Guest Post: Joel Corbo on Graduate School and Teaching

Today’s episode of lazy-bloggers-solicit-guests-to-fill-in features Joel Corbo, a graduate student in physics at Berkeley. Joel and friends were disappointed by some features of the graduate-school experience, and (unusually) decided to actually do something about it — they founded the Compass Project, which supports excellence in science education, especially for women and minorities.

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My name is Joel Corbo, I’m a physics Ph.D. student, and I’m a little frustrated.

My trajectory through the US educational system has been a great one. I have parents who care deeply about me and my future and who believe in the value of a strong education. Because they cared, I went to an elementary school that laid a good foundation and allowed me to attend a high school that was more academically rigorous than many colleges (both of these schools were private, although the latter was also free). I also majored in physics at MIT.

My story may sound typical, at least in certain circles, but there are a few more details to add to the story. My dad is a recent immigrant without a high school education who worked as a maintenance man in the NYC Housing Projects, and my mom is the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants and a lucky survivor of the NYC public school system. I was the first person in my immediate family to go to college. Statistically speaking, I shouldn’t have succeeded — but I did.

Looking back at my education, it’s obvious to me that a huge factor contributing to my success was the presence of people in my life who believed in me and supported me: my parents, my teachers, and my peers. Even at MIT, which is primarily recognized for the quality of its research (and rightly so), I found a physics department that openly cared about undergraduate education, where teaching was valued and done well and which fostered a community of undergrads who learned from and supported each other.

So, why the frustration? My relatively rosy view of physics education was shaken up not long after starting grad school at UC Berkeley (By the way, I don’t want to single out Berkeley as particularly flawed, as I’m sure its problems are shared by virtually every physics department in the US to one extent or another. However, I can only write about what I know and this is where I am). Back in the cocoon of the MIT undergrad experience, I came to believe that physics was awesome for two main reasons: (1) because it answers deep, fundamental questions about how the world works and (2) because it is a community driven, collaborative exercise that thrives on the effective sharing of knowledge among its practitioners. In my mind, grad school would build upon these dual pillars of awesomeness and help me become (1) a great researcher and (2) a great teacher.

The jury is still out on the great researcher thing, but it turns out that, in principle, grad school has precisely zero to do with becoming a good teacher. Oh, you can TA a class here and there, as long as that doesn’t get in the way of what grad school is “really” all about. The unfortunate thing is that the lack of value assigned to teaching seems very systemic, to the point of being embedded in the culture; perhaps this attitude appears to benefit physics in the short-term by weeding out all but the most “serious” students, but in the long run it does nothing but damage.

The damage done to grad students is fairly obvious. First of all, if they are not provided with encouragement and avenues to become better teachers, then they won’t improve their teaching skills as well as they could have. If you happen to believe that an essential part of being a physicist is the ability to pass physics on to future generations of students, to inspire them to follow in the footsteps of their intellectual ancestors, then it is hard to justify allowing people to graduate with PhDs who have not demonstrated the ability to do just that. Of course, this happens all the time.

Secondly, there are always some grad students, including me, who have a deep interest in teaching (I remember deciding in high school that the only way to know if I really understood something was to try teaching it to someone else — so I can genuinely say that education has been on my mind for a long time). When people with such a passion are met with disinterest or even disdain by the people they want to emulate (successful physicists), the blow to their motivation can be severe. After all, who wants to stick around when their interests and talents aren’t valued or supported? I’ve heard it implied (and sometimes even said outright) that such students aren’t “serious enough” about physics and therefore aren’t worth keeping around, but without a crystal ball, who can really say which student will end up making important contributions to the field?

Let’s put the grad students aside for now (didn’t we just talk about that?), and spend some time looking at how undergrads are damaged by this attitude. Teaching is the single most fundamental service an academic department provides to undergraduates, and if, on average, a department is not interested in teaching well, the implication is that it’s not interested in serving undergrads in any way. But serving undergrads is vital to the survival of an academic discipline, because some of those undergrads are that discipline’s future experts. As I stated above, I was fortunate enough to attend schools that did serve their students well, but I can talk about the opposite through my observations as a TA.

