Everyone agrees, presumably, that the chief function of schools
is teaching. Even a universitys research could not occur if
no teaching were going on, for a university is something quite different
from a nonteaching research institute.
But a question seldom askedbecause everyone thinks they already
know the answeris who actually does all the universitys
teaching? Most people assume that teaching is the province of the
faculty. Many faculty members, indeed, have been professionally
socialized to view teaching in highly ethnocentric terms as a university
subdomain, the boundaries of which enclose a function exclusive
to them. Even faculty members who engage in more research than teaching
often will answer the question What do you do? by responding
I teach.
The most familiar model of teaching is the model of a classroom
door closing, students taking their seats, and some faculty member
in an academic department joining those students at a seminar table
or standing behind a podium, from which position she or he will
lecture or lead a discussion. Thats what teaching is, and
its faculty who do it.
Two things are wrong with this model. First, a vast amount of teaching
that circulates within and that travels outward from the university
does not fit the model of teachers engaging with students about
the contents of an academic discipline. Second, this vast domain
of nonclassroom, nonacademic teaching is seldom done by faculty;
the overwhelming bulk is done by members of the professional staff.
This is not something many faculty members think much about, not
because they deliberately prefer to remain ignorant about professional
staff functions, but because the increasingly corporate structure
of the universitynot to mention everyones increasing
commitment to specializationsimply masks various constituencies
and their functions from each others view. Thus, from the
point of view of many faculty members, the functions performed by
professional staff relate to teaching much like the infrastructure
functions of campus buildings relate to teaching.
These functions are indispensable but mostly invisible, and while
faculty would concede that such functions support teaching, they
would not concede that these functions are the same thing as teaching.
If the infrastructure functions inside our classrooms suddenly
ceased workingif heating, cooling, lighting and running water
were suddenly cut offteaching would become difficult. If professional
staff functions suddenly disappearedif students never got
properly registered, if computer assistance techs never answered
the phone, if press releases never got sent out, if no one received
notices of meetings, if in-house publications never got published,
if the library was left to manage itself, if environmental and equal
opportunity policies never got or articulated, if no one ever spoke
compelling to potential donors about the value of giving money to
Emory, and so onteaching would not only become more difficult
but might even grind to a halt.
Faculty members concentrating naturally on their disciplines, their
research, their departments and their teaching dont deliberately
avoid thinking about the professional staff, but the universitys
complex organization (plus everyones business and busyness)
tends to obscure from faculty what professional staff dountil
something goes wrong. The moment something goes wrong or out-of-class
assistance is required in one of these ways, a faculty member automatically
seeks helpnot from another faculty member, and certainly not
from studentsbut from professional staff.
However, much more than many faculty or administrators generally
recognize, professional staff dont merely support faculty
teaching. Professional staff (and this may come as a surprise to
some) play an important role as teachers in their own right. The
idea of a faculty/staff divide, in which all teaching occurs on
the faculty side and only support for teaching occurs on the staff
side, is a fiction.
Throughout academe (including Emory), teaching exists on a continuum
that runs from faculty through nearly the entire professional staff.
Both faculty and staff do important forms of teaching, in other
words, but there are interesting and important differences in the
kinds of teaching they do and in the student audiences
that professional staff encounter.
Professional staff teach various constituencies much more diverse
than most faculty teach. Faculty tend to teach students and each
other. (Im leaving out faculty members who do private consulting
on the side; these faculty may be teaching, but their audiences
are not of the universitys choosing and those audiences dont
have interests served by university aims.) Thus, when faculty teach
their students and on particular occasions, each other (at conferences,
in reports, in discussions, and so on), doing so more or less exhausts
the diversity of their audiences.
The professional staff, on the other hand, who also teach students
and faculty, are just getting warmed up by these two audiences.
Staff teaching fans out to address constituencies more varied than
many faculty members ever see or think about.
In addition to teaching students and faculty, professional staff
teach such audiences as trustees, each other (by means of countless
in-service workshops), new employees both academic and nonacademic,
the media, students families, potential donors, neighborhood
action groups, the city council, the state legislature and politicians
in general, the general public, accreditation agencies (which faculty
members also teach), and alumni, to mention only some obvious constituencies
who need to know facts, policies and history of the university,
as well as the overarching educational philosophy that keeps the
university coherent.
Most of these student audiences seldom get seen by
faculty, much less taught by them. Moreover, the curriculum
that professional staff teach is as broad in its own way as the
facultys. They teach about application and enrollment procedures
to prospective students and their families; they teach faculty about
university policies and benefits and how to work their computers
and how to write grants (for openers); they teach the media about
the universitys educational missions as well as its special
programs and the general character of an educational experience
at Emory; they teach prospective donors about the universitys
needs for both special and general funding; they teach alumni what
changes and improvements have occurred since graduation; they teach
faculty about important developments in intellectual fields and
academic pursuits through publications such as Emory Report
and Academic Exchange; and they teach students important life lessons,
ranging from lessons in everyday civility and time management to
lessons in how to avoid serious problems (or what to do after not
avoiding serious problems) such as date rape, violations of the
honor code or what to do with evidence of someone elses criminal
activity.
These lists are suggestive and far from exhaustive. They are intended
to invite faculty and staff to think of themselves not only as colleagues
in the technical sense of being fellow employees of Emory University,
but to think of themselves as colleagues in the deeper, organic
sense of participating in different versions of the same activity
that lies at the heart of the universitys sense of identity
and that forms its most enduring and distinctive mission: teaching.
The teaching done by professional staff may seldom fit the model
of the traditional classroom setup, but this difference should not
obscure either the fact that it is teaching or that it is important
teaching. Each groups important functions on the teaching
continuum provide not only the grounds for advancement of the universitys
varied missions, but also the grounds for increased respect, understanding
and appreciation for the indispensability of each others contributions
in keeping Emorys teaching mission effective, productive and
vital.
|