To Profess with a Passion

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The bets are down: the U.S. is relying more heavily than ever on college education to shape its destiny. To get into college, kids claw for high marks even in grade school. Parents scratch for dollars, plunge into debt. State taxes soar. Yet how the bet comes out depends on solitary teachers in secluded classrooms--and the number of bored, hostile and inadequate college teachers adds up to something between a serious concern and an outright scandal.

Almost every college administrator is aware of what HEW Secretary John Gardner has termed "the flight from teaching." A massive drive is under way to "rediscover students" and "bring back teaching"--academe's typically bland admission that many colleges have lost sight of all those young bodies bulging their buildings.

Yet the true professor's impulse to teach, like the true physician's impulse to heal, cannot long be squelched, and every campus embraces men who are living models of what good teaching can be.

Burning Hot. In a student poolroom hangout on the fringe of the congested urban campus of the University of Southern California, Associate Professor of Business Administration Anthony Athos, a onetime auto-factory worker with "the lowest mechanical aptitude General Motors ever tested," peers over a pitcher of beer and explains that a teacher must have "that divine tension. You've got to be concerned--but not dedicated, which sounds as if you're doing something you think you ought to do. For me--Christ, it's fun!"

Athos, at 32, is an academic oddity who entered Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration from Gen eral Motors Institute without an under graduate degree, and he dates his own undedicated concern from "the day 1 stepped off the subway and came up into Harvard Square." At U.S.C., Athos has devised a course called "Organizational Behavior," now required of all business-administration majors, which raises ethical and psychological issues, and has made Athos what one colleague calls "the hottest commodity ever to hit our business school."

Cigarette in one hand, coffee cup in the other, Athos strolls into the center of his classroom's U-shaped rows of seats, and begins to toss out pointed questions in a disarmingly gentle voice. He poses, for example, the problem of how three older men feel when a boss promotes a youngster over them. To a student who argues that feelings don't matter, only success does, Athos says crisply: "I would like to suggest that you talk an ideology that you do not practice--even in this classroom." To another: "You think that the boss knows what he's doing because you identify with the boss, as you do in every other case." To a third: "Why do you say these other three guys are just lazy bastards?"

Athos tries to curb his profanity, but he has no desire at all to curb his feelings. "The student is concerned with feeling--even more than with knowledge and thought," he argues. "Where knowledge is overemphasized, students are merely vessels; then they can open the trap and flush it all into blue books. We have intellectual athletes exercising great muscles in the making of intellectual doilies." This may be "the age of the big cool," says Athos, but the good teacher must "burn hot."

Sparks Fly. Amid the cathedral-spired Gothic-solid buildings at Yale University, Art Historian Vincent Scully Jr., 45, excitedly defines the aim of his teaching as putting "the right word together with the visual fact so that all of a sudden sparks fly and a new skill is born: the ability to see."

Scully's soaring lectures on architecture every year enroll no less than one-fifth of all Yale undergraduates--plus some 100 non-enrolled auditors who may catch him for four years and never hear precisely the same lecture twice. Waiting for the lights to dim for his slides, Scully paces head down like a halfback about to take the field. Then he swings his 10-ft. pointer, whomps the screen as if to destroy a bad building, jabs it like a fencer to stress a point --and buildings take on life. "What does a building want to be?" he will ask. "How does that building want to say hello to you?"

The screen shows Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, a 1930 country home near Paris. "Le Corbusier exposes you up in space. It is as if you were in a ship. It's as if he's saying, 'You can't merge with nature.' You are a man. You want things that nature doesn't want. You would like to live forever, and nature will kill you. So you stand and you look at nature, framed out there on the horizon. You are an urban dweller who is trying to make contact with it, and in a very fundamental sense you can never really do so except on a level of profound melancholy."

