University of Virginia Library

Teaching Load

Suppose you were in an airport and you
walked up to the Hertz counter or the Avis
counter if you happen to like underdogs, and
told the smiling young lady (who isn't
anywhere near as pretty as the one in the
magazine) that you wanted to rent a car. She
would continue to smile, perhaps a bit
greedily, as she told you the rates. If you
happened to be rich or on an expense
account, you would probably agree to rent
the car anyway since you needed it to get
around town.

Now suppose you went out to the lot with
your receipt from the girl at the counter and
saw several types of cars - 10-year old pickup
trucks, late model 'Volkswagens, and new
Cadillacs.' All of the them were available for
the same amount of money. If the lot
attendant told you you couldn't have one of
the Cadillacs sitting there, that you had to
ride in one of the pickup trucks, you'd be
pretty angry, wouldn't you? Especially since
you were paying the same amount as the guys
who were hopping into those Cadillacs. You
might even start a demonstration or
something like that.

The University business is a lot like the
rent-a-car business. All the customers pay the
same rate. But, like the customers in our
mythical example, some ride in Cadillacs and
some ride in pickup trucks. The only
difference is that students, who are the
University's customers, are not as belligerent
as car renters. Car renters feel that the
company has an obligation to give them their
money's worth. Students have been socialized
to take the teacher that's been assigned to
them (remember the first day of grade school
when you couldn't wait to see who your
teacher was?) and shut up about it.

A recent study by the Office of
Institutional Analysis points out the extent to
which the University has taken advantage of
the undergraduate students', especially
undergraduates in their first two years, docile
attitude in this respect. The study is simply a
compilation of the number of hours taught by
various levels of faculty to undergraduates in
their first two years, to undergraduates in the
upper division, to first-year graduate students,
and to advanced graduate students. Even to
someone who was aware of the generally
exclusive nature of courses taught by full
professors, the statistics are shocking.

Take, for example, the Department of
Mathematics in the College. It has four full
professors. Last semester, those four
professors taught a combined total of one
lower level undergraduate and 13 upper level
students, presumably math majors. And
Mathematics is not particularly bad in this
respect. In most departments, lower level
students see tenured personnel only from the
back rows of huge lecture classes. Teaching
assistants are the faculty, as far as they're
concerned.

To this, the Departments would
undoubtedly reply that teaching assistants
know all the things that entering
undergraduates have to learn and that there's
no harm in letting them teach. This, of course,
dismisses the value of the experience gained
by tenured personnel, as well as the teaching
ability they supposedly must have to win
promotion. If the Departments maintain that
the lower level undergraduates aren't being
cheated, then they are saying that their
tenured personnel aren't necessarily good
teachers; it's a sure thing that the teaching
assistants have little experience and in many
cases aren't good teachers (some of them, of
course, are). Hertz would have few customers
if it tried to tell them that a pickup will get
you around as well as a Cadillac.

Or, they might say that there are only a
limited number of full professors and that
graduate students need them more. The
reason that there aren't many full professors is
because they cost more than junior faculty
and teaching assistants, and undergraduates
pay the same share of that cost as graduate
students. Moreover, it would seem to us that
first and second-year men need the guidance
and intellectual ability of fine scholars as
much as a graduate students who is
presumably already well-educated. The only
crack in the system that we have seen thus far
is the series of first-year seminars instituted
this fall; but even there, a disappointing
number of tenured personnel volunteered to
teach one. Until they begin to do so, perhaps
the College ought to consider giving discount
rates to undergraduates.