The Transformational College Teacher

Abstract

The recent deluge of criticism directed at university and college teaching is a perfect example of the old chestnut, "We have some bad news and some good news." The bad news is that the image of higher education in general, and the state of teaching within the academy in particular, has been badly tarnished. A few well-known examples will suffice to make the point.In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom (1987) accused the academy of no less a crime than failing democracy and impoverishing the souls of today's students. ProfScam's author, Charles J. Sykes (1988), suggested that the professoriate was made up of a group of lazy, egotistical, and greedy entrepreneurs whose concern for educating the next generation of intellectual leaders was far down on the priority list for their time, energy, and expertise. Speaking with more authority and only slightly less passion, then Secretary of Education William Bennett added his criticism to the discussion, claiming that graduate schools have produced too many narrow specialists whose teaching is often lifeless, stilted, and pedestrian (Bennett, 1985). More recently the House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families issued a report entitled, "College Education: Paying More and Getting Less," which the Chronicle of Higher Education greeted as "the opening salvo in a war against higher education that has been building for some time" (Chronicle of Higher Education, 1992, p. B7). The Chair of that report, Representative Patricia Schroeder, was quoted as stating that a professor's salary is "inversely related to the number of hours he or she teaches" (Anderson, 1992), thus adding further fuel to the idea that teaching is not valued in academe.