Articulate, lyrical, passionate, Scully gets so entranced in lecturing that he once stepped back in the dark, fell four feet to the auditorium floor, leaped back up, still talking. The lectures seem to be spontaneous drama; yet Scully spends a full day planning each of them, selecting as many as 100 slides and changing the course every year because "I'm not the same person I was last year." Frenetic and lonely, Scully's whole life is an explosion. "You ought to hear him give his description of Y. A. Tittle's last year with the Giants," says his colleague Jerry Pollitt. "It's gripping, like Greek tragedy. He comes across like Euripides."

House of Jargon. Professors who profess with the passion of Athos, Scully and the eight others on TIME'S cover are enjoying new glory on nearly every college and university campus in the U.S., as academic administrators react to complaints that they have neglected teaching. To too many youngsters, it appears that those castles of knowledge they thought they were entering have turned out to be cardboard houses built of professorial jargon, Ph.D. pretentiousness, preoccupation with tenure and personal prestige.

Instead of finding the kind of teacher who seeks what Harvard College Dean John Monro calls "a mind-to-mind confrontation" with students, undergraduates often stare across 30 rows of seats at a listless scholar reading from his own textbook and begrudging the time spent away from his esoteric research. In smaller classes, students are likely to meet some harassed teaching assistant absorbed in his specialized graduate studies, sometimes not even teaching in his own sphere of knowledge. "We have sought out ability with football quarterbacks, we are beginning to do it with executives and musicians, but we haven't started with teachers," says Cornell President James Perkins. Even in some small colleges, where teaching is supposed to be the sole goal, says one university president who has visited nearly 400 campuses, "what they call an education is a fraud."

Forty students recently quit a Northwestern University criminology class because the professor belabored obscure theories hour after hour. "To take something as inherently interesting as criminology and make it dull is a crime--he really had to work at it," recalls Senior Andrew Malcolm. At U.C.L.A., Senior Sharon Jones protests that "if I want to complain about a test, first I have to see the reader, then the teaching assistant; then I may get to see 'God.' "

The troubles with teaching stem from healthy causes. Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt formed his New Deal brain trust, professors have been leaping down from their ivory towers to grapple with the earthly day-to-day problems of government and business. Their expertise is suddenly in demand to combat urban blight in Boston, famine in Bombay. "At any one given time," quips University of Chicago Dean Wayne Booth, "a first-class university has at least 10% of its professors in airplanes." Federal money devoted to research projects has multiplied 200 times since 1940, from $74 million to about $15 billion annually.

Bigger Job, Fewer Hours. The teaching task has similarly soared. In the past ten years, student enrollment has more than doubled, from 2,660,000 to 5,526,000. But the number of new Ph.D.s, who form the major pool of college teachers, has increased only 73%--and less than half of these have actually entered teaching. As a result, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching predicts that the nation's colleges will need about 35,700 more teachers by 1970 than will actually be available.

The shortage of teachers--and their new respectability--has given professors mobility and financial independence, which too many use to demand fewer teaching hours so that they can spend more time in research, writing and lucrative consultation. At the nation's top universities, the average science professor carries only six classroom hours a week, the humanities teacher about eight. A "star" system has evolved in which, for example, Columbia College Dean David Truman wonders how he can keep a professor whom another school has offered $30,000 a year, with no teaching and $100,000 for laboratory equipment. Some 70,000 professors now devote full time to research, treble the number of a decade ago.

The problem is not the overblown cry that professors are forced to "publish or perish." Most of the good teachers, in fact, cannot resist publishing; they have something they want to say to the world beyond their classrooms. Every teacher needs time to reflect and explore the frontiers of his field if he is to keep his teaching fresh. But whether all kinds of research always help teaching is problematical. Too often, says University of Utah English Chairman Kenneth Eble, scholarly magazines are established merely so that they can be "sent to editors of other magazines," and the scholar's great goal is to "write enough books about other people to become, well within his lifetime, the subject of still other people's books."

