Perspectives on a Career in College Teaching - American Chemical

Report Lawrence W. Potts1 Department of Chemistry Gustavus Adolphus College St. Peter, Minn. 56082

Perspectives on a Career in College Teaching Those of us who teach analytical chemistry in colleges and universities see more clearly than ever a developing crisis. At the present time there is a two-to-one salary differential between an industrial position in analytical chemistry and a position as an assistant professor in most four-year colleges. We are rapidly approaching the

point where sharp, aggressive young PhDs in analytical chemistry will not

consider making the financial sacrifice to teach. Furthermore, many who are already teaching are finding it harder to rationalize continuing to do so when they are losing spending power at an increasing rate. The people who know analytical chemistry will soon not be teaching it; industry is indeed beginning to “eat its seed corn,” an analogy to acts of desperation in even

Native American culture drawn recently by D. Allen Bromley (J). Who will teach the next generation of ana-

lytical chemists? It is my purpose here to encourage

new PhDs to carefully consider college teaching as a career by pointing out some assets and liabilities of the profession, and discussing these within the context of rewards. I also wish to discuss what I believe are serious problems that young college teachers may encounter that relate to the increasingly bleak salary picture. Table I lists the major categories of rewards that most people seek in their employment. Certainly we all respond to somewhat different rewards, but this list covers what I think are the general categories. I have arranged the

*1981-82 mailing address: Department of Chen istry, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio 44074

0003-2700/81/A351-1603$01.00/0 1981 American Chemical Society ©

Table I, Rewards • • •

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Financial security Recognition Approval of colleagues and friends Service Feeling that the work is ol value

list in order of increasing abstractness: Financial security and recognition are much more tangible than is the feeling that one’s work will be of lasting value. Traditionally, teaching has at. tracted people who appreciate the more abstract rewards and have less interest in the concrete rewards. This may come from the fact that most American private colleges and many universities were originally sponsored by churches and religious orders, and teachers were thought of as missionaries. Regardless of the cause, teachers have never been very assertive about asking for large salaries for their efforts. It is also quite clear that the values of most people in American society are skewed toward concrete rewards. A conflict is inevitable. We are encouraging college students to value more abstract rewards long after they have learned to be accomplished materialists. When there is a salary differential of two-to-one, most students will not be very willing to listen. The two categories of rewards that graduate students really ought to hear more about are service and the feeling of the worthiness of the effort. These are values that liberal arts colleges aspire to instill in students. Unfortunately, they are also values that most

of us feel quite awkward about discussing. They are the rewards that are important to the clergy and those who work in social services. Although premed students can be counted on to badly overstate it, service is doubtless an important factor in motivating people to study medicine. Thinking that one’s work is worthwhile really involves faith. Most teachers count on the worth of their work being shown in the future—their productivity is evident in the minds that they discipline. The results may not be tangible for years. The relative importance of various rewards will determine the extent to which a person sees aspects of a career in college teaching as assets or liabilities. In Table III have made a list of what I believe are the important assets and liabilities of college teaching, arranged like an accountant’s balance sheet. Rather than offer my own view of the balance, I would like to discuss the items on the sheet in detail.

Table IL A College Teaching Balance Sheet Liabilities

Financial insecurity

Nomadic life of the untenured Working with young people

Academic freedom Job security (tenure) Working with young people Campus community Faculty role in governance

ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 53, NO. 14, DECEMBER 1981

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Academic Freedom The principal asset of college teach-

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ing is academic freedom, the freedom to discuss controversial viewpoints in the classroom and direct one’s own research without fear of recrimination. The irony of academic freedom, like that of freedom of any kind, is the responsibility carried by those who have it to treat ideas with intellectual honesty and discipline. Academic freedom is often misinterpreted as leisure time. The formal classroom and laboratory contact time required of most faculty members is about 12 to 16 hours per week, 30 weeks per year. Even with an additional 20 hours of preparation time per week, office hours, and committee work, there is time available to pursue one’s own interests. But this does not make life any easier. On the contrary, in colleges of quality, tenure and promotion come only to those who are both effective in the classroom and engaged in scholarship. There is really no counterpart to academic freedom in industry. Rarely will a research chemist be able to work on a project simply because it is interesting. The final arbiter of what is done in the private sector is market pressure, or perhaps worse, a marketing specialist’s interpretation of market pressure.

