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The Springtime of our Discontent
Were last semester's debates on the future of the arts and sciences a turning point?
(From the September 2001 issue of AE)

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The September 2001 Academic Exchange helps illuminate last spring’s eventful exchanges in the arts and sciences at Emory. Yet amidst all the discussion around Harvey Klehr’s “conflict between undergraduate and graduate education,” I miss any sense of what Emory College now needs most of all to sustain its great ascent of the past two decades—an academic reputation up to the challenge of today’s competition. We demonstrably lag in others’ eyes on academic reputation of undergraduate education, though this is key to overall reputation. Moreover, academic reputation is inextricably linked to both scholarship and teaching. This is most especially the case in a national research university (NRU). Nevertheless, there are ways to spring forward.

Academic reputation, whose importance for college assessments should find few critics, is reified in the concrete rankings of colleges done by such guides as the U.S. News and World Report’s America’s Best Colleges. Best Colleges’ reputational score is constructed from survey responses by college presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions (from, in our case, NRUs) and is widely construed as tilting toward some research reputation despite a pedagogic focus. It counts more than any other criterion in the construction of U. S. News’ influential college rankings. In particular, it counts for 25 percent of U.S. News’ total scores for nrus. As for other criteria, “graduation and retention rates” (consumer security) and “faculty resources” like student/teacher ratios each count another 20 percent, “selectivity” of admissions counts 15 percent, “financial resources” such as per-student educational expenditures count another 10 percent, and “alumni giving” counts 5 percent, while a complex oddity called “graduation rate performance” counts a final 5 percent.

We rank eighteenth overall and, in close tandem, nineteenth for student selectivity. Our rankings on “faculty resources” (sixth), “financial resources” (fourteenth), and alumni giving (fifteenth) buoy our overall ranking, while our graduation and retention rate (twenty-third) and that “performance” score (thirty-second) drag on us a bit.

Where we rank lowest on a score that matters, and well below our overall ranking, is on the score that matters most, academic reputation. Here we rank twenty-eighth, tied with Georgetown at 4.0 on a five-point scale, just below Vanderbilt and Washington University in Saint Louis at 4.1, just above Notre Dame at 3.9. This ranking is nothing less than outstanding. Among private NRUs, our “academic” placement in the company of Georgetown and the like does not contrast very dramatically from our overall ranking between Brown and Johns Hopkins (just above) and Notre Dame and Vanderbilt (just below). Still, our academic ranking in the pages of America’s Best Colleges weighs on our ascent up the quite widely regarded hierarchy in those pages.

None of the “academic” rankings I am aware of reveal a more flattering picture. The “academic rating” of the Princeton Review’s very popular Best 331 Colleges, 2002, is considered more teacher-centered. It is largely constructed from student survey responses to statements on teaching quality (such as “professors bring material to life,” “professors make themselves accessible,” “class discussions encouraged,” “students never stop studying “) and to surveys of “overall academic experience for undergraduates.” Emory ranks about twenty places lower among nrus than it does on the Best Colleges’ scale of “academic reputation.” We have not recently graced any of the Review’s pedagogic “top-20” lists.

The preceding one-two strike from Best Colleges and Best 331 can hardly unsettle a college clearly in no less distinguished company than Georgetown and Washington University in St. Louis, but it should catch our attention. We lag in the dimension of public recognition, an area in which we might most fruitfully lead.

Klehr writes, “Undergraduate education is taken very seriously here in a way that it’s not in a lot of American universities.” There is surely much truth to this. The signposts of external recognition, however, do suggest that our seriousness here may not be as exceptional as he suggests. If we are high on such “objective,” “structural,” and “input” measures of teaching quality as the student-faculty ratio, we are low on some other critera. For example, on the indicator of low reliance on TAs that Klehr cites, a turn to the America’s Best Colleges web site reveals that our 11 to 13 percent of upper-level classes taught by TAs disadvantages us relative to both our most immediate and most challenging competition—including Washington University in Saint Louis and Harvard—and places us in the company of such wastrel public institutions as the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor.

Our institution’s academic reputation is a drag on our overall college reputation. Yet reputation would appear key to attracting excellent students, and college education is widely believed to improve with better students to teach—to motivate teaching and to help teach each other. If these suppositions are true, a little indirection with respect to teaching and a little more concentration on academic reputation might be fruitful.

While graduate education might come into play here, its invocation seems something of a red herring to me. Improving faculty quality and reputation is not so much about resource allocation among university divisions as it is about hiring, promotion, and retention. Though they may bear some tweaking, our resources are already renowned—even in the pages of America’s Best Colleges—and we have more than enough to help draw people here and keep them here. We should remain devoted to teaching, sustaining our high standards and refining our pedagogic practice and incentives—perhaps trimming our high level of TA-taught upper level courses, further enhancing our rewards for teaching excellence and, like Princeton, instituting an obligatory senior project. We should not focus directly on teaching to the point of eccentric imbalance, however. To most directly improve our lagging academic reputation we should begin, once again as two decades ago, to raise the bar of scholarship.