TEACHING AND RESEARCH

As the academic year winds down, students are busily filling in the course evaluation forms that have become standard on most North American campuses. All too often, when students are unhappy with their professors, they complain that their professors care too much about research and not enough about teaching. Such complaints pose a false choice between teaching and research. This is a common misconception among people beyond the academy who tend to count the number of a professor’s classroom hours as the number of hours he or she works. That students make that mistake illustrates our failure as professors to explain just what we do.

It is not just "spin": the notion that excellent teaching and first-rate scholarship go hand in hand remains a fundamental tenet of university life. Clearly, some people are better teachers, and some are better scholars. Clearly, time and resources devoted to one endeavor can sap away time and resources from another. But the university -- especially a leading research institution -- works best as an intellectual center where teaching and scholarship enhance one another. In fact, one cannot get hired, tenured or promoted at McGill, where I teach, without demonstrating excellence in both pursuits.

I cherish both my roles. I love the days I spend in the university teaching; I love the days I spend at home writing or on the road researching. I am spoiled. I do not have to choose between teaching or researching -– and have found, again and again, that my research enriches teaching just as my teaching clarifies my thoughts and fine-tunes my research agenda.

Some of my most exciting classroom moments have come from sharing my research with students. I base one course, the History of Presidential Campaigning, on my first book, See How They Ran, and on a reader I compiled with many of the primary sources I used in writing the book. Students often appreciate the opportunity not just to parrot back what I, "The Professor," told them, but to learn how I thought through research problems, where I succeeded, and, frankly, where I erred.

On the other side of the ledger, teaching helps me translate abstract ideas into comprehensible concepts. I am now researching a book on Ronald Reagan and the 1980s. This year, my honors seminar has been devoted to Ronald Reagan and the 1980s. I hope my students have learned from the seminar – I know I have, and I know that the resulting book (whenever it gets done!) will be the better for it.

Last year, I took a sabbatical to research my Reagan book. Every year, throughout the academic world, thousands of professors take research leaves. These are not pleasure junkets to Aruba or Bali; these are breaks from one of our missions, our teaching, to devote time to another central mission, our research. In fact, no sabbatical or leave is granted without providing a proper rationale and getting approval from at least three levels of the university administration.

To fill in, academics often turn to advanced graduate students to pinch hit. These young apprentices often have yet to complete a Ph.D. but need teaching experience. This normal academic rite of passage rarely results in a job in the same university, for the professors usually return. The experience, however, helps launch the junior’s career -– and offers one more example of a happy meeting between a research agenda and the teaching agenda, as senior academics focus on scholarship and young professors-to-be expose students to new approaches.

Only with an unyielding commitment to research as well as teaching can a university thrive. In the 1990s, the McGill history department alone produced more books than faculty members -- thirty -- and continued to win awards for teaching and accolades on student evaluations. My colleagues take great pride in our work -– when we are engaging young minds in the classroom and when we are trying to decipher the mysteries of the past.

Life in the academy these days is not always easy. Throughout North America, the economic calculus of academia remains depressing. Public institutions in the United States and Canada are reeling from budget cuts. Even in the Ivy League, the land of $30,000 tuition and multibillion dollar endowments, few senior historians earn as much as a rookie lawyer in a fancy New York firm. We academics have to live with our choices; just as the society around us will have to accept the consequences of valuing young paper-pushers over venerable thinkers and teachers. By continuing our joint commitment to both scholarship and teaching, life, at least, can continue to be intellectually invigorating and spiritually satisfying, if not financially remunerative.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article, in a slightly different form, first appeared in the Montreal Gazette on March 22, 2000.

&COPY 1999-2000 The Florence Fund