The Ph.D. Myth. Even more dismaying is widespread professorial snobbishness toward anyone who consciously thinks about the techniques of good teaching. "It's a myth that once a man gets a Ph.D. he's a good teacher," says Earlham College President Landrum Boiling. The stress on the Ph.D. is, in fact, under sharp attack for producing narrow specialists. University of Texas Classics Chairman William Arrowsmith says that "liberal arts colleges should have the guts to say to Harvard and Yale that they don't want any more overtrained, overspecialized Ph.D.s, many of whom are really incompetent to talk to undergraduates." University of California President Clark Kerr deplores the fact that "nothing is being done" to train teachers, calls it "a tragedy that we take teaching assistants, throw them in without preparation, leave them by and large neglected."

The sheer shortage of teachers and a system of tenure that ensures every professor his job for a lifetime prevent administrators from firing stale and incompetent teachers. Sociology Professor Robert Nisbet of the University of California's Riverside campus calls tenure "a blend of mystique and the sacred, as nearly impregnable a form of differential privilege as the mind of man has ever devised." The teaching profession, says the Danforth Foundation's Merrimon Cuninggim, "is the only profession that has no definition for malpractice." Even mental deterioration is no cause for dismissal, and, says Nisbet, "a single man can cause intellectual blight year after year" in students and faculty.

While teaching is a highly personal blend of style, scholarship and attitudes, the qualities of the great teachers of the past are not at all mysterious. Socrates, bearded and bald, gave his name to today's best seminar style simply by plucking insights out of youthful minds with incisive questions. Aristotle drew upon the illustrative experiences of his reckless youth to inspire other youths to be good; his Lyceum linked research and teaching by analyzing biological specimens. In a medieval age of faith, the unconventional Peter Abelard employed shafts of wit and the theory that "constant questioning is the first key to wisdom" to draw throngs to his school of dialectics near Paris.

Taskmaster. In a sense--computers, films, labs and TV notwithstanding--nothing much has come along in 2,400 years that essentially improves the Socratic pattern of a learned man plus a group of students, but the pattern can work out in sharply varied and instructive styles. None of TIME'S ten teachers, for example, court popularity, but none go farther in scorning it than Amherst's Arnold Arons, 49, who has created a demanding course in math and physics that all freshmen must take. He flunks more frosh than any other Amherst prof, barks "You are an idiot" at boys who were high school valedictorians. An arbitrary egotist, he has inspired student dart boards on which his photograph is the bull's-eye. Arons' scathing answer to his student critics is that "they create certain myths to rationalize their own inadequacies." He seems proud of some mementos from his students in his cluttered office: a dead lizard, a hangman's noose.

Arons' sweeping course ranges from Galileo and Faraday to Voltaire and John Stuart Mill. He starts his lectures by locking the door at the opening bell --to encourage promptness, he says; to keep the kids from fleeing, they say. As he carefully shows how a scientific theory can affect man's own view of himself, and requires students to explain such notions as velocity and inertia in their own words, the relevance hits them. The course, recalls Amherst Graduate Evan Snyder, "was absolute hell--but one of the most valuable intellectual experiences I've been through." One student slipped a note under Arons' door, reading "I can't help wondering if physics is really as interesting as you make it seem."

One of his aims, says Arons, is to help students realize that science does not have absolute answers, that "it is a creation of human imagination and intelligence like everything else we do." Arons requires many essays of his students, considers this "feedback" vital to good teaching. "You can't just get up there and say something crisply and clearly and think that it has registered," he says. He has been personally grading papers for 20 years, and "almost every session I learn something new about the obstacles that arise in the students' minds." To their amazement, those students who muster enough courage to ask his help have found Arons pleased, patient, and wholly effective in overcoming obstacles.

Later-Life Influence. At Columbia, Historian Dwight Miner, 61, carries with zest and buoyancy the weighty responsibility of teaching that college's long-famed course in contemporary civilization, following the tracks of such illustrious predecessors as Rexford Guy Tugwell and Jacques Barzun. Creeping, leaping, lolling his head like a cow, he tries to span everything from the Magna Carta to World War II.

