Time to Try Teaching

AI is an existential threat to current educational practices. Universities, long distracted by research, are unprepared to mount an educational response.

I have seen the university from both sides of its mission. My first academic job was as a research-focused faculty member at the University at Buffalo. I was excited to begin teaching, which is why I remember so vividly being told to teach poorly for a few years and then show artificial improvement before applying for tenure. I failed at research, but succeeded as an educator, and continued in a teaching-focused role at the University of Illinois. There I have watched research count for more than teaching even when we hire and promote teaching faculty. Research has come before teaching at every university I have known.

The focus on research begins as students arrive on campus. Undergraduates who have barely begun their studies are still encouraged to seek out research opportunities. Once they reach graduate school, budding academics learn to disdain teaching. Stronger students are funded to do research, and the rest are required to teach. Teaching must never get in the way of research, and the less time spent on it, the better. And they aren’t wrong to do this, because when they apply for academic jobs, their teaching is barely evaluated. Nor will it be meaningfully considered when they apply for tenure, or for promotion, or for positions in university leadership.

The result is a university consumed by research. Once you start to look, the evidence is everywhere. Teaching-focused faculty are usually ineligible for tenure, poorly paid, and absent from meaningful leadership roles. Revenues generated by teaching are used to pay the salaries of faculty spending most of their time on research. Academic hallways and newsletters brim with reports about research accomplishments while rarely mentioning educational innovation. The list goes on.

Universities claim that, by assembling the best researchers, they are also assembling the best educators. But study after study has shown that there is no relationship between research and teaching ability. There are only so many hours in the week. The more time faculty spend on their research, the less they spend on their teaching.

The retreat from teaching is part of a larger retreat from the university’s intellectual community. Research-focused faculty frequently show little interest in undergraduates, or in colleagues outside their own field. Students have noticed. At Harvard, a faculty committee found that students skip class and still collect high grades, because they find their clubs and projects more meaningful than their courses. If faculty contribute so little humanity to our students’ education, maybe we deserve to be replaced by AI.

The arrival of AI has made plain how little attention universities have been paying to instruction. I am watching AI agents take on remarkable roles in supporting student learning in my classrooms. It’s clear to me that, used properly, AI has a positive role to play in higher education. It’s equally clear to me that, at present, it undercuts our already poorly supported educational mission.

Successfully incorporating AI will require a coordinated institutional effort. To meet this challenge we need new and revised assignments, courses, degrees, and departments. This is work that universities should be prepared for. But it is educational work, the kind that research-focused institutions have been avoiding and diminishing for decades.

AI’s threat to higher education is real today, and so is its promise. So there’s no excuse for delay. And yet, most of what you see universities doing now is stalling. Pleas for students to promise not to use AI in their courses. Committees assembled to study the issue and generate reports. Light modifications to existing programs marketed as AI preparation. At a moment when we need all university faculty working together to update our educational practices, most are too focused on their research to participate.

While reports like the recently released one from MIT are full of good starting points for universities attempting to incorporate AI, they never ask whether anyone on campus has the time, the skill, or the incentive to do the work, in the classroom or out of it. Universities have rewarded today’s faculty for minimizing teaching for their entire careers. Perhaps they will suddenly have a change of heart, particularly given this year’s federal research cuts. Research-focused faculty are belatedly discovering that it is teaching that keeps the paychecks coming. But I worry that many universities are simply full of the wrong people for this job.

In the short term, universities can do everything possible to reward the educational work required to respond to AI. Research-focused faculty have long been able to receive research funding over the summer when classes are not in session. Funding educational innovation during those same months would help keep pace with this fast-moving technology. Recognition for this work is cheaper still, and nearly as effective.

In the long term, universities need to align their internal incentives with their public mission: a balanced commitment to research and education. That could take many forms. Hiring teaching-focused faculty with equivalent pay and job security to their research-focused colleagues is a good start. The University of California system and several Canadian and Australian universities already have such roles, although not enough of them to counterbalance their research-focused faculty. Finding good teaching-focused academics is difficult, given how early academics learn to look down on it. Putting teaching and research on a more equal footing would require changes to undergraduate and graduate education as well as faculty hiring and promotion.

A new focus on education is unlikely to emerge from institutions fixated on research. Change is more likely to come from the people paying for it. Today, if you’re looking for a university education, you’ll need to ask some uncomfortable questions during the information session. How many teaching faculty are there, and how are they treated? How much contact will my child have with faculty outside the classroom? Does the university evaluate whether students are learning, not just whether they liked the class? How is teaching quality evaluated when faculty are hired and promoted? Has anyone been denied tenure due to poor teaching? Are there teaching faculty who hold meaningful leadership roles at the campus level? No university I know of has the balance right, but the answers will identify the ones that are trying.

Families pay enormous sums to send their children to university in the hope that they will be educated. But few seem informed about the realities on campus. As Ian Bogost pointed out recently in the Atlantic, most still approach university faculty with the question: “What do you teach?” Perhaps the parents would stop writing the large checks if they realized that, for many faculty, the answer is: “I’d prefer not to.”