The Importance of Excellent Teaching

Over the past few months research, economic development, our library, intercollegiate athletics, graduate study, quality, leadership and resources have been addressed, among a number of other topics. The center of our University, its sole purpose for being though is about teaching. Nothing there, nothing anywhere.

Teaching is our raison d’ etre.

Great teachers are found in institutions of all kinds, they are remembered for their impact on us, I know you can remember one who profoundly affected you, caused you to see things differently, encouraged you to dig a bit deeper inside of yourself to find out what was there, and what it was worth.

Sometimes even the dates and places are glued to us. I recall a situation, see it like yesterday. I visited a teacher in his office, and we talked about a particular design problem I was working on in his class, with him. That was how I saw it… an act of cooperation…co-conspirators. We were confronting my ignorance about how to get something done, together. Not as my problem, but as our problem.

February of 1971 and it is clear as a bell, I left that office differently than I went in. He talked to me about vision in design, and the idea of being able to see something that was not there, and how difficult it was, and how central to the work of being a designer. I was never the same after that and few experiences, one spiritual, on marital, one parental, have even had that same impact on me.

It was during his office hours. I went in for advice, not teaching, but Lane Coulter understood the power of being a teacher and never missed an opportunity to use it for the betterment of his students. He was always available, always wanting to help.
Generous with time and energy, emotional and intellectual.

BTW this did not turn into a life long relationship, I saw him infrequently in the next few years while an undergraduate student and never again and I don’t imagine I ever will. He was just doing his job, a craftsman. He left to teach on an Indian reservation. And I am sure he taught with energy and enthusiasm that changed other people’s lives as he had the gift. Remarkable. He was not an architect as I desired to be and became. He was a silversmith, and a powerfully good one, but even that was a simple vehicle for what he really was, and you know what that would be. A Teacher.

This is teaching as high art. It is always about relationships between people, and connections built around affairs of the mind. It happens in grade schools and high schools too, differently, but with the same result. People are changed, profoundly, by the interaction between excellent teachers, and students who they serve. That by the way is the first mark of a really good one. They are servants.

I had the occasion to visit many high schools in Southern Illinois, and the occasion to visit with great teachers. In classrooms here on the campus I meet people who are impacted by teachers from high school and they tell me about it. There is one teacher in Carterville; I will not name her, who has come up in a number of conversations. I am not asking people about the good ones, we are talking about writing, and they are telling me about their experiences, and the experiences include this teacher. This is potent stuff and what educational institutions should be about.

When excellent faculty carry out research and scholarship, serve the community, work with students in clubs or organizations, or sit in their office and wait for the next one to walk through the door, they do these things because it makes them better teachers. Our university should do all it can to recognize and reward those with this high calling to guide, direct, coach, cajole, tutor, initiate, discipline and inculcate.

Campus Life for Students

The ability of our university to reach full potential and to engender in students a concentrated and powerful academic experience rests with the nature of the campus as a place to live, as well as a place to study. The campus at its zenith provides a “community” for students.

A high quality life for students is evidence of Southern’s commitment to educational opportunity. A number of factors impact the quality of student life. In addition to academic dimensions, a great university provides widespread and varied leadership and social encounters for students to flesh out educational experiences with the life changing development of citizenship skills that constitute the foundation of a free society.

The combination of academic and extracurricular activities provides occasion for students to continue to develop moral and ethical perspective, a more complete social and intellectual world view, and spiritual and emotional growth. Some argue the university is about the mind, and these other aspects of our being should be pursued elsewhere, the heart and the soul should be left at home.

Impossible.

I believe that to fashion critical aspects of mind, and leave unattended concerns related to morality, the place of men and women in the world, and our relationship to others will not produce leaders and that should be our highest aspiration. Serving self without regard to others is an education of smoke and no heat, an empty pursuit of limp and lifeless dreams. The fire of social action and engaged existence comes when the various attributes of a person are developed in unison. To divorce intellectual acumen from other passions and pursuits of living – mind from spirit – is a glass half empty.

In our university’s long range vision, Southern at 150: Building Excellence through Commitment it was said plainly, “Citizen-leaders are the legacy of America. One of the greatest citizen-leaders the country has ever known was well-educated, self-educated, in southern Illinois. Abraham Lincoln understood the power of learning and the importance of it in being an effective citizen-leader. Our aspirations should be clear, and high. Our mission is to educate people who will become the citizen-leaders of the 21st century”.

While the avenues of clubs and student activities, cultural and social engagements of the campus, help develop leadership and citizenship aptitudes of students, nowhere is the potential greater than in an energized classroom when a teacher encourages a student to reach deeper inside and to share more broadly with others, all the while developing a world view that positions him for a satisfying life.

Many forces impact the quality of student experience but none exceeds the importance of the relationship between the student and teacher in the deliberation of both subject matter and world view. Of all indicators of excellence for a university the one signaling quality most clearly is faculty/student ratio. Look at the list of top 50 public universities in the nation and you will see substantially lower faculty/student ratios than those in the second fifty. One of the chief determinates of quality for student life will be evidenced in the interaction between teacher and student… communion here is the core of learning…differentiating education and training.

