The Researcher and the Teacher

Sibling rivals or Siamese twins?

A great deal of eloquence and not a little venom has been expended over the years on the subject of the proper relation between the teaching a college professor does and his or her research activities. Usually, the plaintiff in the recurrent eruptions of this controversy is an educator who feels that undergraduate teaching is being sacrificed on the altar of research. Arises then a defendant to answer the charge, an educator who believes, to quote Stanford's David Jordan, that "the crowning function of a university is original research" and that "investigation is the basis of all good instruction."

- The idea that seems to lie at the heart of the controversy is that the two pursuits are mutually exclusive, and it has given rise to two opposing camps - the research naysayers and the research yea-sayers. (Nobody, but nobody ever comes out in print saying that teaching is a bad thing.) The nay-sayers decry researchers as the products of an overspecialized technical training that excludes humanism and culture. The proponents of research cite the advancement of knowledge and the intellectual vitality of a mind searching in depth. Specialists in research are coldblooded, self-aggrandizing, narrow-minded intellectual machines who constitute a moral plague in the classroom, charges one side. Dissemination of outmoded knowledge by intellectually dessicated minds produces the worst kind of bumbling, ineffectual education in an atmosphere with all the inspirational value of the grave, retorts the other.

Recently, the controversy has given signs of surfacing again. Mathematician Morris Kline has just brought out a book entitled Why the Professor Can't Teach, and Newsweek last August carried a polemic against academic specialization by Mor-timer J. Adler. In an effort to bring to light some of the complexities of an issue which often threatens to become simplistically black-and-white, the ALUMNI MAGAZINE chose one segment of the Dartmouth curriculum — the laboratory sciences — and asked several of its professors to discuss the relationship between their own teaching and research.

PROFESSOR WALTER STOCKMAYER, a deceptively unassuming chemist whose investigations into the behavior of long-chain molecules have won him election to the National Academy of Sciences, thought carefully about the question before he replied. "It is my firm belief," he said at last, "that people who want to teach preprofessional physical sciences need the per- sonal motivation of a quest, of research."

Stockmayer, who was trained at M.I.T. and Oxford, spent 18 years as a professor of chemistry at research-oriented M.I.T. before coming to Dartmouth in 1961. He said he is happy with the change and that he values a small research program such as Dartmouth's. Students can learn perfectly well at large universities, he explained, but the atmosphere there is often unpleasantly competitive. Stockmayer spoke of the dangers of overcommitment in doing research; but he also pointed out that the recognition that research brings is understandably important to people. "After all," he said, quoting Thomas Carlyle, "people can scarcely be got to teach for 'the greater glory of the university.' "

"As far as I've seen things operate here at Dartmouth," continued Stockmayer, " 'publish or perish' is a dangerous over-simplification. A couple of people have been appointed to tenure here whose scholarship is of an unconventional sort and cannot be measured by the number of research papers they have published. The production of teaching texts, for instance, well done, is as good as research. A very, very good teacher, one who may not have published much but who has displayed a scholarly concern of some sort, has a chance here. But a bad teacher cannot, no matter how starry his or her research, get tenure here."

It is common these days for professors to assert that research benefits teaching, but Stockmayer volunteered an obviously sincere and considered opinion that teaching also benefits research, which is unusual. "You need to try to explain what you are doing on as many levels as possible in order to understand what you are doing. Teaching makes you do that. Teaching freshmen is obviously a pleasure, but it also helps to generate tangential ideas for research."

For Stockmayer personally, the connection between teaching and research is a close working relationship, like a domestic arrangement or a marriage: "There are both enormous benefits and conflicts of interest in the arrangement," he said. Time, of course, is the major source of conflict. "And when there is a time crunch, the lecture suffers," he admitted.

Making judgments about a professor's research is easy, Stockmayer pointed out. "Whether we evaluate teaching properly is another question," he said with some concern. "The evaluations we get on young assistant professors from students who have already graduated are evaluations taken from the first, the apprenticeship years of teaching. There are late-bloomers in the world, who are shy and stutter and who have to learn how to teach." Popularity, a Dartmouth teaching standard which has come in for criticism before, is not, in Stockmayer's view, necessarily synonymous with instructing skill. "Everybody is not meant to be a spellbinder in a large lecture hall," he said firmly.

Leaning back in his chair, Stockmayer reflected that times have changed since he carved his own niche in academe. "The pace of research used to be more leisurely. The journals were thinner and there was less to read to keep up. Less expensive apparatus was necessary, and methods were more time-consuming. Young people just getting started now are finding it increasingly difficult. One response to the change has been the curtailing of teaching duties everywhere. Dartmouth requires less teaching than M.I.T. did when I was an assistant professor there. M.I.T. also requires less now."

