If the worst thing an undergraduate encountered at the U. of I. was clones of himself, the university would be a nearly idyllic place. And it is pretty idyllic for a scholar or research scientist. But like most big research universities, it frequently falls short of serving the needs of the lowly undergraduate.
This is the other side of the story of Super U. The vast majority of the U. of I.`s 26,800 undergraduates will never set foot in the Beckman Institute, never hack away on the Supercomputer, never lay eyes on Nobel laureate Bardeen or many other world-class researchers. Some will make it through four years without ever holding a one-on-one conversation with a professor, without ever setting foot in the library stacks where most of the 7 million volumes are housed. In fact, undergraduates aren`t even allowed into the main library stacks without a pass from a professor.
Yes, students can take courses as academically rigorous as those at practically any university in the world, but they can also take Principles of Outdoor Education and Camping on their way to a degree in leisure studies, Bowling and Pocket Billiards en route to a degree in kinesiology (what we used to call physical education) and Problems in Foods as part of a major in foods and nutrition.
”There are ways you can get through an institution like this and avoid an education,” admits Robert Berdahl, the university`s academic vice chancellor.
Classes are often enormous. A U. of I. freshman is likely to find as many students in one introductory class as there were in his entire high school. Some sections of Economics 101, for example, contain 1,000 to 1,500 students. A lot of students don`t bother going to class, and most professors don`t care whether they show up or not. For $2 a lecture, a student can buy copies of class notes from private companies that pay other students $12 a class to be professional note-takers. Enormous lecture classes often break into smaller laboratory or discussion groups a couple times a week, but those are almost always led by a graduate student, not a professor.
Some students don`t mind the big classes. ”If you want the class to seem smaller, you just sit in the front and don`t turn around,” says Michelle Ohms, an engineering student from Metamora.
But others do. ”I hated the big lectures,” says Vipin Gupta of De Kalb, who graduated this summer after winning prestigious Marshall and Fulbright scholarships for graduate study in Europe. ”Often, I wouldn`t even go to class. I almost dropped out.”
Gupta, who fashioned a double major in aerospace engineering and nuclear security policy and technology, began feeling at home during his sophomore year, when one of his professors took the trouble to learn the names of all the students in his class.
Over time, he learned that many professors, too, are discouraged by the size of the classes. ”I seldom get a chance to work closely with anyone besides graduate students,” complains American-history professor John Lynn.
”The best I can do is try to convey some enthusiasm for the subject and hope the students laugh at my jokes. I`m like a living TV set.”
At least he`s living. Many U. of I. students learn their lessons from real television sets. In some beginning chemistry courses, for example, students watch lectures on videotape and perform experiments on interactive video without lighting a Bunsen burner or picking up a test tube. Instead, the student chooses which chemicals to mix, punches some buttons and watches as the experiments are performed on a television screen. If a mixture
”explodes,” the student knows he has done something wrong.
”We think the student learns more this way than in a traditional lab,”
says Larry Faulkner, chairman of the chemistry department. ”We`re moving away from the traditional cookbook experiments.”
Others learn through a computerized form of instruction called hypermedia or interactive multimedia. Sociology professor Robert A. Jones uses it for a course called the Social Bond. Jones still lectures three days a week, but most of the learning takes place on a network of computers. Students write all their papers on the same computer system, and Jones can call up their rough drafts and send them back with comments. Most of the required readings are in the computer system, too. As the student reads the material on the computer screen, he can punch a button to call up a full description of any unfamiliar person or concept he encounters.
”I spend a lot less time dumping information on them in class,” Jones says. ”For instance, I may say that Max Weber`s theory of capitalism grew out of the Reformation. But then I realize they don`t know what the Reformation was, and maybe they don`t know what capitalism is, either. By making information available in a form that`s easy to use, the students come in with some context for what we`re talking about. Sure, you could tell them to go to the library and look up the words, but they might not. And it`s certainly much more convenient when it`s in the computer.”
There`s no evidence to show that students learn any less this way than in small seminars led by kindly, attentive professors. Yet the university`s administrators are uneasy about the way it mass-produces its graduates, and they don`t mind discussing their reservations in public.
”In the big classes, they learn what`s on the examination,” says Chancellor Weir, whose doctorate is in psychology. ”But the question that`s still unanswered is whether the interaction that can occur in a smaller group gives you knowledge that you can apply more broadly or that lasts longer. Many students and faculty believe that is a better form of learning, more widely applicable later on.”