When he hits Darwin and mutations, Miner yanks at his front teeth. "The saber-toothed tiger," he says, "was noted for its eyeteeth. They grew and grew, giving the tiger a tremendous bite. They could just WHANG on that prey." He claps his hands together. "But this mutation kept recurring and the eyeteeth grew longer and longer, till they came down like this"--he drapes his forefingers down over his lower jaw--"and then what happened? They couldn't get a bite. So now there are no more saber-toothed tigers."

Miner gets a kick out of such lectures, but confesses that he prefers to teach a colloquium around a table where "fellows are not looking at the backs of one another's necks." He seeks "an electric exchange" with students, is "tremendously pleased" when invited to a student dinner or fraternity house. His loftiest aim for his C.C. course, in fact, is to furnish ideas for the kids to kick around in bull sessions. "The bull session is a very important aspect of education," he contends. As the hours grow late, students "express what they are really thinking about--they educate each other."

Miner gets grateful letters from former students and, though an erratic typist, pecks out warm answers. He says he is amazed and happy when some company president, for example, quotes something Miner said that changed his outlook on life--"but of course I never remember saying it at all."

Renaissance Man. Boyish enthusiasm sits poorly on a professor, but an urgency and eagerness that transcend enthusiasm can be gripping. At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, English Professor Osborne Bennett ("O.B.") Hardison Jr., 37, wears scuffed shoes, drooping socks and chalk-streaked jacket, goes everywhere accompanied by a kindly dog named Poppo, and makes literature an urgent affair. O.B. revels in Joyce, turns Kant dramatic, convulses his class by acting out John Donne's poem The Flea. Hummingly in tune with the student wave length, he translates the oracle's prediction in Arcadia ("An uncouth love which Nature hateth most") as meaning that, "put bluntly, the king's youngest daughter will become a lesbian." With a lyrical voice and a surging style, he also conveys his conviction that literature is "exciting, beautiful, profoundly moving."

Hardison, says Neil Forsyth, a graduate student from Britain, "understands more of Aristotelian thought than anybody who taught me Aristotle at Cambridge." When one of Hardison's lectures on Milton and the Puritan period ended, Forsyth adds, "I wanted to stand up and cheer." Hardison admits to having some off days when "you wonder whether you are professing anything except ignorance. Sometimes I tell my best jokes and get nothing but lumpish faces staring back."

The son of a World War II commander of the aircraft carrier Enterprise, Hardison started out to be a biophysicist at M.I.T., lost interest, drifted with a bohemian crowd as a nonstudent in Berkeley. He enrolled at Chapel Hill, where he lived on campus in a tent, dabbled in leftist causes, followed the literary criticism of T. S. Eliot and Allen Tate into an engrossing interest in the Renaissance. It is a period, he says, that raises "unsettling new ideas that are constantly relevant to life today."

Hardison taught for a time at Princeton, found it "a little elegant." But he loves tree-shaded Chapel Hill, where his two classes of 50 students each are small enough so that he can read all student papers at least once, and the best ones twice, and comment critically on all. He revises his courses each term, insists that professional publication stimulates teaching, and bears out that belief with a flow of books.

Living Math. Caltech's H. Frederick Bohnenblust, 60, is a veteran dean of graduate studies who remains perennially ecstatic about teaching basic mathematics to undergraduates. He handles a class of 100 students in almost Socratic fashion, keeping up a gentle, good-humored patter with students in the front rows and offering a soft "Thank you" when they chuckle at his phrasing. A symbol is "this thing," formulas are "pleasing and esthetic."

"Once you've understood that math is just straight thinking, just plain common sense," he says, "then anyone can do it." He makes it even easier with his slow-paced, nontechnical language, constantly links math's logic to life. Launched on a spirited application of math to the lift of an aircraft wing at a recent class bell, he talked on clear through another bell. No one stirred. When he finally finished, Caltech's unexcitable young scientists burst into applause.

Enchanting in class, Swiss-born Bohnenblust nevertheless maintains an Old World reserve in his relations with students. "I hate to spoon-feed math to a student who's not interested," he explains, "and I love to talk math to a student who is." Too many students, he feels, "expect to be given things" rather than seize the opportunity to learn. "I chose mathematics as my profession, not teaching," he adds, "but I love math and want to communicate its ideas--especially to the younger generation."

