NYU President Sends Tenured Faculty Back to the Classroom
New York University president John Sexton has waded into one of the thorniest issues in higher education, with critics bemoaning the status of undergraduate education at research universities, where ‘star’ professors can avoid teaching altogether.
Shortly after John Sexton became president of New York University last year, he launched a daring experiment aimed at improving the sagging quality of undergraduate education.
Instead of hiring part-time professors, Mr. Sexton persuaded some of the university’s most distinguished minds to teach undergrad classes. He made it clear that while graduate education and research were still priorities, it was no longer acceptable for professors to ignore their teaching responsibilities.
To set an example, Mr. Sexton, who is also a law professor, continued to teach two courses, including one at the undergraduate level.
The changes didn’t end there. In departments such as law and the arts, Mr. Sexton supplemented tenured faculty with star academics willing to teach full- time–without the guarantee of lifetime job security.
The approach generated buzz among the media and Ivy League educators because it was at odds with what was happening at research universities across the United States and Canada.
In taking up the issue of who teaches undergrads, Mr. Sexton has waded into one of the thorniest issues in higher education. Critics have long bemoaned the status of undergraduate education at research universities, where star professors can avoid teaching altogether.
Indeed, excusing researchers from teaching duties has become such common practice at Canada’s research universities that it is used as a tool for recruiting “trophy” professors.
In many cases, a star academic’s ability to attract research grants is prized above his teaching obligations. That has left the core mission of universities–undergraduate education–to suffer.
Mr. Sexton is determined to restore the balance.
“I have very strong feelings about the university that I’m trying to create,” he says. “One of those is that universities should not attract trophy professors by promising them they don’t have to teach undergraduates.”
Instead, Mr. Sexton argues, uni-versities should foster a culture in which big salaries
and academic tenure are not the only rewards for star researchers.
Indeed, if university administrators do a better job of spelling out the values they want to foster, they can better hold teachers and students to a sense of shared duty–what he calls “a common enterprise university.”
“At NYU, we want people who view their role in a university as a sacred trust,” Mr. Sexton says. “We want people to make decisions and live the life of the mind according to the question: ‘Am I living a useful life?’ Everything at our university flows from that premise.”
The theme of common enterprise is part of a lecture on the future of universities, which Mr. Sexton will deliver at the University of Ottawa today.
In their ongoing attempts to raise the university’s reputation, University of Ottawa administrators are interested in Mr. Sexton’s ideas about balancing research and teaching. They also want to hear his views about how a university can serve the public good during a time of dwindling government support.
Mr. Sexton’s vision is unabashedly optimistic, making him vulnerable to critics who accuse him of paying lip service to the importance of undergraduate education. Others applaud his efforts, but question whether he has found the solution.
Aside from pressing tenured professors to spend more time with undergrads, Mr. Sexton has attracted controversy for his proposals to create new categories of professors. These include “teaching professors,” who teach full time and are not judged by their research; “global professors,” who have tenure at other universities, but who act as visiting scholars to institutions in other parts of the world; and “cyberfaculty,” who specialize in the use of the Internet and its applications to various fields of research.
None of these new professors would be tenured. But Mr. Sexton stresses they would be paid competitively and have renewable, multi-year contracts. What’s more, professors without tenure would be given a higher status than part-time teachers; among other things, they would be given similar rights of a tenured professor to influence academic policies.
The strategy is already in place at NYU’s law school where, as former dean, Mr. Sexton honed much of his vision for a university centered on the common enterprise.
Between 1992 and 2002, the school rose dramatically in university rankings, largely because it aggressively wooed–and hired–three dozen senior professors from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, Michigan and Virginia.
Mr. Sexton was so successful that the board of trustees made him president of the university. Since then, he has continued to attract stars to NYU–not to mention record donations from wealthy benefactors.
The most stunning coup was the recruitment of Stanford University economist Thomas Sargeant, widely regarded as a leading contender for an eventual Nobel Prize.
Mr. Sexton insists he paid Mr. Sargeant and other star recruits competitive salaries while refusing to engage in bidding wars. Instead, he promised them an academic environment in which intellectual energy and a deep commitment to students would be core values.
Mr. Sexton says people who make good enterprise players are not motivated primarily by money. Instead, they are driven by a love for teaching.
“There are loads of trophy professors who would be inappropriate for a common enterprise university because they are not willing to enter into a social compact,” he says.
“The people who get it understand that ideas are proven through dialogue. They understand teaching as a process of questioning as a way of sharpening their own ideas. It can improve their work. Some people just aren’t committed to that and those aren’t the people we want.”
