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Instead of finding the kind of teacher who seeks what Harvard College Dean John Monro calls "a mind-to-mind confrontation" with students, undergraduates often stare across 30 rows of seats at a listless scholar reading from his own textbook and begrudging the time spent away from his esoteric research. In smaller classes, students are likely to meet some harassed teaching assistant absorbed in his specialized graduate studies, sometimes not even teaching in his own sphere of knowledge. "We have sought out ability with football quarterbacks, we are beginning to do it with executives and musicians, but we haven't started with teachers," says Cornell President James Perkins. Even in some small colleges, where teaching is supposed to be the sole goal, says one university president who has visited nearly 400 campuses, "what they call an education is a fraud."
Forty students recently quit a Northwestern University criminology class because the professor belabored obscure theories hour after hour. "To take something as inherently interesting as criminology and make it dull is a crime—he really had to work at it," recalls Senior Andrew Malcolm. At U.C.L.A., Senior Sharon Jones protests that "if I want to complain about a test, first I have to see the reader, then the teaching assistant; then I may get to see 'God.' "
The troubles with teaching stem from healthy causes. Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt formed his New Deal brain trust, professors have been leaping down from their ivory towers to grapple with the earthly day-to-day problems of government and business. Their expertise is suddenly in demand to combat urban blight in Boston, famine in Bombay. "At any one given time," quips University of Chicago Dean Wayne Booth, "a first-class university has at least 10% of its professors in airplanes." Federal money devoted to research projects has multiplied 200 times since 1940, from $74 million to about $15 billion annually.
Bigger Job, Fewer Hours. The teaching task has similarly soared. In the past ten years, student enrollment has more than doubled, from 2,660,000 to 5,526,000. But the number of new Ph.D.s, who form the major pool of college teachers, has increased only 73%—and less than half of these have actually entered teaching. As a result, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching predicts that the nation's colleges will need about 35,700 more teachers by 1970 than will actually be available.
The shortage of teachers—and their new respectability—has given professors mobility and financial independence, which too many use to demand fewer teaching hours so that they can spend more time in research, writing and lucrative consultation. At the nation's top universities, the average science professor carries only six classroom hours a week, the humanities teacher about eight. A "star" system has evolved in which, for example, Columbia College Dean David Truman wonders how he can keep a professor whom another school has offered $30,000 a year, with no teaching and $100,000 for laboratory equipment. Some 70,000 professors now devote full time to research, treble the number of a decade ago.