page report that conformed to the norms of scientific writing. That exercise was abolished when the ethics police scared me and the students about the potential for lawsuits if a student conducted an unethical project. Virtually every project was deemed potentially unethical. After all, interviewing someone on the street might be deemed an invasion of privacy or cause them psychological trauma.
So the exercise has been reduced to a research proposal and a major challenge is catching students who plagiarize or hand in a paper they did not write. I'm back to policing. Every year I have to change the required length of the paper; much easier to detect if a student has handed in a paper written by someone else from a previous year. What I really miss is a former graduate student who was like a mongoose on a snake. Among 700 papers she could spot one she had read a year ago, and she would immediately recognize text from any number of social psychology books.
But policing has gone high tech. The latest gimmick is for students to buy papers off the web. Now they have invented a program that allows the professor to scan in 700 papers and it will search the various web sights to seek a match with any paper on any sight that sells papers to students. I think I can honestly say that if I could eliminate the time associated with policing, dealing with demands for extensions, and repeated questions about when the paper is due and how many pages and what section follows what, I could actually have a meaningful conversation with each student about the essential thesis and methodology of their research proposal.
Reinforcing Mutual Distrust
This very fundamental shift from teacher to police officer is reinforced by a number of subtler procedures. It all begins way before the first day of classes with the proud announcement that with the university's new network of computers, the assignment of courses to a particular classroom and time can be coordinated centrally. Marvelous, at a time of shrinking physical resources and increased student enrollment, now we can maximize the use of classroom space. And so a new classroom assignment bureaucracy is established that does its best to ensure that no one teaches in his or her own building. So now I am ousted from the psychology building and required to shlepp down to the main campus to a room that can accommodate 700 students at a new time. Don't worry about having to carry an eighty-pound box in mid-winter every time I have a handout for the students. Don't worry about the fact that most of the new majors students in psychology have no idea where the psychology department is. And this is the important point. The students miss out on informal chat with fellow students and professors since they are not wandering the halls and cafeteria between classes. They even have difficulty making office hours for meaningful discussion, or indeed to complain to their Prof. about one problem or another.
Every semester I go through the same ritual. I am assigned to a classroom in some far-away building, and on the first day of classes I arrive to survey a room with 160 seats designed for your basic vertically challenged, pencil-thin student, a computerized class list of 150 names, and a room full of 200 students. So in mid-winter students sit on steps or stand at the back and the minute class is finished I phone action central. I am given the speech I have received dutifully for the past ten years. "Oh don't worry about it, you see students can add or drop courses over the next few weeks, many of them will be shopping around, and so within a week your class will settle in at about 150 students." "But that's what you've been telling me for ten years I explain with my usual humility and patience, and it always settles in at about 230 students. The annual reply, "well I'm new to this job, so I wouldn't know about that" Here we go again
So, don't worry about the fact that because of bureaucratic screw-ups your whole class is forced to move to a new classroom a third of the way through a semester. But this classroom, like all large classrooms, is equipped to the max with gadgets that allow for power-point presentations, slides against a midnight blue background, and video equipment in case a movie is a handy diversion from teaching. All I want is a walk-around microphone, instead of a squelching noose that allows me to pace three feet left and right before I hang myself. What if I could walk around while I teach, you know wakeup the students in the back, or steal a cookie from someone in row 60. But no, I'm told that the mountain that serves as the unique focus of my beautiful city precludes the use of such a mike. So how did the Rolling Stones level the mountain when they entertained 40,000 people in this city? Hey, I'm no Mick Jagger. But the bureaucracy never taught a class either.
All of these minor inconveniences that have stimulated this rather selfish rant create an environment where students are hard pressed to believe that the university has their best interests at heart. Moreover, these experiences alienate student from teacher.
Students and teachers adapt to large classes in artificial but important ways by evolving norms that make the class predictable and comfortable, hopefully so that unpredictable and sometimes uncomfortable ideas can be explored. Students tend to choose the same seats, seek out the same friends to sit with, and arrive at the same time. Meanwhile, the professor becomes comfortable with the layout of the room and tries to maneuver the teaching devices so that they will not detract from his or her spontaneous teaching style. When classrooms are moved, overheads don't work, microphones are inadequate, indeed when the university cancels classes for some insane reason, the rhythm and bonding process are affected.
Continued...