Many students arrive at their undergraduate institution with a substantial number of long-held academic “bad habits”, especially in the sciences. High school has managed to convince many students that physics is a dogmatic, memorization-centered subject. As a result, they don’t have the skills necessary to solve real physics problems, because all that they have learned to do is to pattern-match and to plug-and-chug. Still, popular science books and NOVA specials have kept them interested enough that many intend to pursue the physical sciences as undergrads. Once they get to college, however, their passion for physics is quickly squelched by a number of factors:

  1. Because they don’t have the skills necessary to problem-solve, model-build, and generally think like physicists, these students actually don’t know how to effectively learn physics as it is typically presented in a large lecture-based class. This doesn’t mean that these students are stupid, or somehow not worth teaching. It simply means that there are things they need to be taught other than “the material” in order to help them become better learners. Unfortunately, many of them come away feeling like they don’t have what it takes to be physicists (as though there is some intrinsic “physicsness” that they are lacking) and so they leave the field.
  2. The typical introductory physics sequence, at least at Berkeley, is very isolating for potential physics majors. The vast majority of people in those classes are engineering students who are there because their departments require that they take physics; they have largely no interest in physics for its own sake. This makes it very difficult for potential physics majors to identify each other — they are like needles in an apathetic haystack. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that even the physics department cannot identify these potential majors. So, these students end up isolated from the department, from upperclassmen physics majors, and from each other – that is to say, from the physics community – for the three semesters it takes them to get through introductory physics. However, an important part of the excitement of physics is the collaboration with peers, the shared goal of building knowledge through interaction and discussion and asking “What if”. Without that, it’s incredibly difficult to paint physics as an interesting field, to really sell the idea of being physicists to these students beyond the level that NOVA can, and so they leave the field.
  3. The problems of interaction and perceived lack of “physicsness” are magnified for a certain set of students: women and underrepresented minorities. At this point, so much has been said about the lack of women and minorities in all levels of physics due to the “leaky pipeline” that I don’t have much to add to the subject. For this discussion, the important point to note is that in addition to the issues that their well-represented peers also face, they have to face majoring in a field where they don’t see people like themselves. They arrive at the seemingly logical but erroneous conclusion that success in physics is unattainable unless you are a white male, and so they leave the field.

So, here are three of many reasons why undergrads might leave the field of physics – notice that none of these reasons have anything to do with these students’ ability to be good physicists. If the physics community wants to recruit the best minds into its ranks, it stands to reason that these impediments must be removed, but not enough people seem interested in doing so. Hence, my frustration.

[More below the fold…]

Well, kiddo: you’re frustrated, and it even sounds like your frustrations are reasonable (at least to me, since you and I are the same person). What good is that going to do? Were I alone in my frustration, probably nothing. However, it turns out that I wasn’t alone: there were other grad students around me who were also frustrated, and for similar reasons. Three of them found each other, and decided to do something about the problems that they saw: they started to work on creating a program called The Compass Project during the summer of 2006, and I joined the project a year later.

So, what is Compass? At its core, The Compass Project is a program whose goal is to address all of these problems, both on the undergraduate and graduate level, with the ultimate aim of strengthening the physical sciences at Berkeley (I admit, we are a little bit ambitious). Central to our work is a two-week summer program for incoming Berkeley freshmen who are interested in the physical sciences (targeted at women and underrepresented minorities). The summer program addresses many of the issues I outlined above:

