PerspectivesAre you interested in submitting a Perspective Article? Be sure to read The Science Advisory Board's Editorial Guides for Perspective Articles. Click here. Father Guido Sarducci's Fiva Minute-a University by William Ward, Ph.D. Years ago on NBC's "Saturday Night Live," featuring the "Not Ready For Prime-Time Players," there was a charming character that went by the name of Father Guido Sarducci. Sarducci was a chain-smoking Catholic priest with a wide-brim hat, a thick Italian accent, and opinions that would make the Vatican cringe. In those days, when counter-culture was the rage, I watched SNL "religiously." But, the Sarducci comedy sketch I describe below was something I first heard on an airline comedy channel. The sketch was called "The Fiva Minute-a University." In this sketch, piloted before a live audience at Douglass College in New Jersey, Sarducci says something like the following: "You know-a, you go-a to the university for-a four-a years-maybe some-a of you about-a five-a years. So how much-a do you remember a few-a years later. It's about-a fiva minutes. So-a I have-a my OWN-a university. It's-a just-a fiva minutes long. Everybody wants-a da economics, so-a we offer-a da economics. Ya buy-a low, ya sell-a high." He covers a variety of other subjects in the same way when suddenly Sarducci bursts out: "My god-a, my god-a. Here I am-a da Catholic priest and-a I forgot-a da religion. God-a is-a love." The sketch, as I remember it, concludes with a comment "about-a da spring-a break." Sarducci comments that "a Forta Lauderdale is-a too far away for-a fiva minute university, even with-a da Concord-a jet. So I have-a dis itty bitty glass-a of-a orange zhuse." So why is Father Guido Sarducci "spot-a on-a da money" in this comedy sketch? It's because his comedy sketch tells the truth. A few years out of college, most college graduates remember "just-a fiva minutes" of what they were taught. "Why is this so?", you might ask. It's because American universities, like their one-room colonial predecessors, still stress rote memorization of disjointed facts. "Successful" students memorize these facts simply to PASS THE TEST. Even though students will most likely forget these facts just a few weeks later, they get their PRE-MED-required A's and then move on. What is the genesis of this problem? It is clearly with the research university promotion process. By controlling the promotion system, administrators in major research universities in the US provide no incentives for professors to teach effectively. The administration-controlled promotion system rewards professors who raise hundreds of thousands of "overhead" dollars by competing for and receiving numerous federal grants. These professors, in effect, BUY their own promotions. A few others advance rapidly through the ranks by publishing large numbers of papers in refereed research journals of high quality. Still others ingratiate themselves with the administration by serving on countless faculty committees that provide "democracy smokescreens" for unilateral administrative actions. These are the three tracks that lead to promotion. Saying something at a podium in front of a huge room full of students is required of university professors, but few, if any, rewards come from EFFECTIVE teaching or EFFECTIVE learning. Most professors say to themselves, "If the administration cares only about grants, peer-reviewed papers, or my schmoozing with them, why should I put much effort into teaching?" So they don't! The easiest way to get by with minimal teaching is to throw out a bunch of facts in non-interactive lecture format in huge impersonal classes and then to require those facts to be regurgitated on multiple choice exams. Multiple choice exams are preferred as they can be machine-graded. Teaching this way-impersonal lectures in huge classes followed by machine-graded M/C exams-frees the professors to do what the university administration values (getting overheaded grants, doing research, publishing papers and helping out when the administration needs committees of professors to cover-up their autocratic decisions with "democracy games"). There is certainly nothing wrong with a research professor being intensely involved in a narrow, even obscure, research problem. I would agree that intense concentration on a specific research problem should be expected of professors in a research university. But it is not uncommon for highly focused research to interfere with one's ability to relate to undergraduates in a meaningful way-especially in a huge lecture format. A beginning chemistry course might be taught by a professor who has spent his/her entire professional career studying the molecular orbital theories surrounding the molecule formaldehyde. Biology 101 might be taught by a world expert in the reduction of elemental sulfur by extremophiles of the kingdom Archaea. Introduction to entomology might be taught by a professor who studies how hallucinogenic drugs can be assayed by observing the disruption of web patterns of orb-web weaving spiders "under the influence." Not all professors with such specialized research projects may relate well with undergraduates, especially in large lecture formats and especially if the administration telegraphs that they could care less about effective teaching. I remember a few of my own undergraduate college experiences at the University of Florida. Aside from my reminiscing frequently about being the clean-up hitter on my fraternity softball team, it might be a stretch for me to come up with a five-minute-long accounting of what I now remember about my academic classes. I do remember catching my lab partner's hair on fire in chemistry lab. Burning hair smells terrible. I remember making frequent, 3 AM visits to a nearby 24-hour coffee shop before every exam to load up on caffeine. I remember the Bernoulli principle and the Wheatstone bridge from physics, but I am not sure if I have the spellings right. I remember the term non-Markonikoff addition from organic chemistry, but I could not explain a thing about the mechanism. Most of all, I remember our marine ecology boat trip 25 miles out into the Gulf of Mexico. The boat-jammed with students way beyond the US Coast Guard limit-ran into a sandbar in a dense fog at the mouth of the Suwannee River on high tide (so everyone had to spend the night on that tiny boat flopping back and forth at the will of the waves). On board was one gallon of water, two life jackets, and a ship-to-shore radio with dead batteries. Most of the professors I had in the 1960's taught in the style of schoolmasters in colonial one-room school houses. Our classes were much larger than colonial classrooms and there were no slate tablets or dunce caps in my classes at the University of Florida. But, the emphasis was