Financial Insecurity The main liability of college teaching is poor financial reward. Current starting salaries at the assistant professor rank for PhD-holding chemistry teachers are in the range of about $15 000 (colleges) to about $19 000 (universities) (2). Starting salaries for PhD industrial chemists range from about $25 000 to about $32 000. According to the 1981 ACS salary survey, the median salary of all PhD chemists in colleges and universities was $26 200, while the median salary for their counterparts in industry was $39 000.

It seems to have been a popular notion at one time that highly experienced teachers command salaries comparable to those paid to industry people, but the facts show that such a situation must be quite rare. In the 1980-81 academic year the 95th percentile salary for a full professor in liberal arts colleges was $30 580. The ACS March 1981 survey showed that the 10th percentile salary for PhD industrial chemists with about 25 years experience (after the BS degree) was $32 400. This means that at these levels of experience all but 10% of PhD industrial chemists have higher salaries than 95% of PhD academic chemists in liberal arts colleges. A further disturbing note is that PhD chemists in neither area have beaten inflation in the last decade. When 1980-81 me-

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dian salaries are normalized to 1971 dollars using consumer price index figures, industrial chemists have lost about 12% of their salary, while academic chemists have lost about 17%. The bleak message in all of these figures is that academic chemists can look forward to a career-long financial pinch if they must live on a single nine-month salary. There are several ways out: marry someone who is employed, teach summer school every summer, or look for work “on the outside.” The trouble with the latter two strategies is that they consume valuable research and writing time, and make it almost impossible to show the kind of growth needed to obtain a tenured position or promotion. Of course the best strategy is to find a way to get paid for doing one’s own research, as many of the most successful academic people have managed to do. A fifth, far less desirable alternative, is to become a “temporary associate dean.” These two- or three-year rotating positions seem to attract new associate professors who are exploring administrative work and are lured by higher salaries. During these few years of exploration one is almost surely going to lose touch with developments in the field, and the return to teaching is apt to be painful. This kind of professional drifting can severely damage, even ruin, a teaching career. Another ramification of the financial pinch involves morale. In our society a person’s value is usually confused with his or her wealth. Someone who has “really made it” has lots of money and its symbols. It is difficult for a teacher to learn how to brush all of this aside and pretend to be above it. The result can be bitterness and cynicism that can poison relationships with students.

Job Security Job security for tenured faculty is a great asset of the teaching profession. In fact, many argue that job security compensates for the difference in salary between teaching and industry. A tenured teacher has a permanent contract until retirement. Dismissal can occur only after adequate cause has been shown in hearings before faculty committees. Traditionally there have been three causes: moral turpitude, in-

competence, or the imminent bankruptcy of the institution. There is really no alternative to tenure if faculty are to be free to contribute to the governance of a college and academic freedom is to exist. Unfortunately, a largely tenured faculty tends to result in inflexibility in staffing and program development and makes it difficult for a college to adapt to the increasingly volatile student market. Some colleges have re-

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sponded by establishing tenure quotas and adopting policies limiting the number of tenure track positions available. For example, one or two positions in a six-person chemistry department may be three-year terminal positions, without the possibility of tenure, regardless of the qualifications of the individuals who hold them. There are teachers who have become academic nomads, wandering from one temporary job to another, perpetual instructors or assistant professors, spending years at the bottom of the pay scale. While this situation seems to pose little threat to analytical chemists, whose services are in great demand, it is a very serious problem in many disciplines in the humanities.