Three years ago Weir`s predecessor, Thomas E. Everhart, assigned his executive assistant to ask students, faculty and administrators what they thought of the quality of undergraduate teaching. The assistant, Lawrence Mann, wrote a scathing report that will never be included in the recruiting literature the university sends to prospective students.
Mann found one undergraduate who had taken only one course from a faculty member in his major in four years. The rest of the courses were taught by teaching assistants, low-paid graduate students who do much of the grunt work of undergraduate teaching so professors can concentrate on research and work with graduate students.
”Many of our best faculty tell me they will leave if they are forced to teach undergraduate courses,” one dean told Mann. An associate professor said: ”Student writing is very bad. Students in our senior seminar course for majors write a term paper, and their writing skills are inferior-punctuation, spelling, style, thought development. Even more discouraging is that many of them tell me this is their first term paper.”
Mann found that some undergraduates were angry that ”they selected the Urbana-Champaign campus because of the excellent reputation of the faculty but have found little opportunity to interact with faculty because of large classes and a preoccupation, by many faculty, with research and graduate education.”
Mann`s report is liberally cited in a book called ”Profscam,” a scathing indictment of research universities by Milwaukee writer Charles J. Sykes. The book, which came out late last year, is hard to find in bookstores but is well known in academia. If a conversation with a professor or dean begins to lag, just say the word ”Profscam” and you`re sure to get a rise.
Sykes contends that professors waste their time ”publishing trivial and inane research in obscure journals that nobody reads.” They ”communicate in impenetrable jargon, often to mask the fact that they have nothing to say”
and ”are not only indifferent to good teaching but also actively hostile to it.”
And that`s just on the book`s dust jacket. Inside, the book contends that most major universities, private as well as public, look upon undergraduates as the people who pay the bills so professors can concentrate on career-enhancing research. An ambitious young professor of, say, history is much more likely to gain academic prominence by becoming an expert in a narrow specialty (the herring industry in medieval Scandinavia, for example) than by helping students understand broad historical currents or by inspiring them to take a lifelong interest in the subject.
This discontent has begun to seep into some of the college guidebooks. The U. of I. is one of two Illinois universities (the other is Illinois State in Normal) in a book called ”How To Get an Ivy League Education at a State University.” But the author, Martin Nemko, is clearly less than enthusiastic about the U. of I.
”When you graduate, the prestigious UI name on your diploma will help swing Establishment doors open,” he writes. ”Fortunately for UI`s undergraduates, few employers know that UI`s prestige comes less from its undergraduate programs than from its research and graduate school . . . and a faculty recruited and promoted almost exclusively on the basis of their research.”
At the U. of I., as at most big universities, professors complain about their teaching load and brag about their research opportunities, and their prestige is measured by how little they teach. According to a 1984 survey by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, about one-quarter of the faculty at research universities teach no undergraduates at all. At the U. of I., the average professor teaches two courses per term (not necessarily to undergraduates), but many teach less if they`re able researchers. Faculty members at the U. of I. frequently are denied tenure (fired) for being poor researchers but almost never for being poor teachers.
Professors say there`s nothing wrong with concentrating on research. ”I get very annoyed by that criticism,” says Jefferson McMahan, an assistant professor of philosophy and former Rhodes Scholar. ”Especially in the humanities, but to a lesser extent in the social sciences and arts, there is no provision in society for support for people who want to do research on matters of fundamental importance, like my field, the ethics of war and nuclear deterrence.
”Where can somebody go and be paid to do that? The think tanks won`t fund them, the government won`t fund them. You can`t make money selling the finished product, opening your little philosophy shop and hawking your stuff on the street. So how do you support yourself while you`re doing that? The only provision society makes is through academic institutions.”
You don`t have to be anti-intellectual to wonder whether all that research is worthwhile, whether all of those 25,000 learned journals, most of which are published at least four times a year, are really filled with important new knowledge. Sykes` book is full of horrible examples of scholarly articles such as ”The Dialectic of the Feminine: Melodrama and Commodity in the Ferraro Pepsi Commercial” in the Communication Journal. But the only reason we scoff at that and not at ”the structure and function of
microtubules in the Drosophila melanogaster embryo,” the research specialty of one U. of I. biochemist, is that we know Geraldine Ferraro`s Pepsi commercial was not important but we assume microtubules must be important even though we don`t know what they are.
”We live in a culture with a tremendous act of faith in scientific research,” says Berdahl, the university`s academic vice chancellor. ”The country does not know what may be learned by the superconducting
supercollider. We assume we will learn more about elementary particles and the origin of matter, but we`re going to spend probably $8 billion in an act of faith that what will come from that will be important and valuable. We give science the benefit of the doubt, if you will.