An Onstage Presence. For "Bohney," there is great satisfaction when he puts one of those ideas across. He knows he has scored, he explains, when, "before I get to the punch line, I see a smile on the student's face because he knows what I am going to say next. How much better that is than a look of astonishment when I've delivered my last sentence."

Berkeley's Historian Carl Schorske, 51, never lectures before 11 a.m. because he wants two or three hours to get ready--and he still gets butterflies. "But if you have no tension," he says, "there's no spring. You must go in there with tension, and you should end up feeling worn out." Once onstage, Schorske gestures, grins, whispers, employs the full range of a booming baritone voice. He covers three centuries of European intellectual history in his most popular course, shifts spontaneously to suit the mood of his audience ("It's almost a cabaret thing") as he explores Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Marx and Freud. "He inspires an awful lot of hero worship from extremely bright people," says sandaled Coed Regina Janes.

The humanist must be involved in studies that are "really relevant to where the action is," Schorske holds, and research cannot be separated from teaching. "If I lecture on social democracy," he explains, "well, that's a subject I have finished with. I've written my book. It's out of my system. But if I lecture on 20th century culture, my work now; I really cook with gas--this is what I am still involved with intellectually."

A lecture is only a demonstration of "how a person thinks about a problem," says Schorske, and the lecturer should always assume the student is "informed, intelligent, and committed. You then talk to him as a peer--as your companion in learning--and he begins to behave like one." Schorske does not, however, believe in "being buddy-buddy, or in a libidinous relationship such as they have at Sarah Lawrence." The teacher should be neither "lofty nor authoritarian," but his enthusiasm for communicating a subject should command "a natural respect."

Better with Rats. All of these teachers, and the others on the cover, have some common qualities that tend to dispel what Cornell's Perkins calls the "marvelous smoke screen" teachers have thrown up to convey the notion that "what they are doing is an occult mystery." All have demonstrated sound scholarship through publication. All are immersed in a conviction that their scholarship has an irresistible relevance to life, and feel compelled to convey that relevance. And all believe that in sights, ideas, ways of thinking, methods of inquiry, are far more important to implant in young minds than any specific points of knowledge.

Any general improvement of teaching, however, cannot be accomplished simply by copying these qualities. For one thing, no one knows enough about how students learn. "We know more about teaching rats, and we are more effective with psychotics and neurotics than we are with freshmen," says Caltech Psychologist John Weir. One of the leaders in cognition psychology, Harvard's Jerome Bruner, has long insisted that "any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest way to any child at any stage of development" (yet a recent Harvard Crimson course guide terms Bruner's own classes "incoherent").

One likely way to improve teaching would be to get the best minds back into the classroom. Universities cannot, and should not, ignore their duty to pioneer knowledge and put that knowledge to work off-campus, but a generation of bright, skeptical students rates attention too. It will take tough deans and presidents to check what Yale College Dean Georges May calls this "corruptive" influence of "the high priests of research in their white smocks." Ohio University's President Vernon Alden is doing it by promoting good young teachers, even without Ph.D.s or published research, over the heads of their elders to full professor rank.

Open Doors? Teaching could also be improved by leaders who simply open classroom doors and base promotions, in part, on what goes on inside. Yet even those teachers who cry most about not being rewarded for their teaching often consider their classrooms a sanctified place in which the outsider not only cannot comprehend the ritual but even defiles the proceedings by his presence. In reality, it is no great trick to determine whether a teacher speaks clearly, presents relevant material logically, conveys enthusiasm.

Cornell's Perkins contends that every new teacher should be monitored periodically by a full professor for at least three years. A faculty committee at Berkeley has proposed that teaching evaluation based on classroom visits by colleagues be made a formal part of promotion procedures. Harvard is taping the sections taught by many of its graduate teaching fellows, who then discuss the tapes with each other. Antioch and other colleges take movies of professors so that they can see their own visual impact--and the experience is often traumatic.

