The Prize Nobody Wins
WHEN Norman Maclean graduated from Dartmouth and went off to teach in Chicago, he presently won the University of Chicago's distinguished teaching award. In fact, he won it three times - as early as 1932 and as late as 1973. When Professor Robert Hunter left Dartmouth's English Department to become the Mellon professor at Vanderbilt, he soon received $1,000 and a silver cup for distinguished teaching.
If they'd stayed at Dartmouth, neither could have won anything, because Dartmouth has no mechanism for publicly rewarding good teaching. It has plenty of mechanisms for publicly rewarding good scholarship. There are faculty fellowships (equals paid time to work on a book), research grants by the score, College payment of "page charges" for learned articles in the sciences, and so on. There is a special dean to help faculty get grants from outside, so they will have still more time to write. Good teaching is simply taken for granted.
If I were an alumnus wanting to do something really useful for the College - something that would help keep Dartmouth what it is - i wouldn't endow a professorship or give a piece of a building, or even set up another scholarship fund. I would create a teaching prize. My only question would be whether to make the whole faculty eligible, or limit it to the junior faculty.
If I limited it to the junior faculty, it wouldbe with the avowed purpose of helping good teachers get tenuije. They need help. Scholarship is something tangible and measurable - and like all other first-class institutions, Dartmouth is very busy measuring it when it comes time to give or deny tenure. At least one department has an official minimum of five published articles before one can hope to be seriously considered for tenure; and every department much prefers assistant professors who have written books. Which is right and proper. How can you expect students to knock themselves out writing papers if you don't think it's important enough to write any yourself?
Obviously teaching counts, too, when it comes time to give or deny tenure. The College, to its credit, gets in touch with some 20 or 30 former students of any given teacher when he or she comes up for tenure, and asks for a frank opinion, primarily on teaching. (1 have seen some of the letters these young graduates write in reply. To their credit, they write thoughtful, perceptive, and completely honest evaluations; they do the College proud.)
But what that you can put your hands on is there to stack up against someone's new book, shining in an aura of good reviews - or against someone's foot-long record of service on important committees? Right now there is nothing. A distinguished teaching award - maybe complete with silver julep cup - would be a strong help to our best young teachers as they come up for tenure.
In the end, though, I don't think I would limit the award to the junior faculty. Partly because it's just as important to have the full professors teaching well as it is the young ones. But mainly because things that aim too directly at their goal often don't work. A prize limited to assistant professors would be too nakedly a tenure-helper; there would be too much departmental pressure involved in its awarding. It would also have less prestige than one for which all were eligible. So I would have my prize open to the whole faculty. But I would be happiest when it went to some brilliant young teacher who might otherwise get passed over in favor of the good committee-person, or the one who had been pouring out articles (and maybe been pretty inaccessible to students meanwhile).
What would my prize be? I think Vanderbilt's $1,000 is just about right. Big enough to matter, not so big as to create too dire an envy among colleagues. Only I would make one change from the Vanderbilt system. There the winner simply pockets the money, and that's that. My prize would come in two halves: $500 that the winner could spend as he or she pleased, and $500 to use in teaching.
Notice that I wouldn't have to be a fantastically rich alumnus to set the award up. Endowed professorships, I hear, run a million these days. Even a quite small piece of a building is going to be a couple of hundred thousand. But a Distinguished Teaching Award could be endowed for about $25,000. If I couldn't manage that myself, maybe I'd try to get my class to do it as a class gift. So that when our kids came to Dartmouth, there'd be the kind of teaching we had.
One more thing I'd have to think of if I were an alumnus planning such a gift. Who would pick the winners? No matter who, I could be sure that a lot of the faculty (frail and mortal, like everyone else) would be moaning that the system wasn't fair, that there was favoritism and politics, and all of that. But this wouldn't bother me. The same is true of the awarding of any prize - the politics of getting someone a Nobel apparently goes on decades at a time - and in the end it wouldn't really matter which good teacher won in any particular year. The important thing is that one of them does, and that the committees and the books not get all the glory.
Still, I'd like the choice to be as fair as possible, and to have as much meaning as possible. I might rely on students. The President or the dean of the faculty could pick the winner from among nominations made by the undergraduates. Or I might just turn to that group of the faculty who are presumably the most successful and disinterested. That group consists of the approximately 20 professors who hold chairs. They've already had their recognition, and they represent no departmental interest group, no administrative point of view.
If I did ask them to make the choice, I think I'd add another $5,000 to the fund, and use the income from that to pay for a lunch once a term where all the chaired professors would meet to discuss candidates, and anything else they felt like discussing. Just bringing those lunches into being would be good for the College, quite apart from the teaching prize. We need more common purposes.
Having done all this, what would 1 do for an encore? Why, I'd try to get some doctor friend to set up a similar prize at the Dartmouth Medical School. If College rumor is to be believed, the Med School expects its faculty to put research first, research second, research third; and teaching the students is practically regarded as frittering away one's time.
There are distinguished exceptions, of course. More, perhaps, at Dartmouth than at most medical schools. I'd just like to see one of them get a silver cup.
Noel Perrin has taught at the College since 1959.