”I think the same act of faith is involved in humanities and social-science research. I`m a specialist in German history. I published a book on the Prussian nobility in the 18th and early 19th Centuries. There`s nothing particularly relevant about that book to contemporary problems. It`s not going to add to the economic development of the State of Illinois.
”But I think, having done that, I have learned something in that process that`s fundamental about historical change; it`s fundamental about how social classes interact, fundamental about how ideology develops and captivates and molds and shapes a political culture. It`s important as a historian that I know that and that I am able to teach other people about that process.
”To say something has to be absolutely relevant to some contemporary problem in a one-to-one ratio is, I think, to proscribe the learning process in ways that are really unhealthy and unwise.”
In any event, says Berdahl, the university has no intention of reducing its commitment to research. ”In determining whether a faculty member gets tenure, we will always put a great deal of emphasis on research,” he says.
”I believe a person will not continue to be intellectually alive and stimulating throughout a 30-year career unless they are actively involved in learning.”
U. of I. administrators insist they`re trying to improve the quality of teaching while maintaining their commitment to research. The university and its various departments hand out 65 teaching awards a year, ranging from $100 to $5,000, to professors and graduate assistants, and the tenure committees of the various academic departments have been told they must pay more attention to the quality of a professor`s teaching when they decide whether to grant tenure.
The university also is paying more attention to what is being taught to undergraduates, particularly in their first two years. Responding to criticism that it cranks out narrow, culturally illiterate specialists, it has established a new set of required courses designed to broaden the students`
knowledge. Once the requirements take effect, and nobody can say when that will be, every undergraduate will have to take two courses in English or writing; one in a mathematics-related field; one that involves quantitative reasoning; one in Western culture and one in a non-Western culture or American subcultures and minority groups; nine hours of natural science or technology; nine hours in humanities and the arts; nine hours in social and behavioral sciences; and three college semesters of a foreign language or three years of it in high school.
The university gives several hundred of its students a breath of small-college atmosphere with two special programs. The elite one is the honors program, which accepts 100 of the best freshmen (ACT scores of 30-plus) and offers them at least one seminar of 12 to 15 students each year, plus a faculty mentor, opportunities for summer-research grants and a pass to get into the main library stacks. ”Students often don`t see a faculty member up close until their senior year,” says program director Richard Burkhardt.
”This may be the one moment they have in this situation. It gives them a feeling they really are an important part of the academic community early on.”
The other program, known as Unit 1, acceqpts 300 freshmen at random from about 1,000 applications each year. The students live in the same dorm and take at least one or two downsized classes there. The gargantuan Economics 101, for example, has only about 40 students when taught in Unit 1, says the program`s director, Howard Schein. In addition, the program brings in ”guests in residence” (among recent guests: former presidential candidate John Anderson and sports sociologist Harry Edwards), who live in the dorm, make speeches and hold bull sessions. ”The students here perceive themselves as having a greater amount of intellectual activity and a greater sense of community,” says Schein. ”We think it results in a higher level of satisfaction with their education.”
The thousands of U. of I. students who aren`t in those programs can still get some individual attention, but it won`t come to them automatically, as it would at a small college. They have to make an effort.
”If a student is fairly outgoing, self-directed, very aggressive about learning, they will be able to find things here that they`ll never find at other schools, because what we have here is just so extraordinary-the library, equipment, resources-it`s just so big and diverse and huge,” says Chancellor Weir.
”But what we don`t do nearly as often here is provide that kind of individual and personal attention, the direct and marvelous contact between professor and student. That is much rarer here. But it certainly isn`t unknown, especially for this self-directed student we`re talking about. These kids find out very quickly that professors are accessible if you make the effort.”
Professors agree. ”Some students think of the faculty as being very aloof, but that`s really not so,” says Robert Hendersen, an associate professor of psychology. ”I encourage students to take a faculty member to lunch. The amount of flattery that it takes to get a professor to open up is really very small. All you have to say is, `I was impressed by your paper on such and such a topic,` and it just kills them.”
Of course, not every Illinois student is eager to engage in intellectual give-and-take with a tenured professor. Many, perhaps most, are satisfied to do the work that`s expected of them for four or five years as long as they`re assured of the payoff: the U. of I. diploma, which, even if it`s not Princeton`s, still impresses more than a few employers. University surveys consistently show that 90 percent of graduates would attend the U. of I. again and more than 90 percent express ”strongly” or ”moderately” positive attitudes toward the university.
”Sure, it`s too big and impersonal, and you`re just a number most of the time,” says Scott Maier, a junior from Elmhurst. ”But that`s the way the world is, too.”