PROFESSOR THOMAS SPENCER, one of Stockmayer's colleagues in chemistry, described himself as "primarily an educator," but he admitted that "by Dart- mouth standards" he has done quite a bit of research. His field is organic synthesis - the putting together of molecules chemically. At present he is applying his knowledge biochemically, in examining how enzymes, which are chemical catalysts, work to inhibit and regulate such things as cholesterol production.

Spencer said that when he first began teaching he just mouthed all the academically popular words about how important research is to good teaching. "But I discovered," he said pointedly, "that it is absolutely correct. I honestly believe it is almost impossible to maintain yourself as a truly effective teacher without doing research. Why, given how drastically the discipline changes, much of what I teach now simply wasn't 18 years ago when I started teaching."

He maintained that increasing professionalism has not adversely affected undergraduate education at Dartmouth. "In the mid-sixties," he said, "when the graduate programs in the sciences were first introduced here, there were great fears about that. But nobody is left who contends that undergraduate education has been harmed. Even the undergraduates agree. They still get all the tender loving care they ever did. The teaching has got to be done. I spend my life talking to students. You have to be available to them at all times, at the same time that you're doing competitive research. You have to succeed as a teacher here."

According to Spencer, Dartmouth occupies an unusual position among American institutions of higher education, which offer, he said, a great spectrum of undergraduate education: "At one end are small liberal arts colleges, most of which, despite good intentions, can't provide competitive research experience for their students. At the other end are the state universities, the big research empires where students are not noticed by anybody. Dartmouth is in the middle, by design. Our majors spend a lot of time in the building, because they have the rare opportunity to be involved in the research that does go on here. That is effective, stimulating education. It offers the humbling experience of learning what it takes to control things and teaches a great respect for the complexity of nature."

Like Stockmayer, Spencer lamented the expenses involved in modern scientific research. "Most of our instruments have a five-year life before they become ob- solete," he explained. He spends a lot of his time writing proposals for grants to buy major equipment, and he admitted that the success of an assistant professor at Dartmouth is dependent in part on how much funding he or she can attract from outside.

He agreed, too, that times have changed since he and Stockmayer climbed up the academic ladder to tenure. "The hiring pool is frightening. It takes guts these days to go for an academic job. You kill yourself for low pay for six years — until the tenure decision — and then what?"

KAREN JENNETTE, assistant professor of chemistry, has three more years before she faces that possible "Now what?" In addition to teaching courses in inorganic chemistry and biochemistry, Jennette is working at the forefront of cancer study. The research team she leads has an NIH grant of $130,000 to investigate the way that the carcinogenic (cancer-causing) metals chromium and nickel affect DNA.

Almost everyone in the Chemistry Department, said Jennette, wants to do research. "Oh, sure," she admitted, "some don't, a tenured minority. But those people have more committee duties or teaching duties. Such people might well not get tenure today. I think there may be more emphasis on research now. But it's good to be active, because it helps in teaching."

Jennette thought the teaching load in chemistry "quite reasonable," explaining that she has two terms out of four free for research: "In each of the other two, I teach one course, which has a lab. Course preparation and labs take up most of my time then. There may be two or three sections of the lab for a course, and each section meets once a week from 1:45 until 5:45. Teaching assistants do help in the labs, but the initial lecture is my responsibility, and I go around to each student at least once in each lab session. It's a unique opportunity to get to know them by working with them. It's different from having them come to my office and knock on my door."

She said she thinks Dartmouth students have "a unique opportunity" in being directed in original chemical research for their senior theses. "They don't do cookbook experiments in the labs. They have a chance to do real research. It helps develop their intellectual abilities and a special kind of creativity and originality that they don't otherwise have a chance to express."

PROFESSOR JOHN COPENHAVER '46 is a biologist who maintains that in any field that is changing, a teacher must be interested in research. "Otherwise you lose track of new advances," he said. "You get old, stale, out-of-date."

Copenhaver explained that four years ago the Biology Department at Dartmouth had gone stale. "The research was falling off, the teaching was suffering," he said. "We decided that the cure was to hire a nationally known researcher (who was also reputed to be a good teacher) to chair the department. I think it has worked. The students aren't bitching to me as much about poor lectures. We recruited four new faculty who are doing a lot of good research, and the feedback from the students indicates that they are all good teachers."

