Higher Ed Craves Pecan Pie
I love pecan pie. Its gooey molasses, the softened spiced nuts, a warm buttery crust. Sure, the corn syrup and shortening are awful for me. Someday I’ll eat healthier. But not this Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. I’ll start next year. Maybe.
Now just imagine if I got recognized by Pie International Eaters every time I ate pecan pie. And if all my colleagues congratulated me. And if someday I even won the coveted Gold Medal (all-purpose flour) Prize.
Man, I would just keep eating pie.
Higher ed is addicted to pecan pie. It’s called prestige. And it’s gained, like weight, through an outsized appetite for research. Seeking a vaunted Carnegie R1 or R2 Classification? Do more research. Need to show up in national rankings? They’re also based on research. Want federal grants? The dollars are for research.
These are pies that higher ed bakes and serves to itself. By comparison, when Americans are asked what makes some universities the “best,” they do not answer “research.” As scholar Corbin Campbell notes in her forthcoming book, respondents rated excellence in teaching the highest.* Apparently, the public is largely unaware that college students won’t, in fact, consistently experience evidence-based teaching.
As Campbell explains, great instruction doesn’t increase an institution’s reputation. Nor does teaching typically increase donations or help faculty gain prestige and professional advancement. As a result, teaching is not prioritized the way students deserve.
Like a better diet, we know it should be. For example, the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities (UERU) recently affirmed that “students learn more and are more likely to succeed when research-proven pedagogical techniques are used and learning environments are inclusive.” But its new report, “The Equity-Excellence Imperative” of the Boyer 2030 Commission, then queries: “How will we ensure that our students — all of them, without exception — are educated using evidence-informed pedagogies…?”
The call from this blue-ribbon body is not new. In 2017 then president of the Association of American Universities, Mary Sue Coleman, asked her members to “realize a ‘new normal’ [in which] all faculty members will both use and be rewarded for using evidence-based approaches to instruction.” Later that year the co-chairs of the Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, Roger Ferguson and Michael S. McPherson, implored: “Institutions need to devote far more attention to and support for the quality of teaching and the teaching workforce and become more purposeful, effective, and efficient.”
In the 1990 landmark Scholarship Reconsidered, Priorities of the Professoriate, the late Ernest L. Boyer, then head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, observed “that students themselves increasingly have raised concerns about the priority assigned to teaching on the campus.” We can look back at least as far as 1933 to find the American Association of University Professors comment: “if even a small portion of the ingenuity and persistence which are now being expended on research… could be deflected… toward research into the results of their own teaching, the improvement in the general standards of collegiate instruction might be considerable.”
But the pecan pie tastes so good…
The Boyer 2030 Commission’s report, described as a “blueprint” for undergraduate education at U.S. research universities, is full of worthy ideas to advance both equity and excellence. It recommends “world readiness” for students, “eliminating barriers” to admission and graduation, and to foster “belonging and equitable campus cultures.” Plus, effective teaching is prioritized as a way to achieve these goals.
Yet I could not help but be struck by the report’s somewhat odd choice of phrasing. It asks, “How will we…” and “How can we…?” make all these good things happen (emphasis added). It’s as if higher ed doesn’t know and needs to discover, er, research, the solutions.
In truth, these questions have already been answered. Today, higher ed knows what constitutes, for example, great teaching. It also knows the kinds of professional learning experiences that positively engage faculty to strengthen their craft. Proven, equitable, and scalable approaches, like ACUE certification, “do” make this happen for students of all backgrounds, “without exception.” Indeed, the report lists some of the pilots and programs that deliver the change it recommends.
A more provocative question asks: What will turn these “should dos” into “will dos”? Or better yet, “are doings”? What’s the shock to the system — the health scare — that will change higher ed’s diet?
Perhaps it is the drastic decline in enrollment — 1.3 million fewer students since the start of the pandemic. Or persistent public doubts about the value of a degree. Or the nation’s racial reckoning and call for educational justice, in light of inequitable graduation rates for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students, lagging those of White students by 8 to 21 percentage points, per UERU.
I would hope that these conditions are enough, but I’m not confident. Change of the sort that the Boyer Commissioner seeks will take new and much stronger incentives. As Boyer himself wrote in 1990:
At the very heart of the current debate — the single concern around which all others pivot — is the issue of faculty time. What’s really being called into question is the reward system and the key issue is this: what activities of the professoriate are most highly prized? After all, it’s futile to talk about improving the quality of teaching if, in the end, faculty are not given recognition for the time they spend with students.
In the 22 years since, UERU optimistically writes that the “kind of action needed is clear and underway.” Regarding instructional excellence, it points to the establishment of centers for teaching and learning. Progress, for sure, but not nearly enough, or at sufficient scale, to achieve the Commission’s “provocation” of equitable instructional excellence in every class. Nor does the report address the damaging impact on “faculty time” from two decades of adjunctification, with its perverse reward system.
Colleges and universities must ensure that all professors — part- and full-time — find the taste of great teaching as sweet as research. This will only happen with new faculty reward structures, for which UERU does call. The change is similar to recommendations made by KC Culver and Adrianna Kezar in “Designing Accessible and Inclusive Professional Development for NTTF,” from USC’s Pullias Center. Other practical ways to realign professional, cultural, and employment incentives are offered in the Gates-funded toolkit “Success & Equity Through Quality Instruction,” prepared by Strong Start to Finish, Education Commission of the States, ACUE, and Sova.
But even these useful guides are more “should dos” not “will dos.” I’ve come to believe that we will need even greater — more macro — incentives if institutions, particularly those designated as “research universities,” are to take faculty reward structures — and by consequence, teaching — seriously.
At present the American Council on Education is revising the Carnegie classifications. As I’ve written, why not add new Carnegie “T1” and “T2” designations, to incentivize “very high” and “high-quality teaching”? These would live alongside the R designations and give prospective students and families the information they seek (and believe they already have) when choosing a school. Alternatively, why not eliminate R designations altogether, given how they’ve morphed into proxies of prestige and selectivity instead of educational excellence and equity? At present, rankings are increasingly unpopular, because they largely recognize and reward the wrong things. But they could measure, mix, and deliver what faculty and students deserve.
Let’s make a new recipe. I still crave pecan pie. But I’ve recently learned, I can make a delicious vegan crust and substitute honey for corn syrup. Higher ed can do the same. Will it?
*Campbell, Corbin. Great College Teaching: Where it Happens and How to Foster it Everywhere. Harvard Education Press, Cambridge, MA. (Forthcoming, 2023).