Students The students themselves are at once asset and a liability. The fictional archetypal teacher, Mr. Chips, observed that the faculty and administration of a school get older, but the students are always young. Youth is the characteristic of students that can make working with them so stimulating one minute and so infuriating the next. Students come out of high school at the age of 18 or 19, still in the emotional upheaval of their teens. Many of them were never challenged by their high school curriculum and are largely unprepared to deal with the pressures of a college education. Even though many are bright and eager, few have had to develop the discipline needed to sit and concentrate in order to really learn something. Few, as college freshmen, are able to carry an argument to its logical conclusion or express themselves clearly. The best of them try to be assertive and independent, but falter, unsure of their abilities. All of a sudden they must work with a professor, someone who has been portrayed in television and the movies either as a mixture of brilliance and preoccupation, or as a fool. Many actually resist being taught and fight every effort the teacher makes. It may take a half dozen approaches to a concept before such a student will take hold of it. Even a class of college seniors can be told how to prepare for an exam, and most will ignore the advice. These are all the ingredients of the challenge in teaching and are some of the things that make teaching so incredibly interesting. In fact, most of the important but intangible assets of college teaching involve the students. Watching students transform from somewhat disinterested spectators in a large general chemistry class to enthusiastic, aggressive class participants in their senior courses is a real source of satisfaction. Watching heads nod in agreement and faces light up as ideas are an

grasped (the “aha!” phenomenon) keeps many teachers going. The news that a former student is doing well in a highly competitive graduate program is one of the greatest sources of pride to a college teacher. Most of the readers of this Journal are familiar with the assets of working in a college campus community. Simply put, colleges are interesting and exciting places to be. Except dur-

ing the summer months, there is more happening on the typical college campus than one could ever hope to get involved in: drama, musical performances, seminars and guest lectures, athletic events, and perhaps most important, a rich, often informal, intellectual life.

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An important asset of college teaching, although it is not universally available, is the chance for even the youngest members of a faculty to play an important part in directing the course of a college. For genuine academic freedom to exist, faculty must be involved in matters relating to personnel and curriculum. At least on campuses where faculty are not members of a union, faculty committees recommend candidates for tenure and promotion, hear grievances, and recommend changes in curriculum, majors, and even programs. The realities of the competitive business world make this kind of cooperative governance rare (probably nonexistent) in

industry. Committee involvement can, however, become a trap for young faculty who are too eager to get involved in campus affairs. It can rob energy and time that might be better spent on scholarship. Particularly annoying are the distractions of ad hoc committees, which usually seem to generate only directives for standing committees. In

the absence of leadership, monthly faculty meetings can degenerate into forums for the longwinded with righteous causes, and hours can be spent bickering over issues of no greater moment than campus parking. Involvement is a matter of balancing the important functions of faculty governance against the demands of one’s career.

Summary Whether the assets of college teach-

ing are sufficient to outweigh the liabilities depends entirely on an individual’s values, and these are very difficult to sort out. If a graduate student sees the balance as favorable, then I would hope that he or she would at least try to find a suitable teaching position, being aware from the beginning of the problems that might arise. Graduate advisors have a tremendous influence on the opinions of their students. Students may hear grumbling about poor salaries and long hours, but may not hear about the more positive aspects of teaching. Advisors should start talking about what they like about their work with as many students as will listen. The chemical industry must realize its stake in the education of analytical chemists. Industry cannot be faulted at all for trying to hire the best qualified students available. However, it could make a tremendous contribution to the morale of those who choose to teach by stepping into the vacuum being left by the diminishing support of the federal government in science education. With or without federal help, colleges still need to replace worn-out equipment and purchase modern instrumentation. Increased private support of undergraduate and graduate research in analytical chemistry could go a long way in helping to replant some of the “seed corn.”

References (1) D. Allen Bromley, “The Fate of the Seed Corn” (Editorial), Science, 213, 159 (July 10, 1981). (2) Starting salary figures are based on figures quoted in “Average Faculty Salaries at 2500 Institutions,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 1981. This is also the source of the figure for liberal arts college teachers’ salaries. ACS surveys quoted are published in Chem. Eng. News, June 22, 1981 (pp 56-62) and

June 21, 1971 (pp 64-69).

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Two books by Gilbert Highet will be of great interest to graduate students and teachers, “The Art of Teaching” (Knopf, New York, 1950) and “The Immortal Profession” (Weybright and Talley, New York, 1976). This paper is a summary of a seminar first presented at the University of Minnesota earlier this


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Lawrence Potts received a RA degree in chemistry from Oberlin College and a PhD in analytical chemistry from the University of Minnesota. He has taught analytical and inorganic chemistry at Gustavus Adolphus College since 1972. During the current academic year he is visiting associate professor at Oberlin College.

Perspectives on a Career in College Teaching - American Chemical

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