Our lack of teaching training is the professoriate’s secret scandal

There is a welcome debate afoot about how to – and how not to – improve teaching in American colleges and universities. While it has some useful substance, however, it largely disguises the single biggest scandal in US higher education: universities’ profound indifference to teaching scholars how to teach.

In my case, I did not have one observation of my teaching skills during a 45-year career in five major universities, four of which were in the north east of the US. Nor was I offered one workshop, coaching session or webinar on pedagogy.

After my PhD, in a cultish “Great Books” programme in Chicago in the 1970s, I was tossed into teaching courses in basic and specialised anthropology in a large, prestigious and conservative anthropology department. It was a baptism by fire, airdropping me from the boy scouts to the green berets in a discipline of which I had only accidental and fragmentary knowledge.

I had no knowledge whatsoever from my graduate school years of Dravidian kinship, cargo cults, potlatches or Eskimo dentition. But my teaching them as key examples of the human journey was saved by my skills in the English language, my slightly British accent, and by my early exposure, during my Indian childhood, to oration and elocution, which taught me how to infuse memorised poems and speeches with a mighty sense of conviction. I also learned, in great Indo-Anglian style, to debate entirely trivial issues as if a great deal turned on the outcomes.

These skills carried me much further than they should have in those early classes, and even then, as subsequently, I had very few adverse student evaluations. Then again, what do student evaluations really tell us about teaching quality? They have a long history, going back to the 1920s, but they are one of those habits which have become hardwired into the system even in the face of searing and ongoing criticisms.

At their best, student evaluations are no more than popularity meters. At their worst, they are shooting galleries, allowing frequent revenge criticisms to offset occasional paeans to the professor. The contradictions between critics and detractors, often in reference to the same aspect of the course or of the instructor, make these evaluations hard to learn from.

I never had a promotion request denied or delayed with any reference to my teaching over my career. But that, I am sure, says less about the quality of my teaching than it does about the priorities of those who recruited and compensated me – who aided and abetted in my lifelong teaching imposture because they valued my research.

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My largely elite education and employment history may open me to the criticism that my experience is untypical of the approximately 1.5 million teaching faculty in the US today. But several recent interventions by academics and a certain amount of social media chatter suggest that my views and experiences are neither marginal nor heretical.

I am one among countless thousands who came to their jobs without a clue about teaching and had to beg, borrow and steal the methods, curricula and oral styles of their seniors, like dogs under their tables waiting for crumbs of wisdom to fall into their mouths.

We also circled and sniffed our immediate peers’ syllabi and course evaluations, all the while fishing the corridors for gossip about traps and fixes for teaching without being shamed. And we solicited copies of the syllabi of colleagues or friends in other colleges and universities, which were themselves products of similar “search and imitate” strategies. In the days before Google, publicly available pedagogical websites and large language models to fill this monumental gap, we relied on the slower and more cumbersome telephone, Xerox machine and postal service.

Every one of us also relied on the kindness of strangers, on brief glimpses of public lectures by our more talented colleagues, and on tips and tricks picked up during tenure debates about younger colleagues who, unlike us, had undergone “teaching observations” (the criteria for which were never discussed, including how those under observations were protected from the biases, factions and hidden criteria among those who already had tenure).

Nor am I remotely alone in having been thrown into teaching a large introductory course having barely recovered from the nightmare of an excruciatingly narrow thesis topic and a defence which left no specialist stone unturned. Even now, this is the standard career trajectory. Overnight, doctoral graduates are expected to become as wide-ranging as Stephen Jay Gould, as sage as Michael Sandel and as riveting as Richard Feynman. The secrets of this compulsory alchemy are hard won and not easily shared with the less fortunate.

Most often, for most mortals, the skills vacuum is filled by lecture room theatrics, office-hour therapeutic chats, personal anecdotes, weak attempts at stand-up comedy and a host of sophomoric analogies, metaphors and parables to teach complex and fundamental ideas – all sweetened by the regular awarding of inflated grades. The struggle to keep young minds in large auditoriums away from TikTok, Instagram and their umpteen other apps of choice is, admittedly, doomed to failure for any average human being. But it is an especially futile quest for someone with next to no training in how to teach.

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It might be objected that most faculty in American colleges and universities had to pay for some part of their graduate education by serving as teaching assistants (TAs). Some were virtually solo handlers of courses the standing faculty were not interested in. Did this not teach them how to teach? The answer is more no than yes – because they weren’t given any pedagogy training at this stage either.

Yes, they learned the mechanics of how to grade multiple-choice exams. They learned how to answer questions about the often-incompetent weekly lectures of the main professor. They learned how to adjudicate grade change petitions, organise slides and PowerPoints. And they learned how to make a first cut on grades, curves and written comments on assignments.

But did they learn how to develop a serious lecture, which is neither a rambling personal reflection nor a cut and paste of secondary sources? Did they learn how to hold the attention of the middle 50 per cent and the bottom 20 per cent of the students? Did their professor tell them how he assembled the syllabus which they were supposed to explicate? No, no and no.