  1. By bringing together a set of 15-20 incoming freshmen for an intense two-week education experience, Compass starts the process of forming the network of peer interaction and support that doesn’t form during the intro physics sequence.
  2. Compass’s teaching methodology focuses very heavily on collaborative learning and group work. The Compass instructors (who are all grad students – more on this later), act more as guides helping the students answer a realistic physical question (for our pilot year, the question was “What do earthquakes tell us about the interior of the Earth?”), rather than an authoritarian source of all knowledge. We focus on building problem-solving and model-building skills in our students, which are skills not explicitly address in traditional physics classes.
  3. Compass introduces these students to the physics department very quickly. Through interaction with the Compass grad students, the Compass undergrads learn that physicists are real people, with real problems and real struggles, just like them. They get the message that they are valued members of the physics community as soon as they arrive on campus, and many of them choose to self-identify as physics majors before their first semester is done. We hope that as Compass grows, this sense of ownership will lead future Compass students to act as nuclei in their intro classes around which potential majors who were not in Compass can aggregate.
  4. The curriculum for the summer program is developed and implemented entirely by grad students. This means that Compass provides a tremendous opportunity for grad students involved in the program to hone their teaching skills in ways that simply aren’t possible without that level of freedom and control. Additionally, Compass provides a space where a passion for teaching is actually valued and encouraged, and therefore serves as a seed for the creation of a community of grad students. For many (including me!), the friendships formed through that community are invaluable for actually making it through grad school.

As though the summer program didn’t already keep us all busy, Compass also has several components that extend throughout the academic year, with the goal of supporting the Compass undergrads throughout their academic careers. Among those are (1) a mentorship program that pairs each Compass undergrad with a grad student to help them navigate the challenges of college, (2) a set of office hours, staffed by grad students and upperclassmen, to provide Compass students with academic help, (3) a lecture series where physics faculty describe their research at an undergrad level (this has been well-attended by Compass and non-Compass undergrads alike), and (4) pure social activities. So, yes, our goals are ambitious, but so are our methods for achieving those goals.

So, how can you help support this fantastic program? As I alluded to earlier, Compass was founded quite recently (our second summer program is happening this August!), and is entirely run by physics grad students. Right now, the main problem that Compass is facing at Berkeley is a lack of financial support (apparently times are tough in Sacramento as well as in DC), so we are trying to get the word out about our existence and the good work we are trying to do. So, if you think our program is worth supporting, spread the word! Tell your friends in important places about us, let us know if you are interested in hearing more or helping out, and, if you are able, donate some money to Compass. Every bit of help we can get is vital to keep this program going.

And if you happen to be a grad student at some school, and you happen to feel frustrated about these issues too, don’t despair. Consider starting a program similar to Compass at your school (and by all means, tell us about it). You’d be surprised how many good things your frustration can create.

87 Comments

87 thoughts on “Guest Post: Joel Corbo on Graduate School and Teaching”

  1. Hi Joel, thanks very much for your post. It touches on a lot of points that I’ve been concerned about for awhile now, because I’m a physics undergrad very interested in the education aspect of physics. (And to all those who are arguing physics education isn’t particularly important, come on. We all know better than that.)

    One point I will digress with you on, however, is the problem of having physics majors mixed in with engineers. I attend Case Western Reserve University, and while CWRU does have an “honors” track for physics students no one tipped me off on this so I was with the engineers in their physics track. I really had no problem with this and some of the people I did homework with were friends ever since, so I think having classes like that lets you meet others you might not otherwise and who don’t necessarily think like you do (which is an integral part of undergrad, in my opinion).

    This isn’t to say I don’t feel close to my fellow physics majors- we attend classes together sophomore year on, have a lounge, and a very active Physics and Astronomy Club, so in my year there’s a joke that we have all lived with, shared a drink, or dated every other major in the year. I remember going on study abroad and finding it fundamentally odd to be in a department where this wasn’t the attitude- at the institution I attended no one worked together on homework and there was even occasionally hostile tension over grades, but that’s another story I guess.

    I guess what I’m saying is while getting to know everyone else in a department as soon as possible is a great step to take early on, specific classes aren’t nessecarily the way to do it. Bribing interested frosh to come to the lounge with liquid nitrogen ice cream does wonders, after all. 😉

    As for your third point about “physicsness” and minorities in the field… as a female, I don’t see this as the case at all and never thought anything of it. (If I felt like there were lots more guys than gals in freshman physics- and I did, as I came from all-girls school- I sat towards the front so I couldn’t see them.) I haven’t heard of any females who arrived on campus planning to do physics and changing their minds over this point, either, so while it might be a factor I wouldn’t list it as a major contributing factor. But then, that’s my experience here.

