Teaching and scholarship go together

Jeffrey Kuhner's melodramatic article crying Crisis at McGill (Comment, March 21) poses 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. A graduate student working on his PhD while filling in temporarily at McGill should know better.

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 endeavour can sap time and resources from another. But the university - especially a leading research institution such as McGill - works best as an intellectual centre where teaching and scholarship enhance one another. In fact, one cannot get hired, tenured or promoted at McGill these days 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 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 honours 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 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 PhD 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.

The truth is that the only way McGill University has remained one of the great intellectual centres of the Western world has been because of its unyielding commitment to research as well as teaching. In the 1990s, the history department alone produced more books than faculty members - 30 - 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.

Yes, McGill risks being strangled by government cutbacks, ridiculously low tuition and the failure of individuals, corporations and foundations to fulfill their responsibility and keep the university funded. Sure, we would welcome anyone who wants to endow a professorship in American history - or any other field. And yes, the last decade has been a difficult one for the university and prospects look dim.

More broadly, throughout North America, the economic calculus of academia remains sobering. Even down south, in 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. The headline, thus, is not Crisis at McGill. Rather, the headline should read: Despite it all, scholarship and teaching continue to thrive at McGill.

- Gil Troy is professor of history at McGill University.