This is where the cavalry from teaching and learning centres (TLCs) supposedly arrive to save the day. But while these centres’ remit – to support faculty to enhance their teaching practice – is the right one, the reality is that they offer too little, too late.

Remedial programmes for students who have not had an appropriate background in the three Rs in high school are fine. But remediation for a thorough lack of training in pedagogy for a recent PhD drowning in their first job is simply unrealistic, however well intended such centres might be. The Little Red School Method for teaching undergraduates how to write better, developed at the University of Chicago, is a classic. But writing is only one skill that academics must learn to teach, along with reading, critical thinking and disciplinary inquiry.

It is also important to point out that the growing precariate of TAs, adjuncts and non-ladder instructors is usually too busy to take advantage of TLCs. As for tenured faculty – well, frankly, they look down on TLCs.

The reasons are complicated. On the one hand, there is an unspoken scholarly disdain for education schools and departments. Most arts and sciences faculty alike regard them as mere trade schools for lowly schoolteachers and for poor-quality researchers in “helping” professions such as social work and speech therapy – the kind of people who use the dreadful term “educator”, rather than “teacher” or “professor”.

Reacting to this stigmatisation, many educational schools have allowed mission creep, branching out into teaching substantive topics in history, social studies, psychology, cultural studies and more. But these efforts to gain the esteem of their colleagues in other departments are usually fruitless, and education schools remain low on the prestige ladder of many colleges and universities.

But even if their efforts were successful, I am not sure faculty would flock to TLCs, precisely because their own insecurity about being untrained in teaching makes them uneasy in the presence of those who study and teach about teaching. It is that lack of initial training that really needs to be addressed.

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The challenge is that teaching and research, classroom and laboratory, innovation and transmission have all become hopelessly entangled in the creeping mission and identity of the American university. What was once a largely teaching-focused institution has gradually become a research and development facility, an ersatz town hall, a rainbow identity fair, a sports-spectacle complex, a test facility for corporate skill-building, and a regulator of increasing swathes of students’ emotional, medical and festive life. And boards of trustees, historically often self-perpetuating and accountable to no superior authority, have gradually become tools of party politics and opponents of faculty autonomy as public trust in higher education institutions sinks to all-time lows.

In the face of these trends, small adjustments will not do. We must be prepared to rethink some fundamentals. And one major fundamental relates to whether research and teaching are genuinely inseparable.

Much research already occurs outside universities: not only in dedicated public research institutions but also in the church, the armed forces, on corporate campuses, and in any number of para-academic digital platforms. Does the generation of new knowledge really need some special link to college campuses, facilities and resources? After all, many in the corporate world see college credentials mainly as ways to select for drive, competitiveness and basic analytic skills, while real content is best taught by the employer.

Perhaps the mutual dependence of teaching and research is, in reality, restricted to postgraduate education – and perhaps to those disciplines where teaching and training are closely allied, as in many of the natural and experimental sciences. Removing research from the job descriptions of faculty in other subjects would allow a more serious investment of institutional attention, resources and recognition to teaching as a teachable skill.

Relatedly, we need to interrogate the common but unexamined assumption that teaching is primarily a window into how great minds think – without preconceptions, biases and dogmas. We believe that if our faculty are recruited to be good or perhaps great thinkers (as judged by their teachers, their publications, their referees and their job talks), then they are ready to display the eternal sunshine of their superior minds to their classroom audiences, and learning will reliably occur.

The first step in correcting this mistake is to frame a new and mutually respectful relationship between teaching and training.

There is a long-term tendency in American cultural history to venerate the practical wisdom of the craftsman, the tradesman, the man (or woman) of action. Benjamin Franklin’s early capitalist teachings, for instance, were remarked on by Max Weber in his classic work on the protestant ethic, and they continue to undergird the ethos of the University of Pennsylvania and the jewel in its crown, the Wharton School of Business. It was only in the first half of the 20th century that the social sciences at UPenn established their independence from the Wharton School – which today still hosts 30 per cent of the university’s total undergraduate population.

That practical ethos, both at UPenn and elsewhere in the nation, extends to medical, law and engineering schools, as well as those more pastorally inclined, such as education, social work and nursing schools. In all of these, training and hands-on experience is valued over abstract teaching, as can be seen in their profusion of placement services, summer internships, and practitioner-professors.

But the divorce of training from teaching in this tradition means that training for teaching became a cultural oxymoron, with teaching being seen as the domain of those with an odd mix of personal charisma, egg-head abstraction and an inability to handle action in the real world. The divorced parties are ripe for reconciliation.

We must rekindle our interest in craftsmanship, apprenticeship and vocationalism – not as lowly matters for the needy classes, but in the spirit of Weber’s concept of beruf, a calling to a discipline, a craft, a professional community. Such a reform might even offer us a fresh path to the democratic virtues of citizenship, which must include respect for all those who teach others, across all the institutions of our societies, from families and the clergy to corporations and media platforms.

The success of such a reformation will depend on a debate over detailed blueprints. But without a plain admission of our founding scandal, such debates are unlikely to emerge.

Arjun Appadurai is emeritus professor in social-cultural anthropology at New York University and Niklas Luhmann visiting chair in social theory at Bielefeld University, Germany.