  2. Pingback: On Compass « Entertaining Research

  3. As a physics major at Berkeley, I agree with mgary – the H series does a wonderful job of bringing potential physics majors together. It’s a problem, as Joel said, for non-H introductory courses since classes sizes of over 100 are filled mostly with engineering students. The thing I discovered is that the sooner students find out about the Reading Room, the sooner they become part of the community. I found out about it the beginning of my 2nd year, and that’s how I started to meet everyone. SPS at Berkeley is particularly good at frequently holding BBQs too. The incoming physics majors have to be willing to look around, and maybe it takes a bit of a push. I admit that I wouldn’t have found out about the Reading Room if my friend who knew a friend who knew a friend didn’t tell me.

  4. Re: 13. none-of-the-above writes:

    “Violence?! Do you really think that the LHC was funded by having the CERN director general rob banks and mug little old ladies?”

    Yes, the LHC was funded by robbing banks and mugging little old ladies, literally, albeit in a fairly sophisticated way. The government rarely actually has to pull out the gun because people know it will be there if they resist taxation. Of course they will try to imprison you first, but if you resist that, then you will start to see their guns. And I agree that international collaboration rocks, but the removal of public funding will only encourage more collaboration because each collaborator will bring in new funding from their own pockets.

    I also agree that experimentalists act quite efficiently with the money that they are awarded, but there is the additional consideration of whether they would have even began a given experiment if they didn’t have grant money. Milton Friedman’s advice applies to situations where a government agency might fund an experiment that nobody would want to personally contribute funding to.

  5. The purpose of a grad school in physics is simply not to educate teachers. The study is culminating in a PhD degree. It is not a doctor of teaching of kids, it is a rather selective “doctor of philosophy” – the actual scientific subject. For example, cosmology or nuclear physics.

    If someone wants to teach high school kids, she doesn’t need a PhD degree. If someone wants to teach at universities, she needs a lot of expert knowledge – to be professionally above the college kids and to be a genuine scientific authority that college students from whole regions and countries are expecting – and skills that do require the PhD degree and there are simply so many of them that teaching is just another distraction.

    When professors are hired, of course that teaching skills do play a significant role. But it is very correct that they don’t play so much role when PhD degrees are being awarded – i.e. they don’t play a key role in grad schools in general – because the PhD degrees are about science, not about enthusiasm in teaching.

    Good teachers are partly made by their talents and temperaments, and partly they can learn to be good teachers. The first category doesn’t improve if we add teaching to grad schools. The second category does improve but it improves at a wrong time. People should be “trained” to do certain things before these things are actually important. Professors may be improving their teaching skills once they are professors, too.

    The teaching skills of grad students should only be refined for the purpose of their performance as TAs because there is no other good reason for it.

    Quite generally, “teaching” is the weaker, less selective activity for scientists. A proverb says that “who can’t do the science, becomes a teacher”. It would be extremely bad if physics PhD were awarded just for teaching of high-school-level and similar level of scientific subjects.

  6. “Even at MIT, which is primarily recognized for the quality of its research (and rightly so), I found a physics department that openly cared about undergraduate education, where teaching was valued and done well and which fostered a community of undergrads who learned from and supported each other.”

    Do you have any hypotheses as to why the culture at MIT is healthier than at Berkeley?

    Don’t get me wrong- it is great that you’ve put this program together. But it is a shame that the culture was bad enough that you felt the need to act.

  7. Hi Anon,

    Wouldn’t it be great if there could be both great teaching and great philosophizing? It is interesting that you found so simple a definition for the purpose of grad school.

    Another “proverb” I’ve heard is “You only really learn something when you can teach it.”

    Although I do see your point that sometimes the faculty hiring committee might emphasize other things over teaching, I’ve tend to observe that most of the best are both great researchers and great teachers.

