Science Teaching: How to Spend $5 Million

Abstract

I second the opinion of Stan Metzenberg (Letters, 9 Aug., [9 Aug., p. 721][1]), regarding the absurdity of the National Science Foundation spending $5 million to encourage faculty at research universities to teach well. Metzenberg's critique, however, which aims at increased support for the “second-tier universities” where “faculty actually teach their own courses,” leaves out the fact that it is this nation's liberal arts and sciences colleges which have historically produced a disproportionately large number of students who have gone on to earn doctorates in the sciences and which continue to provide leadership in the design and implementation of the most effective undergraduate teaching methods. If $5 million spent to support science teaching at second-tier universities would have a significant impact, imagine how powerful would be the results of those same dollars spent at liberal arts and sciences colleges to support and reaffirm the outstanding job they are already doing. Just one small portion of those dollars provided to increase support for student-faculty collaborative research—typical at our colleges, but rare except at the graduate level in the first- and second-tier universities—would have an impact far beyond its “drop-in-the-bucket” significance for the big research universities. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.273.5276.721