EDITORIAL
INDUSTRIAL AND ENGINEERIKG CHEMISTRY Editor: DAVID E. GUSHEE Editorial Head uarters 1155 Sixteenthlt., N.W. Washington, D. C. 20036 Phone 202-737-3337
Teaching us. Research
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t has become quite fashionable these days, in both lay and profes-
I sional circles, to portray the successful university professor as someone who spends most of his time and energy contriving to obtain funds for his research and in salting the literature with publications bearing his name. This view, while to some extent explaining the supposed situation as one of “publish or perish,” in which the hapless professor is carried along by an inexorable tide, nevertheless also manages to suggest that the professor is so pressed by his financing and writing labors that he is forced to do less than justice to his teaching assignments, with consequent neglect of the needs of the students. I t is therefore both refreshing and reassuring to learn from a recent study that the picture of the successful researcher as a poor or uncaring teacher is probably an inaccurate one. Jack B. Bresler, Assistant Provost at Tufts University, has conducted a quantitative investigation of the relation between effectiveness in the classroom and the general success of the teacher in obtaining research funding and in publishing resarch papers. Professor Bresler’s study, Sczence 160, 164 (1968), examines the teaching performance of 130 faculty members from the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Engineering a t Tufts University as evaluated by the consumer-the student. T h e study covered about 155 courses, typical of those offered to students in the first two years of the undergraduate program. The results concerning the teaching effectiveness of science and engineering faculty members, including those in chemistry and chemical engineering, show the same trends as those in other disciplines. Faculty members having the greatest amount of external (largely governmental) support published the largest number of papers during the period of Bresler’s study and were rated the best teachers by students. Those having no external support published fewest papers and were rated the poorest teachers, while those in receipt of internal, university awards, but no external support, were rated intermediate in teaching effectiveness. This report from Tufts University deserves attention not only because it appears to shoot down a popular misconception about the supposed conflict between research and teaching duties. It also reemphasizes one of the strongest justifications cited by professors who undertake research. Research, by its very nature, they say, promotes in the teacher a keen awareness of progress and so helps to keep the dissemination of obsolete-and just plain wrong-information to a minimum, while encouraging the teaching of newer, unifying concepts, O n the other hand, are students really the best judges of their instruction? Are they not suggestible-more liable to be swayed by the exciting sounding adventures of the researcher in his pursuit of research’s Holy Grail than by a straightforward, unemotional, even dull presentation of facts which they nevertheless must learn to graduate? Certainly enthusiasm and commitment are important adjuncts to teaching success, but they can also be roused in support of dubious causes. I n any event, the Tufts students have been sold. Let us hope their purchase was subject to honest packaging and labeling.
ho
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