  8. I must admit that I’m bothered by the common attitude that physics education exists primarily to produce more physicists – by the numbers shouldn’t the intro classes be more concerned about the apathetic engineers? It’s not too crazy to say that the most important classes are the the ones full of people who will have only a glancing interaction with physics, and whose needs are rather different from those of the physics majors. (This is coupled to the “grad students are failures/have been failed if they don’t become professors” problem, but that’s a topic for a different day…)

    Anyway I certainly agree that graduate departments typically don’t make access to teaching development resources easy, so I’m glad that you’re working on this.

  9. You have to wonder what happens with the money the universities get from the astronomically large tuition fees the US students have to pay.

    Wouldn’t it be better if students at university were just given the opportunity to take exams and nothing more for a very small fee? Studens can then keep the money for tuition fees in their own pocket and spend it as they see fit.

  10. Great effort Joel. I certainly benefited tremendously from the close contact that physics majors had with PhD students in my home university as part of the normal organization of things, and coming to grad school was likewise severely disappointed at the lack of this interaction at my grad university. Even more shocked though at the lack of interest in discussing and exchanging research between researchers.

    And yes, we can do something. we started a series of regular colloquia in my particular field bringing together isolated PhD students from different institutions, which by now has gone Europe wide! It’s a small and intimate program in comparison to your monumental efforts but I’d like to join your rallying cry to other grad students, if you don’t like stuff, start changing it!

    “You’d be surprised how many good things your frustration can create.”

    word!

  11. @Joel

    My understanding (from highly anecdotal evidence), is that the department sees it as very much in its own interest to keep graduation rates high… and that the research groups also a strong (perhaps stronger) interest in looking after their own students. But as Ellipsis says, not every student works out–it seems hard to avoid that, although there are certainly some specific ways in which Berkeley (I, too, write about what I know) could handle the process more gracefully.

    Also, if believe that “it is hard to justify allowing people to graduate with PhDs who have not demonstrated the ability” to teach, aren’t you proposing a graduation requirement of some type? Won’t people who can’t do it fail to graduate (i.e. be weeded out)? And how on earth would a graduate program tell in advance whether its admitted students were up to teaching or not?

    But ok, I see you’ve said that you’ve said it would be enough if departments changed their attitudes about teaching. But what do you mean, concretely? If you think students oughtn’t to be penalized or sneered at simply for expressing an interest in teaching, that is obviously very fair. However, I think that much of the source of negativity toward teaching is from a more subtle issue: the perception that a student’s research suffers because of time spent on teaching. That, I think, is a fair thing for a department to be concerned about.

    @Count Iblis and Lab Lemming

    UC Berkeley, as a state-funded school, doesn’t get to charge anywhere near $40k per undergraduate, and it has a very large number to teach. Those things are a major challenge to teaching undergraduates well.

  12. On a more philosophical note, the assumed strict distinction between research and teaching that is implied today is not necessary, the German University system used to be build explicitly on the unity of research and teaching. Though they are separating it out somewhat these days….

    It’s one of these implied truths so universally accepted that we no longer realize it’s contingent and that there ARE other ways to frame the debate/think about these issues.

  13. I think the world is producing enough physicists.. as evidenced by the competition (and often low pay) for physicist positions. What I would like to see is engineers and other students develop deeper model building skills and understanding of fundamentals (physics).

    But although it may be sized correctly, the physics community could certainly use more diversity, as can engineering and CS. I would rather people think “more diverse” vs using other terms. “Underrepresented minority” as implemented it is usually about what you look like vs. your experience and what you think. ‘Look different’ is correlated to ‘diverse’ but not completely.

