June 1998
A report released in April by a commission created by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching sharply criticized the teaching of undergraduates at research universities. By implication it said that liberal arts colleges were doing the best sort of teaching, combining close interaction with professors and opportunities to do real research at the undergraduate level. Some excerpts of the report follow:
• In a great many ways, the higher education system of the United States is the most remarkable in the world.... Half of the high school graduates in the United States now gain some experience in colleges and uni-versities; we are, as a country, attempting to create an educated population on a scale never known before....
• The country's 125 research universities make up only 3 percent of the total number of institutions of higher learning, yet they confer 32 percent of the bacca-laureate degrees....
• Nevertheless, the research universities have too often failed, and continue to fail, their undergraduate populations.... Recruitment materials display proudly the world-famous professors, the splendid facilities, and the ground-breaking research that goes on within them, but thousands ... graduate without ever seeing the world-famous professors or tasting genuine research....
• Many students graduate ... lacking a coherent body of knowledge or any inkling as to how one sort of information might relate to others. And all too often they graduate without knowing how to think logically, write clearly, or speak coherently....
• These are not problems that have been totally denied or ignored; there is probably no research university in the country that has not appointed faculty committees and created study groups or hired consultants to address the needs of its undergraduates.... Even so, for the most part fundamental change has been shunned....
• Every research university can point with pride to the able teachers within its ranks, but it is in research grants, books, articles, papers, and citations that every university defines its true worth. When students are considered, it is the graduate students that really matter....
• What is needed now is a new model of undergraduate education at research universities that makes the baccalaureate experience an inseparable part of an integrated whole.
• There needs to be a symbiotic relationship between all the participants in university learning that will provide a new kind of undergraduate experience available only at research institutions. Moreover, productive research faculties might find new stimulation and new creativity in contact with bright, imaginative, and eager baccalaureate students, and graduate students would benefit from integrating their research and teaching experiences....
And from the report's conclusion:
• Captivated by the excitement and the re-wards of the research mission, research universities have not seriously attempted to think through what that mission might mean for undergraduates. They have accepted without meaningful debate a model of undergraduate education that is deemed successful at the liberal arts colleges, but they have found it awkward to emulate. The liberal arts model required a certain intimacy of scale to operate at its best, and the research universities often find themselves swamped by numbers. The model demands a commitment to the intellectual growth of individual students, both in the classroom and out, a commitment that is hard to accommodate.... Almost without realizing it, research universities find themselves in the last half of the century operating large, often hugely extended undergraduate programs as though they are sideshows to the main event....
The commission's full report is available on the World Wide Web at http:// notes.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf.
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