A specter is haunting College Park – the specter of the “research professor.” This nebbish little man, dressed in rumpled tweeds and smelling of cheap tobacco, blinking out from beneath thick-rimmed eyeglasses while mumbling something incomprehensible in a vaguely Eastern European accent, actually has the infinite temerity to selfishly care about his other duties when you would prefer he hold your hand for the next 15 weeks. The research professor, as we’ve read in recent Diamondback columns, is apparently responsible for just about everything that goes wrong in college classrooms or even in America itself these days, from worthless diplomas to unemployment to outsourcing. The only problem with these allegations is the research professor, like most ghosts, doesn’t exist.
That’s not to say every professor on the campus is a paragon of the teaching profession, but only that it’s time students took a long, hard look at themselves before they accuse others of incompetence. The myth of the research professor has become an awfully convenient catch-all excuse, a modern-day bogeyman jaded seniors use to scare freshmen with and the college equivalent of “My dog ate my homework.” Download 400GB of Japanese cartoons from the DC++ hub instead of doing your homework? Research professor. Chug Keystone Light until you pass out the night before your paper is due? Research professor. Skip classes for a week to play volleyball on LaPlata Beach with girls in bikinis, then fail the midterm? Research professor, natch!
If studies show college graduates fail even the simplest real-world applications such as understanding an article they’ve just read or balancing a checkbook, why does that automatically have to be their professors’ faults? If anything, it’s more damning of the students themselves than of the beleaguered teaching staff, which can hardly be expected to make bricks without straw.
Our culture has somehow essentialized the undergraduate experience as simultaneously both absolutely necessary for any future success in life and the ultimate four-year party. It goes without saying this attitude, which combines intense pressure to get into college with the expectation that college itself be non-stop sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, rather than any fictional research professor, is at the real root of our problems. You want to talk about fixing the university system? Rather than spinning off education from research, fix the dichotomy first.
College isn’t for everyone. But the pressure to get into college drags in many students who would really be better off either coming back after they’ve matured for a few years or attending trade schools. Unfortunately, America, unlike Europe, has no historically strong system of vocational education. Instead, universities eager to earn a quick buck on tuition will admit as many students as possible – I challenge you to explain otherwise why students on the campus have had to live in hotels so often in the past – and then when some of those students turn out to be unfit or unready for higher education, it’s easy for them to blame professors instead of themselves.
The myth of the Mr. Magoo-like research professor bumbling through his teaching duties hurts students and professors alike. Students are hurt because hearing whispers that a professor is a “research professor” encourages them to underperform in class and then blame the professor. Professors are hurt because the slander is untrue. I’m sure somebody will write in with a tirade of angry anecdotes denouncing what I have to say, but the fact of the matter is the very best professors I’ve encountered throughout these past four years were those who were passionate about their outside research.
Look up Roberts, Klank, Ali, Oruç, DeClaris; they are all outstanding professors with lives outside of just academia. And they’re better professors for it – research and teaching are two sides of the same coin. To be passionate about research and then not be equally or even more inspired to pass on the fruits of your life’s work to the next generation is about as likely as being passionate about breathing in and then forgetting to exhale.
Cyrus Hadadi is an electrical engineering, mathematics and history major. He can be reached at chadadi@yahoo.com.
