Why should academic freedom protect ineffective teaching?  

During the first semester of my undergraduate degree, I experienced the full spectrum of teaching strategies.  

On the one hand, I had a professor who spent three hours delivering content from a textbook to a mostly passive audience. Attempts to engage students in discussion were rare and the course assessments seemed to guarantee a familiar learning pattern: memorize, regurgitate, forget.  

On the other hand, another professor spent three hours ensuring that their students had understood course content and facilitating wide ranging discussions, leading by example and showing them how to make strong arguments and disagree reasonably. They also circulated throughout the classroom despite its large size, listening to and engaging with small group discussions, some of which were later drawn upon in larger discussions focused on learning objectives.  

When I began teaching on my own, first as an assistant and later as an instructor, I realized that the contrast between these two professors had a major impact on me. Because the latter teacher was so much more effective, I committed to emulating their classroom strategies. With hindsight spanning an undergraduate degree to a PhD and beyond, the latter professor proved to be the exception rather than the norm of my classroom experiences.   

This leads me to a provocative question that really shouldn’t be that provocative: why should academic freedom protect ineffective teaching?  

Academic freedom is the lifeblood of the academy, and the unique right of academics to research, teach, and speak publicly without restriction provided it’s within the bounds of law and policy (and standards of scholarly merit). Because professors have invested a significant amount of time immersing themselves in their disciplines and undergoing trials such as comprehensive exams, dissertation defences and peer-reviews, they possess highly specialized expertise and therefore a privileged position.  

This means that it’s reasonable to assume that they should have autonomy over the content of their courses, including determining which scholarly contributions are the most important for their students.  

In the domain of teaching, however, most professors will not be subject to the same rigorous standards of scholarly merit. They will, of course, be subject to the impressions of their students occasionally, who may lack the ability to assess effective teaching and reflect systemic biases. And while student evaluations are formally considered for promotion and tenure, there’s a tacit recognition that they’re an imperfect measure of teaching effectiveness. Due to a lack of resources and deep disagreements about how to measure such things, we’ve sadly accepted a status quo in desperate need of change.  

For junior scholars, the status quo can be especially perplexing. Demonstrating teaching effectiveness has practically become a requirement for tenure-track positions and teaching has gradually become professionalized. In a sense, departments have shifted their expectations without shifting their opportunities, with many featuring graduate programs that require students to look elsewhere for teaching training and mentorship (like a Centre for Teaching and Learning or equivalent).  

Further, professors may boast little to no formal training or education in teaching and never experience the equivalent of peer-review in the classroom. And while there are more resources available than ever to sharpen the teaching of graduate students, postdocs and professors, such opportunities are both discretionary and arguably undervalued. Conversations about how graduate education can better equip students for non-academic employment have advanced significantly in recent years, but teaching is still largely left out. This situation reflects a ‘common sense’ that graduate students imbibe early in their career: rather than forming a mutually reinforcing whole, teaching ought to yield to research.  

Put another way, the strong justifications for academic freedom may not equally apply to teaching if we can distinguish between the content and form of teaching. Still, the idea that teaching methods ought to conform to best practices established by scholarship would likely be viewed as a violation of academic freedom. And even if specific teaching methods could be shown to be more effective than others, their imposition would be resented if not resisted. Why?  

If the point of academic freedom is to provide the autonomy required to follow the evidence (and repel interference) in the service of a public good, we need to ask if that same dedication to the public good is experienced at the classroom level. This cannot happen if we simply assume that academic freedom protects ineffective teaching, while we demand good evidence for research while simultaneously ignoring it for teaching.   

The solution to this glaring inconsistency isn’t greater managerialism, surveillance of the classroom or the imposition of best practices in teaching. Instead, it’s changing the culture of teaching in the academy, in part by incentivizing junior scholars like me to think about teaching using the same standards of scholarly merit that they bring to their research.  

By thinking about teaching strategy as individual decisions with options buttressed by more or less empirical evidence, they can become intentional teachers and therefore increase their effectiveness. Similarly, if junior scholars are invited to reflect on measuring their teaching effectiveness somehow, they may find that their own research methods can also have positive impacts on the classroom.  

The point isn’t to establish the most effective teaching strategies as a gold standard and discard everything else. That would threaten the creativity and experimentation that makes teaching so rewarding. Instead, it’s to think about teaching as a series of decisions requiring justification, rather than something one learns intuitively through practice or reflects empirically equal personal preferences.  

I may not be able to convince some of my former professors that there’s a better way, but tomorrow’s professors are probably listening.  

Dax D’Orazio is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Guelph.