Copenhaver recalled only two people in his own experience who were good teachers without also being researchers. "And both of them," he said emphatically, "read voluminously in the library to keep up with the field." Not that research makes a good teacher, he cautioned: "Communication and willingness and joy make a good teacher." After saying that Dartmouth has been both conscientious and fortunate in adhering to a high teaching standard, Copenhaver explained some differences in the two occupations. "Reputation on a national basis is the product of your research," he said, "and to a much smaller extent of the research achievements of your former students. A teaching reputation does not happen until one is well along. It usually doesn't extend outside one's own institution for years. Then, too, one may learn how to teach, and it may take time. There is a saying about all this: 'Research credits are transferable; teaching credits are not.' "

The greatest pressures on a biologist at Dartmouth, according to Copenhaver, are the teaching pressures, which make it necessary to curtail the research. "Some people don't stay here because of that," he said. "We recently lost a very very bright young professor from Stanford who was doing very exciting research and was also an excellent teacher. She left because of an attractive offer from elsewhere. The attraction was a lighter teaching load; it wasn't money that moved her." (Biologists at Dartmouth are required to teach one course each term for three out of four terms. Most courses carry a lab, and a lab may run to as many as eight sections.)

Copenhaver's feeling was that the College's commitment to research could be better, but that it is far, far better now than it was at the end of World War II: "Ernest Martin Hopkins operated this place on the thesis that research and teaching were mutually exclusive. After 25 years of that, we were in sad academic shape. President Dickey finally made a serious commitment to research." Such a commitment is principally a commitment of money: "It costs a lot to hire more faculty so the teaching load can be lightened and to provide facilities and equipment for basic research."

By basic research, Copenhaver said he meant "asking pertinent questions and detecting worthwhile answers without necessarily having long-range concrete objectives such as a cure for cancer." Directed research can make scientific advances, but it seldom solves big problems, he explained, citing President Johnson's massive infusion of money for cancer cure research and comparing that with Rosalyn Yalow's Nobel Prize-winning work in radioimmunoassay. "That was a result of something she was doing 'on the side,' " said Copenhaver. "Neither she nor anybody else had any real inkling of its value when she began the research."

Copenhaver himself is currently studying fishes' gills, which behave much like human kidneys in regulating the balance of sodium and potassium salts in the blood. The questions he wants to answer are posed by those fishes which can live in both freshwater and saltwater - some flounders, for instance, and salmon. He suspects that the same enzyme is somehow working in these fishes' gills in two different directions, since in freshwater a fish must retain salt and in saltwater it must excrete it. "There is no basis for the research in clinical medicine or anything like that," asserted Copenhaver. "Just a better understanding of how cells and membranes operate."

Copenhaver left this intriguing topic, however, to return to the subject of teaching. "I don't think I could be without it for long. I think I would miss it. I would miss the chance to have contact with students and have an impact on them. I get rejuvenated by working with young minds. I get great satisfactions from it." He laughed and then added, "Of course, I get ticked off by it sometimes, too."

NINA ALLEN, halftime assistant professor of biology, explained that because she must "hustle up" grant money for the other half of her salary, she spends more time writing grants and doing research than the regular full-time faculty member. She is currently co-investigator on a $400,000 National Institutes of Health grant, doing what she described as "elegant light microscopy." Using recently developed light microscopes, Allen photographs and "does the science on" the minute cytoskeletons of plant cells. She also wants to understand how actin and myosin (proteins which are also found in muscle) act to transport the cytoplasm of cells.

In response to questions about teaching and research, she replied: "Those who do little research teach rather unimaginatively, I suspect. It is a very rare person who can teach the right things and not do research. The excitement of research has to show through." Allen described her own undergraduate university, Wisconsin, as a "research factory" but feels that she got a "super" education there. She said that nobody is hired at Dartmouth unless he or she can give a seminar that is understandable, but added, "I think that if you are really good at research, you can teach, too - because you're smart." (She conceded that there may be a five per cent exception to this rule.)

Allen recalled asking President Kemeny once whether teaching or research was the more important at Dartmouth. His reply, she reported, was, "At this college, it's teaching." "On the other hand," she added, "the department is chaired by a researcher."

Allen herself "loves teaching," although she feels she is not always good at it. "I find the students here are really great. But then I teach esoteric subjects. Some members of the department might cry if you asked them about teaching Biology 5. It's full of medical students, and it's often very competitive and depressing."

Like Copenhaver, Allen said she felt that the infusion of researchers into the Biology Department four years ago has improved things. "Four years ago," she recalled, "there weren't many undergraduates around the department. Now they are finding that it's exciting to be around."

According to Allen, she and her colleagues often work a 16-hour day. "We might get more research done if we didn't have such a heavy teaching load." She thought a minute and then added, "Realistically, there are always some people who get tenure and then peter out. There ought to be some equitable way to arrange things so that those people could teach more and leave the others freer to do their research."

