At Crooked Timber, Ingrid Robeyns passes along an email she received from an undergraduate student she doesn’t know. It’s a list of seven essay-type questions about the work and impact of economist Amartya Sen, along the lines of “How has Sen’s thought changed traditional development?” (Tyler Cowen, playing the straight man, actually answers the questions.)
A long discussion follows: What is the duty of professors, when it comes to answering questions from students? Heated arguments from different sides, largely for good reasons, and largely talking past each other. Students are complaining that they come to school to wrestle with great and challenging ideas, work hard and become passionate about what they’re being exposed to, only to find that professors are too busy to talk to them outside of class. Professors are shaking their heads in sympathy with the original post, amazed that a student who wasn’t even in a class with someone would feel justified in essentially asking them to do their homework for them.
So where is the line exactly to be drawn? I don’t know, but it’s a really good question, to which we give very little systematic attention, preferring instead to let every professor work things out according to their own preferences. Professors hold a privileged role in our culture; in return for years of hard work and devotion to an esoteric academic pursuit, society gives them jobs with lifetime tenure (ultimately, one hopes) and no heavy lifting, thinking about ideas at the edge of our understanding. In return, they are asked to assist in the production and dissemination of knowledge — doing original research, teaching students, and talking to the wider public. But what is an appropriate portfolio of these very different activities?
At the extremes, it’s not so hard. If a professor is teaching a class, there should be some time set aside for real-time interaction with the students outside of class. Traditionally these are “office hours” (a concept which, in my experience, undergraduates love and then completely forget about when they go to grad school). And at the other end, professors shouldn’t be expected to do students’ work for them. (I once got an email from a colleague, who was forwarding an inquiry from a student that he thought I’d know the answer to. Indeed I did know the answer, because I had just given that problem on a take-home exam that the student was supposed to be doing. More or less the definition of “busted.”)
But in between the extremes it’s harder, and there are few firm guidelines. And the invention of email has lowered a great deal of barriers, for better and for worse. What emails should we answer, and in how much detail? You don’t want to be a jerk, but you do want to get work done.
Crucially important is the relationship between the emailer and the recipient. In the original example, the fact that it was an unknown student was extremely relevant; if the student had been taking a class with the professor in which they were talking about Amartya Sen, there would have been some context to evaluate whether a straightforward answer should be given, or simply some pointers about where to look. But equally important is the form of the questions. In this case, they were so vague and essay-like that there was almost no simple answer that could have been of any use; the temptation to respond with a map to the library or instructions on how to use the internet must have been overwhelming. A good rule of thumb is: the less time it would take to respond, the more likely it is that a response will be forthcoming. And if it’s pretty clear that the original emailer has done next to no work themselves, they shouldn’t get their hopes up.
I get a lot of email, as well as occasional phone calls and regular mail. And I’m happy to admit, I don’t answer all of them. If they are technical questions about general relativity (about which I’ve written a book, don’t forget), I generally do not answer, but rather point to some promising resource — exactly because I’ve written that book, and if I answered all the questions about GR that I get I would do nothing else. If they are inquiries from students or sincerely interested people on the street about the state of physics or cosmology or whatever, I try to respond with short but substantive answers. If, as is often the case, they are from crackpots who say “I dare you to refute my theory!”, I generally don’t take the dare. (An exception is a letter I recently received from a state prison in New York. The writer is not a crackpot himself, but is stuck in prison with another guy who is convinced that special relativity is internally inconsistent, and he would like to know how to respond. In that case, I’ll definitely answer.)
The answering-email issue is just part of the much larger question of how much time professors should devote to students. The paradox is that what often draws students to a university — the place’s academic reputation, which rests on the research accomplishments of the faculty — can be an obstacle to fruitful interactions once they get there. Imagine how many physics students came to Caltech because of Richard Feynman. Undoubtedly they could have had some interesting interactions with him while they were here. But undergraduates would have found that he taught graduate seminars almost exclusively, while graduates would have found that he almost never took on any Ph.D. students. Too much worry and responsibility — he wouldn’t feel right giving a student a problem that he hadn’t already solved himself. While to me this seems like a scandalous abdication of duty (where would he have been if John Wheeler and others at Princeton had felt the same way?), the motivation is perfectly understandable.
What this calculation leaves out, of course, is that it can be extremely rewarding to advise students, or more generally to help people to understand things. But that sometimes gets lost amidst the feelings of being burdened and distracted from what we’re “really” here for.
Advising graduate students is a terrifying prospect, if you take it seriously; you’re wielding an extraordinary amount of influence over a young person’s life. Answering questions by email is a much smaller burden. But multiplied by dozens or hundreds of examples, and you can quickly get swamped. I suspect that most of us try to be reasonable, but walking the line between having individual chats with every interested person in the world and actually producing the research that made us experts in the first place is a delicate operation.