  14. I’m considerably older than most of you (at least I expect so), but my educational trajectory was much the same, tho’ I did a stint in the evil private sector, before returning to academe. Let’s face it – and be honest – university work is a business. The primary task of the university is to make a profit (not altogether unreasonably). Skill at teaching, while admirable, is not really in line with this goal, and as a result, it does not figure into tenure decisions and promotions, except in a superficial way. Now, a PhD is a research degree; I don’t believe anyone would argue otherwise. So university teachers are largely self-taught. It takes motivation, hard work, and practice to be good in the classroom. As there is very little reward (other than personal satisfaction) in being good (which does not necessarily translate as popular), and as the time spent in prep, grading, and so on, is time taken away from research, writing, and grant proposals (the things that DO count in tenure/promotion decisions), there is little motivation to spend a lot of time on classroom stuff. And the university is going to be more interested in the things that bring in grant money. By the way, I should say that do have tenure, so this is not sour grapes about the system; I have perhaps a broader perspective having been in the private sector). And there are notable exceptions; Rabi used to insist that everyone teach, everyone WILL do it well, and he always put the best of us in the “Physics for Poets” class.

  15. Very nice post. I had the luxury of getting to actually teach with my TA assignment at Caltech, and to work for a professor who cared very much about undergraduate education (Prof. Politzer).

    Personally, I think of being a physicist as a bit like being a scribe in olden days. Sure, we research, and every once and a while the very best of us discover something really interesting. But most of us are not writing thousand citation papers — our ideas will not be described in history books. For those of us, I see our value as being keepers of knowledge and methods, to pass on to others. Because everything it takes to do what we do cannot be put into a book, it needs a living, thinking vessel. At least that’s how I justify being a physicist despite the marginal value of my work ;).

    Anyway, from this perspective, teaching is very important. From this perspective, research is something you do to keep yourself sharp, to add value to what you can share with others. Of course we all hope that maybe we’ll be one of the lucky ones who actually discovers something of real value to the world, something of tangible interest to people outside our circle of colleagues. But for me, that hope is just too chancy to stake my assessment of the value of what I do.

  16. @Anonymous hero

    Quite generally, “teaching” is the weaker, less selective activity for scientists. A proverb says that “who can’t do the science, becomes a teacher”

    And yet another proverb says: “If you can’t explain it to an undergraduate, you don’t understand it yourself.”* Teaching is not a skill that you can learn-once-and-be-done-with-it, like riding a bike. Every piece of knowledge that needs to be taught requires very careful consideration of how it was constructed in the first place — because the best teacher doesn’t just read off what they know — they lead the student in figuring it out themselves. For the student, the metaphorical difference is between watching a video of someone climbing Everest for you, and following a sherpa who helps you along as you climb to the top of the mountain yourself. And I would argue that though you could be a good researcher without that sherpa skill, you are even better with it. So, no, good teaching shouldn’t be required, but it should be encouraged.

    * Now, I can’t think of anyone who’s been able to explain string theory to undergrads. What does that tell us? 😉

  17. Nice post. Good luck with COMPASS. Sounds like something both fun to do and rewarding.

    On the question of whether Universities are suppose to teach or do research, I think the answer is both. On whether the Universities are doing both, I think the answer is yes.

    There is always a tension between the two, simply because there is only so much time/resources around to do both. Not everyone can be a good teacher and a good researcher. Someone who is a good researcher but a poor teacher is probably doing the university a favour by not doing as much teaching as s/he is required : how many of us remembered that terrible teacher that you and I have wasted our time with and said “Man I could have learn that better on my own.”.

    Well, that’s my main point : I think good teaching are great, but no good/bad teaching is going to make or break a student’s time in school. Universities are not simply places you enroll in to sit in classes : there are other students, the energy of being there, the off-hand discussions, the motivation you get from being surrounded by fellow scholars/learners. That’s why the internet can never replace the physical university.

    (Disclaimer : I love teaching people stuff. But I always have the sneaky suspicion that I get more from teaching than people I teach.)

  18. Lab Lemming said “Do you have any hypotheses as to why the culture at MIT is healthier than at Berkeley?”

    As a former MIT undergraduate, and interested in physics when I arrived, I can say that’s because the OP is full of bulls**t. The introductory physics class 8.01 is notorious for failing upwards of 20% of the entering class, and in my opinion it’s because the teaching sucks. (This is suggested by the observations that those who fail get a second try with the few TAs who speak English, and a professor who also speaks English – and these students inevitably pass). So yea, while the OP may have been a talented physicist-in-the-making and thus soaked up material, believe me when I say that physics teaching at MIT is not all its cracked up to be.