WILLIAM DOYLE, professor of physics, came to Dartmouth in 1955 directly from a doctorate at Yale. For the first ten years here, he explained, he was heavily involved in teaching first-year physics. "I could not possibly have survived teaching elementary physics courses for ten years without having an interest in the subject itself," he said flatly. "Awakening intellectual joy in a student comes from keeping it alive in yourself through research."

What Doyle called "the guts" of the issue is the role research plays in teaching a student what real physics is. "As a student," he recalled, "I loved books and hated labs. They all do. It is difficult to make up a phony situation that can interest a student. That's why labs have such a hard time — the answer is in the book, and the student feels, what's the point? It is vital that a student experience real physics — which is dirty, messy, and full of error. In this building something has got to be going on that is as messy as the real world."

Is the relationship between teaching and research reciprocal? "Yes," said Doyle, after mulling over the unfamiliar question for a moment. "It happens all the time that I get new research ideas by preparing lectures. In fact, the more I think about it, the more important I think it is. Teaching broadens research and defocuses it. Both teaching and research are very important; research alone leads to narrowness."

Doyle spoke somewhat strongly about the way a lot of non-academic research is done. "If you really want to develop something, do it with industry," he said. "Put the money to it! Zonk! Get the answer! Get it done! When multibusiness, or agribusiness, or the military-industrial complex wants to do something, it finds a big building, puts a lab in it, and fills it with people working as a team. Of course, there's no joy in it, and nobody asks why it's being done. And I suspect it's not easy there to follow hunches and intuitive guesses. But it'll tell you the best way to grow tomatoes. You can't eat them, but you will definitely get the most tomatoes."

He relaxed and talked about teaching. "Oh, yeah, I love to teach. I love the large elementary classes. I like to explain things, like to talk loud. It is significant to talk to a large number of people, to try to make the large ideas of physics accessible to a lot of people. I like to teach at that level. You get to deal with big structural things in the elementary courses." Doyle confessed that his most memorable teaching experience was the time he astounded his son's fourthgrade class with a little bit of real physics. "But," he concluded, "you can teach elementary courses too much. I did. It's hard to keep being original at it. Finally, it got too hard to approach in a fresh way. It was a chunk of my life. Now I'm in a different chunk: I'll teach more technically advanced courses for a while now."

If Doyle's teaching focus has changed, so has the focus of his research. As a young assistant professor, he began studying the magnetic interaction of electrons trapped in insulating crystals. "I had a big National Science Foundation grant to develop the thing, and I set up a big establishment - graduate students, undergraduate assistants, visitors, technicians, equipment, the whole thing — and it went on for 15 years. We mapped out the detailed shape of the probability distributions of electrons we injected into crystals. We had years of fun with that. Then for a few years I had a ball learning what happened to the electrons when we squeezed them. I went around giving papers at high-pressure physics conferences and meeting all those people. Then I got tired of it. The questions I could think of got smaller and smaller. I was no longer excited by it. And besides, my students were not getting jobs any more."

Doyle dismantled his research establishment and picked up a little idea he had had on a back burner for years, about the optical properties of inhomogeneous media. (When electron-injected crystals are heated, the electrons clump together and the crystal acquires new physical properties and is then said to be "inhomogeneous.")

"The problem has been around for a hundred years and nobody else seemed interested in it. I thought I would just putter around in it by myself and see what happened. Then last summer I got a notice about an international symposium on the optical properties of inhomogeneous media. Now I am trying to decide whether I want to apply for a grant and set up again. I'm not at all sure I want to administer another big establishment." His brow furrowed. "You know," he said, "the Bible speaks of being doers of the word and not sayers of the word. But the writers of the Bible didn't foresee being administrators of the word."

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR BRUCE PIPES, also in physics, has just this year been granted tenure at Dartmouth. He made the point that most people are apparently unaware that anybody does research here. He admitted that he himself wasn't sure about it when he came up to interview six years ago. "I was pleasantly surprised," he said. "It wasn't Harvard, of course, but it was a reasonably significant program." Pipes is concerned about Dartmouth's reputation. He said he still encounters people, even at the scientific funding organizations, who think of Dartmouth as "only a teaching" institution.

Pipes himself has never felt any real tension between his teaching and his research, although he did, he said, feel some uneasiness about which was really important at Dartmouth. "I wasn't sure about the criteria. It wasn't that I wondered whether to spend more time here or there. I had the time. But when you come to a new place, you are always told that you should be a good teacher and do 'significant' research. I thought about it a lot. Significant in what context? Competitive with Harvard, Princeton, with European institutions? 'Sure, sure,' the deans say, 'Why not?' That's not a real answer. Maybe it; should be significant in the context of Dartmouth. That is to say, signs of continuing intellectual activity in areas of research. That's very different. After I got tenure, I knew the answer."