What about emails asking specific questions related to recent papers? I’m a senior grad student and have had very hit-or-miss experiences asking profs (who I don’t know) questions about their papers. I’ve had very helpful responses from some people but for the most part my emails are ignored. More than once I’ve asked my advisor to email the same person asking the same question (after, say, a month without response) and he almost always recieves prompt replies (“Dear Dr. XXXX, That’s a very interesting question, …”). It’s curious that the same question is interesting when my advisor asks it and not worthy of a response when I ask it. (Personally, I respond to every email I get about a paper, even when it’s someone bugging me to cite some paper of his which is only tangentially related to mine…)
Of course an email about a recent paper is hardly comparable to some vague set of essay-style questions. However, I think it’s interesting that (in some cases) profs who don’t have the time to respond to questions from students who they don’t know DO have the time to answer the same questions from profs who they don’t know.
“Such virtual universities will completely outperform the traditional universities and the later will then disappear.”
They already exist, The Open University in the UK, or Fernuni Hagen in Germany, people get much more “one to one” distance tutoring and it sucks. A friend of mine did this and switched to a regular University after 2 Years. They have their use but they are not ever going to replace traditional Universities. The reasons are that there is no substitute for interacting with other students and for seeing someone explain something in person.
Coming from the continental European system: A university doesn’t need or even shouldn’t provide massive amounts of one on one time with lecturers, it should provide students with the means to figure things out for themselves. If they can’t do that they don’t belong in a University in the first place. That means trusting people with a lot of free time in which to do their own studies, providing them with rooms and libraries where they can meet and organize themselves into study groups (they are grown ups, so this shouldn’t be something the University has to do for them), etc. Ideally some kind of seminar where they can come meet grad students who answer their questions (AFTER they honestly tried to do them on their own).
One of the core problems about answering one on one is that only one person benefits, if you get them into groups of 20 people the real (non lazy) questions can be answered and a lot of students benefit.
One on one explaining is just not a very efficient use of highly trained experts time.
grad student, always email the first author on a paper, rather than the professor (i.e., the last author). Not only does the first author usually have more time to reply, she is also the person who did the actual work and is capable of responding in the first place.
PK: good advice, except in particle physics the author list is almost always in alphabetical order. (If it is not, then it is definitely the first author that did most of the job.)
PK:
Yes, agree that some tuition is necessary. But this doesn’t have to cost many thousands of dollars per year. The student I helped (see posting #7) payed me $1000 in total. But this student asked me to explain everything completely and do all his homework for him.
Rien, yes the taxpayer pays for universities, but I don’t think that per student this is anywhere near the tuition fees US students pay.
fh, I think that the calculus about virtual universities would change a bit if you had to pay huge tuition fee for ordinary universities.
Also, not every student studies in the same way. Some benefit more from social interactions while studying others not.
By not attending any classes and problem sesions you are forcing yourself to completely master the subject yourself. Also, you have more time to do that as less time is wasted at university. I found that to be the best way of studying for me.
I remember going to the university once for an exam (about Fourier transformations and the theory of distributions). Some of my friends were asking what I was doing here, they had never seen me at the course. 🙂 The exam result was very good for me, I scored 100%. But it was not so good for the other students. One scored 70% and one other scored 60%. All the other students (about 25 in total) had failed the exam. 🙂
About tuitions: it would be good with some numbers here. I guess it varies quite a lot between universities. The overhead on research grants is also far larger in the US than in some other countries. For example at a Swedish university where I worked it was 30%.
Count Iblis,
The benefit of studying books, working book problems, and having one-on-one tutoring undoubtedly varies from person to person, but I don’t think the on-site learning experience is the most compelling reason to attend a university. There are other less tangible but crucial benefits of attending a university that cannot be replaced by a “distance learning” approach:
1. The professors and TAs have (usually) been screened by knowledgeable people before given the opportunity to substantially influence others. Prospective professors may be evaluated on their research rather than teaching ability at many universities, but at least they must know their stuff to get hired. TAs must usually take coursework (or be subject to high standards before being admitted to a university, e.g., Princeton), and usually pass qualifying exams; they are also evaluated by students and/or professors for their teaching. I doubt that any for-profit tutoring company will have anywhere near that level of screening before hiring a tutor. But you should know, since you were hired as a tutor.
2. Pedigree matters. When it comes time to look for a job, where you learned counts. If all you have to say is that you studied a particular set of books and were tutored by some completely unknown person with a PhD who had no affiliation with a recognized organization like a respected university, I can’t imagine very many potential employers getting very excited about you. I also find it difficult to see funding agencies being thrilled about giving most grants to researchers with no institutional affiliation.
3. Grades provide some measure of mastery of material, as well as preparation for moving to the next level of material. Getting grades from a tutor who is payed by you (read: conflict of interest) is likely to be somewhat meaningless to a graduate school or employer; the grading would be very non-standard and would not be normalized with other tutors or students.
