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The problem is not the overblown cry that professors are forced to "publish or perish." Most of the good teachers, in fact, cannot resist publishing; they have something they want to say to the world beyond their classrooms. Every teacher needs time to reflect and explore the frontiers of his field if he is to keep his teaching fresh. But whether all kinds of research always help teaching is problematical. Too often, says University of Utah English Chairman Kenneth Eble, scholarly magazines are established merely so that they can be "sent to editors of other magazines," and the scholar's great goal is to "write enough books about other people to become, well within his lifetime, the subject of still other people's books."
The Ph.D. Myth. Even more dismaying is widespread professorial snobbishness toward anyone who consciously thinks about the techniques of good teaching. "It's a myth that once a man gets a Ph.D. he's a good teacher," says Earlham College President Landrum Boiling. The stress on the Ph.D. is, in fact, under sharp attack for producing narrow specialists. University of Texas Classics Chairman William Arrowsmith says that "liberal arts colleges should have the guts to say to Harvard and Yale that they don't want any more overtrained, overspecialized Ph.D.s, many of whom are really incompetent to talk to undergraduates." University of California President Clark Kerr deplores the fact that "nothing is being done" to train teachers, calls it "a tragedy that we take teaching assistants, throw them in without preparation, leave them by and large neglected."
The sheer shortage of teachers and a system of tenure that ensures every professor his job for a lifetime prevent administrators from firing stale and incompetent teachers. Sociology Professor Robert Nisbet of the University of California's Riverside campus calls tenure "a blend of mystique and the sacred, as nearly impregnable a form of differential privilege as the mind of man has ever devised." The teaching profession, says the Danforth Foundation's Merrimon Cuninggim, "is the only profession that has no definition for malpractice." Even mental deterioration is no cause for dismissal, and, says Nisbet, "a single man can cause intellectual blight year after year" in students and faculty.
While teaching is a highly personal blend of style, scholarship and attitudes, the qualities of the great teachers of the past are not at all mysterious. Socrates, bearded and bald, gave his name to today's best seminar style simply by plucking insights out of youthful minds with incisive questions. Aristotle drew upon the illustrative experiences of his reckless youth to inspire other youths to be good; his Lyceum linked research and teaching by analyzing biological specimens. In a medieval age of faith, the unconventional Peter Abelard employed shafts of wit and the theory that "constant questioning is the first key to wisdom" to draw throngs to his school of dialectics near Paris.