The College is looking for evidence of solid teaching and solid research, accord- ing to Pipes, who said he felt that his good teaching was the most important factor in the College's tenure offer to him. "The research doesn't have to be world-shaking," he said, explaining that his isn't and that that's unlikely here anyway, because of a lack of facilities.

According to Pipes, the administration's commitment to research in physics is distressingly small at Dartmouth. "More deans should be down in Washington banging on desks for money," he said. "And there should be more pressure on us to write for outside funds, pressure from the deans and the head of the department."

Pipe's own research has suffered from insufficient funding. He studies magnetism in helium and the conduction of electricity in metals and other materials at temperatures near absolute zero (—460°F), and he is plagued by the difficulty of obtaining liquid helium for the work. Dartmouth does not have a helium liquifier (which costs between $100,000 and $200,000), so Pipes and his team buy the helium from Boston at $20 a gallon. "We use 30 to 40 gallons a month," he explained. "There are often shipping delays, and recently a shutdown of the helium wells in Texas caused our graduate students to have to sit on their hands for a month." Helium liquifiers are common in major universities, he asserted, recalling that at Stanford, where he did his doctoral work, "there were two of them down the hall."

Pipes understands that Dartmouth probably just doesn't have that kind of money, although he is convinced that a greater commitment to research on the part of the administration would not harm the undergraduate teaching. "I don't think there is a strong relationship between the quality of a teacher and the quality of his or her research activities. Teaching depends on careful recruiting and careful scrutiny at promotion. That's independent of research."

IT seems clear that at Dartmouth both teaching and research are important. It also seems clear that the Dartmouth professors represented here were more interested in discussing research than teaching — possibly because an attack against research always lurks in the topic "teaching and research," and those who value both may feel that it is the research which needs bolstering. Another Dartmouth professor has suggested that the tendency among academics to cry up their dedication to research and to downplay their dedication to teaching may well be a defensive pose adopted out of the ever-present uncertainty all teachers feel about how good they are at teaching, which is so much more difficult, to evaluate than is research.

Though the remarks presented here are hardly conclusive, they do suggest that the older a professor is, the more he or she will have to say about the joys of undergraduate teaching. This could be because younger academics are a product of the changed times Stockmayer and Spencer mentioned. Or it might be that professors naturally have a greater concern in the early years with the professional status that research brings and that later in their careers, when they have made their niches, they look for different joys in what Doyle called different "chunks" of their lives. It could be some of both.

The issue is complicated by many such things, but not least among them is a distinction which academics usually make but seldom articulate, between two very different kinds of teaching. One kind involves the communication of more or less commonplace knowledge to the young of a society: the passing on of "elementary" knowledge which it is felt everybody needs to have. At its most basic, this is the kind of teaching parents give their infants and toddlers and elementary school teachers give the early grades. It has a relatively low status in this society, where it is relegated largely to women. The satisfactions it provides are not those of grappling with subject matter itself, but those of grappling with the intricacies of human relationship in an effort to understand how best to transmit the other kinds of knowledge.

At the college level, this "elementary" teaching of large numbers of uninitiated students also carries low status, as indicated by its designation as "service" teaching. The "higher" teaching, the teaching about which college professors are usually most enthusiastic, is the teaching of more or less "new" knowledge — the kind research generates — to graduate students and upperclass students majoring in the professor's discipline. The number of such students — who are the ones who have the oft-mentioned advantage of doing actual research — is relatively small.

"Almost entirely," says Professor Thomas Roos, who chairs the Biology Department at the College, "the undergraduates who do research in biology are majors. It is highly unlikely that anyone else would have the background to do anything other than sandbox science. This department gave out a total of 1,711 undergraduate grades last year, and I would say that the number of juniors and seniors doing research last year was about 36." The numbers in chemistry and physics are similar. It should be remembered in the face of these startlingly disparate numbers that every undergraduate has a major and will in some department or other be part of such a small, privileged group. But the numbers do reflect this seldom-articulated distinction between the two kinds of teaching. A tendency to confuse them clouds an issue already complex by nature.

Another Gordian knot encountered in any attempt at analyzing the relationship between teaching and research at Dartmouth is the apparent refusal on the part of the humanities faculty here to have graduate departments - a refusal which thoroughly mystifies the scientists. It is even possible that in the humanities the relationship between teaching and research is a very different kettle of fish.

Shelby Grantham wrote about changes inthe study of the classics in the March issue.She is an assistant editor of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE.