As the pandemic has forced most colleges and universities to adopt remote instruction, it’s worth remembering that more than 50 years ago some schools voluntarily experimented with remote instruction via televised classes. That did not go well either. Students did not feel the same connection to their instructors and that, in turn, made a difference in what was learned. “It’s better to have a poor instructor in the classroom,” said one unhappy professor in 1967, “than to have a good one on TV.”
The vignette comes from Jonathan Zimmerman’s “The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America.” Mr. Zimmerman, an education historian at the University of Pennsylvania, has braided together a smooth narrative from many short pieces of thread, consisting of glimpses into the experiences of faculty members, students and administrators from the early 19th century up through the 1990s, and encompassing two- and four-year institutions, large and small, elite and not. The book is economical in its presentation of materials, gathered from 60-plus archives, and even-handed in presenting the gripes of instructors and students.
The book’s clever title refers to the way that higher education, when hiring, evaluating and rewarding faculty, gives most attention to research productivity and little to teaching effectiveness. Partly this is due to the difficulty of measuring effectiveness in the classroom, but it is also due to the resistance of faculty members to having their teaching reviewed by peers—something that would, Mr. Zimmerman says, “make their teaching truly professional.”