Our university will serve our students best when serving completely, in mind, heart, and soul, acting boldly by example to achieve fullness absent in so many contemporary institutions.

Our Campus

Campus evokes strong memories for graduates. The word was first used in the United States to describe the ground Princeton University occupied. In a letter Charles C. Beatty 1775 wrote to his brother-in-law Enoch Green 1760 on January 31, 1774: “Last week to show our patriotism, we gathered all the steward’s winter store of tea, and having made a fire in the Campus, we there burnt near a dozen pounds, tolled the bell and made many spirited resolves.” From Alexander Leitch, “A Princeton Companion.”

Presbyterian minister, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Princeton President John Witherspoon was there. It seems especially fitting that “campus” was first used in relation to an act of defiance of the King of England. And so too today, campuses are places of social statement, change, and sometimes upheaval. How fitting for what most universities are for so many…places of change.

The grounds, the buildings, the auditoriums, the lecture halls, the student center, the library, the dormitories, the playing fields, are places central to the life of our university deserving full attention. They should be beautiful and encourage interaction provoking memories and creating a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself.

Caring for them should be a high priority. The challenges of deferred maintenance and the great costs of keeping up buildings, and building new ones, are actions worthy of our strongest support.

The campus needs to be a place rather than an internet address, although the power of the internet to positively effect educational opportunity is not lost on anyone one other than the most uninformed.

Some universities, such as the University of Phoenix, celebrate the fact that they don’t have a campus, and therefore place the demands of grounds and buildings on the shoulders of students who study through the University of Phoenix- they don’t go to school; school comes to them – via the internet, sometimes at the dining room table. It is a most cost effective way to do business but I fear something very important is lost. The jury is still out on the long term viability of campusless universities.

I was taken by the fact that this years Super Bowl was played in the University of Phoenix stadium. I tried to explain to a friend of mine that the beautiful stadium in which the game was played was not on a university campus. In fact, the university campus for which the stadium was named is no different than Coca Cola, and if Coca Cola had purchased the naming rights the game could have been played at Coca Cola stadium. The University of Phoenix is not a place, it is every place. This took a few minutes to clarify. Now my friend is intelligent, it’s just that the notion of the university is so tied to “place” it was hard to fathom what in the world was going on here.

The challenges of stewardship of the campus and its environs are worth every penny. That’s why we “go” to college. The printing press and the enlightenment, the industrial and information revolutions sustain the university. So too does the campus.

Our university should value and invest it all aspects of the campus. As it was it should be, a place of beauty, reflection, pride, and interaction. I believe “place” central to the idea of a university.

Our Graduate Students

We are conditioned to think “undergraduate” when we hear the words “college student.” When we think of growing our university to more ably serve a greater number of students you can feel the predisposition building, we are thinking of freshman or undergraduate transfer students.

Thinking only freshman works well for community colleges, and regional universities, but falls dangerously short of mission attainment when thinking “public research university.” We need to covet the best graduate students and recruit like our collective lives depended on them.

We do.

More students are not the issue – more excellent students are, and at least one in four must be in graduate programs. This is not a comfortable thought for many, but we should get used to it if we want a truly great research university that serves Southern Illinois best.

Such a perspective elevates, not diminishes, the importance of undergraduate education.

Many forces impact our ability to attract the brightest graduate students. Stipends, insurance benefits, tuition waivers, and other forms of financial support are important to effective results. However, if the University’s response to the challenge stops there, a key ingredient of graduate student life is lost.

Graduate students come to the university, in almost all cases, to become members of the academic community, if only for a brief period of time. Limiting graduate students to teaching additional sections of lower division course work, while potentially beneficial for institution and student alike, may be shortsighted in the long term evolution of graduate programs and general university excellence.

Quality is evidenced in many ways but for scholarly enterprises – like our university -quality is measured by significant, peer reviewed and recognized, intellectual work. Research, creative activity, service for purpose, moving the social fabric further and higher in a way that it is widely recognized, builds reputation. Reputation is fertile ground for growth. In a business like a university people vote with their feet and follow academic reputation. Nothing else really works.

A significant barometer of the quality of peer reviewed work is research funding from the best federal agencies, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are two examples.

There are clubs to which universities belong based on how much peer reviewed, federally funded, research they attain. Our University joined the $20 million club a few years ago. It is a good one. Only a few hundred public and private research universities make the grade of procuring more than $20 million in federal funding.

This is a high water mark for Southern as it indicates a level of excellence in intellectual work not common. We have beaten the national averages in research growth and are gaining ground. This progress fuels economic development activity, new business start-ups, and self-perpetuates in its ability to attract better faculty, and better graduate students. There are no short cuts, no programs, no end-arounds when it comes to a research university, it is all about quality measured by peers, and graduate students are a key ingredient.

Henry Rosovsky, former dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard said it plainly, “Graduate students are the faculty’s young disciples who ensure the continuity of learning”.

Southern will only increase in stature as it recognizes and values graduate students as intellectual soul mates, and one of the pillars of excellence at our university.