4. Remote learning would do nothing to address the needs for most kinds of research that are part of a PhD education. (Presumably you do want PhD’s, since they are your future population of qualified tutors.) Some kinds of theoretical research might be possible remotely, but experimental research would be difficult to do on one’s own.
5. Design of the curriculum would be problematic. Having a separate “standards organization” that designs curricula and administers some kind of “exit exam” that certifies the student as having completed the course of study sounds unworkable. Who would administer the organization, fund it, judge whether the standards are appropriate, create the tests, and so on? By the time you do all that, wouldn’t you essentially have a remote university, many of which already exist?
I just don’t see your vision of education in the future as being attractive to a wide audience.
Regarding Count Iblis point about self-study as opposed to lectures/problem classes, I don’t think it’s about “social interactions” as much as having someone to tell you you’re wrong/confused; the social stuff just comes from the “economics” applied to the situation. Indeed, I remember when I was a maths undergrad being told that it was better to actually have a go at all the questions in a problem set rather than insist on spending time working on one question until you’d completely solved it before moving onto the next. The reasoning was that you’d probably run out of time under and not finish all the problems under both approaches, but the first way would give the people giving the tutorial more ideas of the things you’d got mistaken ideas about. That’s what I’d expect would be the emails giving the most sutdent-improving questions would be those where the student rephrases something they’re not certain about and asks if this understanding is correct. (Obviously this only really applies to scientific type subjects.)
Sometimes the best thing a professor can do is NOT answer your questions. I was a grad student at Stanford with an office across from Shelly Glashow. I had heard that blue lasers were more difficult to make than red lasers and I wondered why. So I decided to ask Glashow.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m a second-year graduate student.”
“Then you should be able to figure that out by yourself,” Glashow replied.
I did and I never forgot the answer.
I don’t have any real profound to say. I just wanted to say I thought this was a nice post and, even as a high school physics teacher, it gave me some things to think about in terms of my teaching and my college experience.
Thanks.
I have to say that as a senior level physics undergraduate I expect a certain amount of commitment from the professors whose classes I take. What I mean by this is that I expect professors to offer some kind of insight into the subject which cannot be easily extracted from the text of a book.
So far I’ve been sorely disappointed. Most (certainly not all, there have been a few exceptional cases) of the professors I’ve dealt with seem to think of teaching as a burden. Their lecture styles were uninspired, and for the most part paraphrased (if you were lucky enough not to get a verbatim reading) the book. I don’t expect professors to be “nice” per se, but what I do expect is an honest attempt to communicate ideas from the subject they are teaching. This includes thinking of new ways to introduce difficult topics and tying concepts together in a way that sheds light on the unity and synergy of different branches of the subject.
Not everyone can be Richard Feynman, but I believe it’s part of the job you take on when you accept a professorship at a university to pass on knowledge to posterity in the best possible way that you can.
Marty:
At point 1) The work I do as tutor cannot be compared to teaching at university. I don’t work for a virtual university (i.e. something that comes close to a real university). All I’m saying is that in the near future virtual universities could outperform real universities.
Point 2) I think that things will change gradually. The virtual institutions will have to prove themselves. You can imagine a virtual university avoiding the problems you mention by offering Ph.D. courses to high school graduates. I.e. you get an education and then you’ll have to produce a Ph.D. thesis based on your peer reviewed publications. Your CV will contain a list of publications, no one can argue with that. 🙂
Later, when the virtual university has made its name, can it also focus on students who only want to do an M.Sc.
I went to Caltech as a physics student, but not because Richard Feynman was there. As it turns out, the example of Feynman is odd, because Feynman did in fact interact with both undergraduate and graduate students at many levels, and managed to convey to them his attitude and style of physics, much more valuable than the development of particular skills or particular bits of knowledge. For many years, Feynman gave an unofficial, ungraded, non-credit “joke” class called “Physics X”. It was held in the evenings in one of the large lecture halls, and consisted basically of Feynman showing up in front of the room with a piece of chalk. Anyone could join the audience, provided they behaved themselves reasonably well. Members of the audience would then ask questions, ranging from the elementary to advanced research topics: “Why is the sky blue?” to “How much gallium do you need to make a neutrino detector?” to “How do you quantize the electromagnetic field near a gravitational singularity?” Feynman would then try to give an answer, together with help from the audience, where he would start from first principles as much as possible (He would say: “I can’t remember much, but I can remember a few simple principles.”). He would do calculations in his own, ideosyncratic mathematical notation systems, on the blackboard. There were often amusing asides and anecdotes about his work, or other things that interested him. Feynman was also known to hang out and BS with undergraduates from time to time, to a much greater degree than any other professor I have ever known.
Dear Students,
Please note that many of us from whom you are waiting for an answer are borderline depressives or really depressives. Hence the delays in answering emails. If your professor is both a procrastinator and a borderline depressive then you’ll have to be patient and the best thing in an administrative situation is probably simply to knock on the door.
ciao,
Bruce