This week, in between negotiating computer crashes, dealing with angry university finance people and the usual grind, I managed to read a new book on the history of university teaching in the United States called The Amateur Hour by Jonathan Zimmerman.  It is pretty innovative in its way: there are histories of higher education in abundance, but most of them end up being histories of institutions (or institutional types), or sociological histories of the student body, or whatever: focussing on what was going on in classrooms is pretty new.

The book starts by examining about one of the key evolutions in higher education: namely, the adoption of the lecture as the key teaching methodology.  Contra some simple analyses which claim the lecture is some kind of remnant from the Athenian agora, the book shows that in fact until the second half of the nineteenth century, recitation rather than lecture was the dominant teaching approach, and that in fact the move to lectures was seen as suspect in two ways that would profoundly influence the debate over university teaching for the next 150 years.

The first was that lecturing infinitely multiplied the ways in which teachers could attempt to get students to master the material.  Recitation by its nature is a fairly strict call-and-response system, whereas lectures, as everyone knows, allows professors large leeway in methods.  What instantly occurred was what one might call a “cult of charisma”; a belief that certain professors simply had the magic touch required to be able to connect with students and draw out their best efforts to master a subject.  Naturally, those who lacked such charisma tended to disparage this as “mere showmanship” or even simple charlatanry. 

The other big change came just after the start of the 20^th century, when America – decades in advance of any other country – began massifying higher education.  Very quickly, their universities began to realise that small-group meetings or tutorials were completely uneconomic and began to adopt large lectures to cope financially.  I was surprised by how early this happened: apparently Harvard was teaching class of over 500 students in economics as early as 1914 and Cornell was teaching 1,000-student courses in the 1930s.  Recognizing that gigantism was causing alienation, they adopted a system of teaching assistants who could hold “discussions” in addition to the massive lectures.  At Princeton, Woodrow Wilson tried to create an entire system that would try to bridge this gap between “alienating” lecturing and small tutorials known as the “Preceptorial System”.  It didn’t work, mainly because at the end of the day, the preceptors, like TAs then and now, lack the prestige that full professors have.

From there the book forks off into different directions: some is about attempts to harness gigantism in teaching: B.F. Skinner’s “teaching machines”, the use of TV as an educational tool, and the Personalized System of Instruction developed at Columbia University.  Equally, it tells the story of various attempts, particularly in the 1970s, to both bring class sizes down and to make teaching more collaborative and (to a degree influenced by some of the more far-out ideas of that decade) less hierarchical and more collective-voyage-of-discovery-ish.  As implemented, neither worked very well: turns out most students actually preferred structure.          

But there is another way to read this book, and that is as a long recitation of faculty efforts to never, ever, ever be accountable for teaching or indeed, acknowledge that holding a job as an instructor logically has any connection with having any credentials as an educator (a fair bit of which has to do with the widely-held contempt in which Faculties of Education are held by the rest of the academy).  I won’t go into it all here – do read it for yourself – but the point is that since the arrival of the PhD in the late 19^th century, many in the professoriate thinks of their “true” calling as research and teaching as a very distant and in many cases disreputable second place (research is “work”, teaching is a “load”).   It’s not so much that they eschew attempts to measure teaching – something which is indeed problematic –  but also that there is such widespread rejection even of taking instruction in pedagogy, which basically persists because most faculty assume they have that “academic charisma” and anyone from administration claiming this is either untrue or insufficient is an assault on academic freedom. 

Amateur Hour ends in the 1990s, which many people thought was going to be a decade of renewed emphasis on undergraduate teaching after the publication of the Boyer Commission report (which in turn inspired the Smith Commission – technically, the Commission of Inquiry on University Education – in Canada, which was set up by universities and then roundly ignored when it told them they were ignoring their undergraduate teaching mission).  It does not get into the era of MOOCs, but frankly it does not need to.  Everything that could be said and learned about that fad has already been covered by events in at least one of the preceding ten decades.   And that’s what’s truly great about the book: demonstrating how old and intractable some of these debates really are.  Two thumbs up.