In 1949, the graduate dean at the University of Minnesota imagined that he had fallen asleep and woken up in 1984. The first thing he saw was a newspaper. It mentioned none of the “Orwellian horrors” that George Orwell had predicted in his novel. Instead, a banner headline blared “AMERICAN COLLEGE TEACHING REACHES A NEW HIGH,” with all-caps subheads that read “IMPORTANCE OF COLLEGE TEACHING NOW RECOGNIZED BY ALL” and “SKILL OF NEWLY TRAINED COLLEGE TEACHERS IN CLASSROOM AMAZES COMMUNITY.”
These phrases capture the perpetual dream of college-teaching reformers for the past century or more: to make undergraduate instruction into a truly professional enterprise, on par with research. But their reach has always exceeded their grasp. In the 1920s and ’30s, they introduced student evaluations; in the 1950s, seminars and televised lectures; in the 1960s and ’70s, ungraded classes and self-paced modules. Yet teaching remained a lowly endeavor, in status as well as quality: Hired mainly for their publications, many professors were woeful instructors. The problem was already apparent in 1903, when William James—who taught at Harvard for many years, despite never earning a PhD—wrote the most-quoted critique of college teaching: “Will anyone pretend for a moment that a doctor’s degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be a successful teacher?” By mid-century, when the Minnesota dean wrote his missive about 1984, calls to reform undergraduate instruction had already assumed a predictable rhythm. Committees would be formed, statements would be issued, and most professors would continue to teach in the same dull, uninspired manner. In 1957, another university dean wrote that the pattern reminded him of a snow globe he had owned as a child: You shook it up and the flakes scattered, but they soon settled down exactly as before.
So it’s easy to be skeptical about the “Great College Teaching Movement,” the latest effort to improve instruction in higher education. For the past decade, several state university systems have established broad-scale initiatives to recognize—and upgrade—teaching. The leading force in this campaign is the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE), cofounded by a former New York City educational official, Jonathan Gyurko, in 2014. Gyurko holds a PhD—from Columbia University Teachers College—but he’s not a standard-issue academic; instead, he is trying to alter the standards that academics use to judge each other.