EDITORIAL
A Total Effort, Not a Choice The efforts for excellence in teaching and research need to be combined, not opposed
D
uring recent weeks several compilations of fact and opinion on the teaching and research argument have appeared. The Westheimer Report (C&EN, Nov. 29, page 72) adds useful documented information. Its very emphasis on the support of basic research in universities could stimulate a focusing of facts, points of view, and contentions that might lead toward a well-designed base for proceeding further in wrestling with the difficult problem. Other recent studies throw a light on the matter and ought to be analyzed with a sense of the political atmosphere in which they were conceived and developed. The recent report of the House Research and Technical Program Subcommittee, headed by Rep. Reuss (D.-Wis.) (C&EN, Oct. 25, page 31), shows a bias for teaching. The report of the National Science Foundation to the Subcommittee on Science Research and Development, headed by Rep. Daddario (D.-Conn.) (C&EN, Sept. 27, page 37), makes a strong effort to be balanced. It seems generally agreed that where there is to be excellent teaching of chemistry there must be research. The fact that graduate training is very much a teaching process is sometimes overlooked in the arguments, as is its contribution to the spark and spirit of the atmosphere of an educational institution. The degree to which postdoctoral research influences the quality of the educational spirit at lower levels is a point of contention. There seems little doubt that our best colleges and universities are now producing chemists at both the B.S. and the Ph.D. level with better training than ever before. A counter argument asks what is happening in the great number of other institutions of learning and suggests that in today's atmosphere the emphasis on research in universities hurts teaching generally. This is
countered by the view that where more good research is done the general intellectual level is raised and the teaching benefits, even though it seems to suffer in comparison with research. However, there are many liberal arts colleges not receiving the intellectual uplift from increased research that now find it difficult to attract good teachers of chemistry and other sciences because of competition from the more heavily funded research-oriented institutions. The latter institutions do not seem to be training people to want to go out and do excellent teaching in small colleges, at least not to the extent they did in the past. The NSF-Daddario Report touches on the heart of the matter when it notes that the major educational institutions and the colleges with small numbers of science majors play different but important roles in science education in the United States, "roles of such importance that both must be not only continued but strengthened, yet roles so different that each kind of institution, occupied with its own group of problems, is in danger of losing contact with the other unless conscious effort is made to recognize the extent to which each depends on the other and to recognize also the contribution that each makes to the other." If there is a trend toward loss of contact as the NSF-Daddario Report implies, something should be done. If the Westheimer Report can stimulate some more concerted and effective attack on this problem it will have justified itself with that alone.
DEC.
6, 1965
C&EN
5