  19. riptide,

    When I was a freshman undergrad, the intro to physics courses had over a 50% flunkout rate. Every second grade was an F.

    It was basically used as a “weedout” course to kick out as many engineering and science majors as possible.

  20. It’s not about teaching but about research and limiting entrants to the size of the program, which is as small as possible since it is all about research. Expectations need to be crushed to fit in the available opportunities. Even then, too many are produced.

  21. It’s not about teaching but about research and limiting entrants to the size of the program, which is as small as possible since it is all about research. Expectations need to be crushed to fit in the available opportunities. Even then, too many are produced.

    So, by that logic, we should abolish undergraduate education altogether, because the professors shouldn’t spend any time teaching, and instead devote their full time to research. So, after you graduate from high school, you should go and spend four years backpacking in Europe, at which point you’ll be magically ready to either enter the workforce, or start research for your graduate degree.

    This is sheer idiocy. While your quality as a researcher should be judged solely by the papers you put out, your quality as a well-rounded member of academia should necessarily include teaching. In fact, if we were to get down to semantics for a second here, the very word “professor” has everything to do with teaching: it comes from Latin “professus”, which means to “declare openly”, that is – to share and disseminate knowledge.

    So yeah, someone whose title is a ‘researcher’ should just concentrate on research, and someone whose title is a ‘lecturer’ should just teach, but a professor (that most Ph.D. students presumably aspire to be) should do both, and do it well.

  22. Dear Joel,
    I think what you are doing with the Compass Project
    is great, and wish you success.
    The students in your summer program will certainly
    benefit in many ways. (Before my undergraduate studies,
    in Europe, I also profited much from a program, which had
    me take a 4-week modern math course [though traditional
    lecture format] before the first semester; after that,
    I was ahead in the first-year math classes, which otherwise
    weeded out many students.)
    And it will allow for better social connections between the
    sometimes ‘nerdy’ science students.

    But why is teaching not rewarded in a research university?
    I’d think that the main problem is economic: As a professor,
    at a research university you *must* get grant money.
    The University adds to the money you apply for an overhead
    charge (to pay for office/lab space, admin. cost)in the
    range of 50 to 70%; the department gets back some money
    from this overhead charge. The direct grant money will
    pay the professor’s summer salary, or sabbatical salary,
    travel to conferences, computers, experimental equipment,
    and graduate student salaries.
    So if you don’t get any grant money, your (professor’s)
    life is miserable, your chairman will visit you and
    suggest to move elsewhere…
    Also, the fact is that if you won the prize for best teacher,
    but do not get grant money, you won’t get tenure.
    (Of course, during commencement addresses, the university
    president will always say to the assembled parents how important
    he thinks teaching is, but three weeks later, we learn that Asst.
    Prof. So-and-so, who won an award for teaching three years
    in a row, did unfortunately not get tenure.)

    (Anecdote: I remember that at an earlier time, I applied for
    postdoc and teaching positions in small colleges;
    when I asked for recommendation letters, my adviser asked
    to make sure in which letters he might mention that I had been
    a prize-winning teaching assistant; as he thought, that
    mentioning good teaching in a letter to a research institution
    would be the kiss of death;
    it would be understood as a disrecommendation, meaning
    “I cannot say enough about the candidate’s research, so I throw
    in some remark on his teaching to fill the space.”)

    So then, if your grant pays a graduate student, you, of course,
    want that graduate student work more than full-time on research,
    so that you can mention much progress in the progress report or
    grant renewal application. No time for any other activity.–

    Now there used to be (and might still be) many colleges which
    value teaching. However, as there was in the last 20 years such
    a great supply of very good physics graduates, with Ph.D.s and
    research experience, even small colleges -who in the (long)past even
    allowed instructors with only a M.S.- nowadays routinely ask for
    Ph.D. and many publications. The work on Compass migh give you
    and your colleagues working on it an additional brownie point
    when applying to such an institution, if you find it.
    Also industry might be more open-minded, as there they are aware
    that presentation skills are important.

