The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America by Jonathan Zimmerman

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America by Jonathan Zimmerman Xenia Coulter, Professor Emerita and Alan Mandell Jonathan Zimmerman. The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. 294 pp. $34.95. ISBN 9781421439099. In The Amateur Hour, Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, illuminates common college teaching practices in order that we might find new ways of improving them. Zimmerman points out that the actual performance of college teaching is largely hidden behind classroom doors where individual instructors determine their own way of teaching. As such, he traces the history of college teaching in the United States over the past 200 years as described in “ . . . private letters and memoranda in 59 daifferent college and university archives” (p. 11) and in student evaluations and “college newspapers and other online sources” (p. xi). Without a common understanding of what constitutes “good” teaching, he expands upon an argument made earlier by educationalist Randy Bass (p. 219) that college teaching is no more than a form of amateurism. Readers will fully appreciate the intellectual effort required to search through and make sense of the archives available to the author. As Zimmerman points outs, however, the findings are necessarily negatively biased since “the worst examples draw the most ink” (p. 12). After all, as he writes in his introduction, “across time most college teachers were neither excellent nor horrible” (p. 12), a point with which we fully agree, but that was almost entirely set aside in the eight chapters that followed. Spanning one historical period to the next, from the nineteenth century through the 1970s, these chapters are filled with quotations by policymakers, administrators, teachers, and students describing, often in colorful language, some of the horrors of bad teaching that took place during each period. For example, we read about a “distinguished scholar” who was “too damn busy with his book even to go through the motions of a decent lecture” (p. 64); or professors who were “tardy, digressive, or belligerent precisely because they were trying to cover for their lack of preparation (p. 115); or from a student at Yale, “the classroom is a race to see who will get to sleep first—the class or the teacher” (p. 39). The final chapter, an epilogue, summarizes the main findings and speculates about possible future changes in college teaching. To be sure, throughout the book, Zimmerman also conscientiously describes notable exceptions—lecturers who keep “students in a hypnotic spell” (p. 39), show “evangelical zeal” (p. 66), “mesmerize audiences” (p. 117), or establish “a mystical presence that cannot always be defined but also cannot be denied” (p. 234). Moreover, he makes note of principled objections to the autocratic nature of the lecture and describes many efforts by faculty to introduce other more democratic ways of teaching, which, despite their promise as improved college pedagogy, are seemingly never able to be sustained. Zimmerman argues that a major obstacle to good teaching, whether by lecture or more student-centered democratic methods, has been the common belief that “teaching is an art, . . . an intensely personal thing” (p. 84) and “a personal act . . . a function of personality” (p. 105) that makes it inaccessible to standardized efforts to train scholars in its practice. Another obstacle that he also notes is that historically, universities and colleges hire and pay professors for their scholarship, not their teaching abilities; or in his words, it is “the lack of tangible career-related returns on teaching [that] remains the central barrier to improving it” (p. 233). At the heart of these observations is one major finding: throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, prominent voices from the world of higher education have consistently protested the poor quality of, or lack of serious attention paid to, the teaching of undergraduates. Proclamations, denunciations, fault-finding, and critical analyses have been astonishingly similar decade after decade. In the nineteenth century, Zimmerman points out, “The one constant was the disdain of their students who derided most of their professors as nasty sadists or pompous bores” (p. 16). And in the 1970s, the Scranton Commission report described universities that “ . . . ‘failed [students] in...