still on factual recall of details presented in lecture format-now presented in large classes rather than small ones. My high school background in biology was quite good, so I made A's in my college biology classes. But my chemistry preparation under Bernard Stevenson at Ft. Myers High School was nothing short of terrible. Excellent scores on the Florida Placement Exams landed me in three advanced college courses first semester, including an accelerated chemistry series. I received a C in first semester general chemistry, a D in the next semester, and then two F's in a row in my attempts at organic chemistry. By the end of my sophomore year, I was on academic probation. In the summer of 1962, I reversed my academic tailspin by learning to focus 100% on factual recall at the expense of all understanding. From then on, I made A's in nearly every course, often "setting the curve," even in chemistry. Despite receiving a steady stream of A's for the rest of my undergraduate career, I learned almost nothing of lasting value. I became a specialist in making A's. The system demanded mindless recall and I adjusted perfectly to the system. It is now 44 years since I graduated from college and, as unlikely as it may seem, I am now a professor of biochemistry at a well-known state university. For several years, I fell into the same teaching pattern I had learned in undergraduate school-throw facts at the students and grade them on the basis of mindless recall. In these early years, many of the courses were taught in teams, each led by a professor more senior than I. So I went with the flow. But, in more recent years, as I have had full control over my own courses, I have altered my teaching style and my learning objectives. While I still expect a bit of recall, my courses all strongly emphasize imagination, thinking, problem solving, reasoning, understanding, and integration of knowledge derived from multiple disciplines. Students are not used to problem-solving, thought-provoking college courses, so many have initial problems with my style. But the better students adjust amazingly well. Weeks before graduation, some students in my senior-level, "Problem Solving in Biochemistry" course tell me that mine is the first course in college that has required them to think. I take this as the greatest compliment I could get as a teacher. Through all this, I have a very active research program in one of the hottest areas in all of biotechnology, GREEN-FLUORESCENT PROTEIN. I have mentored, in my research lab, more than 150 undergraduate students in independent research projects. Many are highly motivated, very ambitious, and remarkably curious students. Some are in the honors program, some want to go to graduate school, and still others hope to go on to medical school. Before tackling independent research, most of these students have already taken a year of college chemistry with lab, a year of general biology with lab, and a year of calculus. Many have taken at least one semester of biochemistry with lab, several science electives, and perhaps physics. With all the formal education they should be ready to function fairly well in a research lab. But, they have been conditioned, as I was, to memorize facts and then forget them. So, when their research projects call for real UNDERSTANDING of the fundamental principles of chemistry, biology, biochemistry, mathematics, or physics, these smart and capable students generally come up short. They have memorized facts but have not exercised critical thinking. This is not their fault, it is the fault of the system-a system driven by a totally screwed up promotion process that the administration unilaterally controls. Students with two years of chemistry are not always able to explain why a short-chain alcohol dissolves in water while a long-chain alcohol will not. Seldom can they tell me why very small particles (individual molecules) will not move in a centrifugal force field. Students generally cannot relate the chemical term aromatic with the root word aroma. They cannot tell me why spreading salt on icy roadways melts the ice, even if the temperature is well below freezing. They cannot tell me the name of the acid that is part of DNA, even when they know that the abbreviation, DNA, stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. Just one student out of 30, in my last year's class, knew that the acid in DNA is phosphoric acid (so even factual recall is weak-well, the test was months ago). Only a couple of students could define pH and many are not sure if HCl will raise or lower pH. They cannot explain why the ammonium ion in ammonium sulfate acts as a buffer in water while the sulfate does not. They cannot use their prior college education to think through and then to understand, on their own, a very simple research question. They lack the knowhow to pose a good question-a question the answer to which is likely to provide movement in a positive direction. They have trouble interpreting data, or deciding what to do next after an initial experiment is completed. These "classroom-educated" college students are unprepared to function in a research lab without having a mentor re-teaching what they were supposed to have learned in one, two, or three years of formal (yet, I would argue, superficial) college science courses. We need something much better than Father Guido Sarducci's "fiva minute-a university." We need an educational system that actually functions at the college level by producing students who can think, who can reason, and who can process complex information. We need research university administrators who encourage and then reward professors' teaching effectiveness across the board. It is not good enough for university administrators to occasionally single out a few outstanding teachers and then to recognize them at graduation with a plaque or fancy piece of paper while ignoring teaching accomplishments of all the other professors. So, rather than focus entirely on a professor's ability to raise money, publish research papers, and play "democracy games" (to help hide administrative shenanigans), administrators need to encourage and reward excellent teaching and learning everywhere it occurs. Excellent teachers need equal access to the promotion system. We need change and we need it now! This change needs to start at the very top of the university administrative ladder. Until this happens, many of us will continue to say that the American research university is NOT the place for high school graduates to gain a "higher education." Instead we will continue to say that the American university provides, at best, a relatively safe, but very expensive, refuge for young people to grow four years older (and thus, by aging, four years wiser). ### << Previous Next >> [ View All Perspectives ] |
|