    Now, please excuse the rant following here, on comments 6,29:
    Chris Clark [CC]of comment 6 has it right that it is the incentives.
    But he drank of some cool aid when he writes:
    “I also think all the “free money” floating around causes a lot
    of problems. Professors spend so much of their time begging for
    their share of the loot stolen by the government through taxation….
    ….science would be better off without public funding….
    As for expensive experiments like the LHC, if they can’t be funded
    without the use of violence, then is it really the right time to
    perform them?”
    Well, I’d think that
    – taxation is the dues we pay for living in a civilized society.
    – for certain things, public funding is needed, as the ‘free market’
    fails in providing it, such as roads, schools, a legal and court system
    (>~90% of federal court cases are brought by companies, shouldn’t
    they be taxed to pay for it?), police (mainly enforcing property
    rights)….and funding for research, which provides a public benefit
    (Remember: taxpayer-funded high-energy particle physics research
    gave you the WWW, ARPA + NSF built the internet…)
    – certain things are possible only by public tax funding, due to the
    size of the problem; e.g. welfare (could not be replaced by private
    charity) and certainly it seems ridiculous to suggest that LHC
    should be built by contributions from physics professors’ salaries.
    But society has agreed to fund such things, by the imperfect means
    of our legislature/congress/government.
    (Perhaps CC’s argument is that there should be no big science; my
    observation is that in the U.S., industry has totally abandoned basic
    research, so it wouldn’t be replaced; there is no more Bell Labs;
    the free market took care of it.)
    CC (Comment 29): “Yes, the LHC was funded by robbing banks and mugging
    little old ladies, literally, albeit in a fairly sophisticated way.”
    “Taxation = robbery?” What did you just smoke?
    (Remember, those who presumably are taxed most, also profit most
    from the social system which makes their income possible. Or do you
    suggest having private armies instead of the police, to protect your
    property and enforce business contracts (well, the Mafia worked well
    enforcing theirs, but somehow I prefer the court system, for all its
    imperfections).
    You may argue that LHC is too expensive. But I am happy that my taxes
    pay for a minuscule part of it. (But I am open to suggestions to have
    optional wars funded by bake sales, and canceled, if not enough is raised.)

    CC (comment 6):”As usual, economics can tell you the solution to the problem,….”
    No, it seems some ideology from defunct economists which tells you that.

    Sorry for rant. But this ‘taxation=robbery’ crap shouldn’t be propagated without some opposition. The U.S. has been much harmed by too many people falling for this.

  23. “The primary task of the university is to make a profit.”

    No. No it’s not. Simply put that is entirely and absurdly wrong, at least in most universities I have been involved in. That is one of these completely basic assumptions that is presented as if it was some sort of common sense that everybody ultimately has to agree to even if it might make them feel uncomfortable.

    In truth it makes us feel uncomfortable because it is a vicious destructive ideology wrapped into a s seemingly common sense statement. Because it is presented as such arguing against it immediately makes you feel like you are just making excuses through sophistery. You are not. Given the economic framing of every debate simply makes it harder to express more appropriate sentiments and debates because you always need to deconstruct the framing first.

    It is a sad testament to our society that this insidious debating technique is so effective today.

    I submit:
    “Let’s face it, economic constraints are a reality, but the primary task of a university is to further an disseminate human knowledge and culture.”

    or even:
    “Let’s face it, the primary task of a university is to further an disseminate human knowledge and culture. Economic matters need to be evaluate with respect to this goals, they hold no meaning in themselves.”

  24. So, by that logic, we should abolish undergraduate education altogether, because the professors shouldn’t spend any time teaching, and instead devote their full time to research.

    It is not totally absent of opportunity, only mostly so.

  25. The better approach in my view would be to statistically detail the outcomes to be expected of new entrants in their first class all the way to eventual career, position, pay, success, status, obstacles, etc., and let students decide for themselves whether they should pursue it, even though each may expect they will be the exception.

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