One beguiling way to sharpen teachers would be to return to the 13th century system of student guilds in Italy, where students paid, hired and fired the professors. That is hardly likely, but student critiques of professors and their courses are sweeping the campuses. Some 400 are either in operation or planned. Most are solely for the guidance of the individual teacher, but about 50 are published campus-wide--and these can be far more painful to professors than any judgment by their peers.

Harsh Judgments. The Berkeley critique, called Slate, says of Assistant Professor Robert Haller's English 142B: "The class is bored and he is bored. He takes an hour to say ten minutes' worth." Yale's complains that Political Science Professor David N. Rowe "is so firmly convinced of the absolute Tightness of his beliefs that he does not permit students to question or challenge him." Harvard's guide quotes a Cliffie who rates Chemist Louis Fieser as "only a little less articulate than my pet hamster."

While harsh and sometimes cruel, student judgments do not necessarily downgrade the taskmasters. Slate contends that Assistant English Professor Joseph Kramer is "a hard grader and expects a lot from his students," yet gives him an A rating for his "perceptive and stimulating presentation of Shakespeare." Good teachers often rate student raves. The American University guide calls English Instructor Peter Scott "great, dynamic, interesting, interested, alert and careful when grading, the most valuable and worthy freshman English teacher at A.U." In general, the student judgments tend to be fair. "Students have a marvelous, ironic ability to see through bull," says Vincent Scully.

Scores of colleges now have "good teacher" awards, including cash gifts of up to $1,000, to stimulate better teaching. Many are attacking the problem by curriculum changes, more tutorials and independent study under faculty supervision, the creation of clusters of small colleges within big institutions.

"And I Said to Albert." A perennial debate among professors is whether subject or student comes first--and the verdict usually favors those who stress the subject. Harvard Biologist George Wald, 59, shows why. As a researcher, he has made one of the most enlightening finds of recent decades: his discovery of the Vitamin A molecule in the retina goes a long way toward explaining the physiology of eyesight. Light, it seems, makes this crooked molecule straighten out and signal the optic nerve. The very originality of such work also makes Wald a frontiers-of-research lecturer, and his "Nat Sci 5," in the Harvard Crimson's judgment, is "one of Harvard's truly great courses."

Some 400 students pack his lectures, spill into the aisles, seem mesmerized for the hour. He begins in a whisper to force silence, raises his voice to make a point, then stares "with a kind of eye that burns right through you," as one auditor puts it, while the point sinks home. With crystal clarity and obvious joy at a neat explanation, Wald carries his students from protons in the fall to living organisms in the spring, ends most lectures with some philosophical peroration on the wonder of it all.

He tries, Wald says, to make it "a happy course." Notorious for name-dropping, he tosses in references to "and then I said to Einstein, 'But Albert . . .' "--and his audience, as on cue, hisses in chorus. Wald pretends to ignore this, actually loves it. "He isn't really teaching," says Freshman Tom Zanna. "He's inspiring." Radcliffe English Major Valerie Rough says she is "spiritually majoring in biology" because Wald makes it "so esthetically appealing." Harvard Dean of Arts and Sciences Franklin Ford says Wald generates an "amazing quality of intellectual excitement."

A teacher, says Wald, must be "the most committed student in the room." In lectures, "I am just trying to make things clear to myself--I find I am learning things all the time." And even when he is the only one talking, he considers it "a kind of dialogue. I am acutely aware of the expressions on the students' faces. A puzzled look stops me short." Facts, he argues, are "just raw material for understanding basic relationships, and the whole job of teaching is to weave a fabric of relationships and to attach this at so many points to the student's life that it becomes a part of him."

Classroom Dialogist. Claremont Men's College, near Los Angeles, has only 626 students, but it also has Bronx-born Political Scientist Martin Dia mond, 46, who has turned an offbeat set of experiences into a classroom asset. He learned how to intrigue a crowd and squelch hecklers while plugging socialist causes on New York street corners when he was the age of his students.

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