October 22, 2008
Dear alumni, parents, and friends,
In this year’s annual letter to alumni and parents, I offer a paean to teaching—and the people who teach—at Reed. This may seem repetitive, since I’ve been praising teaching at Reed repeatedly for the past six years, but, as I discovered this past spring, it’s one thing to say it; it’s another thing to live it.
Virtually every year since becoming president, I have supervised one or two senior theses and served on thesis orals boards. But I had not taught a course. That changed last spring, when I co-taught a course, American Constitutional Democracy with Tamara Metz, assistant professor of political science. The experience taught me some things about education at Reed College that one can only learn in the classroom. Here are some of my observations.
First, courses at Reed must be very carefully planned. A good course syllabus at Reed is a thing of beauty—carefully organized, delicately balanced, and exquisitely embellished with instructions, insights, and various other grace notes. Readings must be stimulating, complementary, and, above all, challenging. (And, I should add, copious: a couple of our students criticized the course for not having enough reading!) The architecture of the course must trace the outline of a coherent and compelling intellectual structure that reaches (to mix my metaphor) a resounding crescendo at the conclusion of the semester.
Second, leading a successful Reed conference takes considerable finesse. We had 22 students, a large class by Reed conference standards. In a group that size, accommodating variations in student backgrounds, expertise, enthusiasm, and articulateness is a real challenge. It’s easy to start a discussion: assign the reading, ask a provocative question or two, and watch the students go. The hard part is to steer the discussion, to keep it from wandering too far off track without stifling provocative and useful insights, and to engage the more reticent students without silencing the most enthusiastic.
Third, largely for that reason, Reed faculty members think deeply, continuously, and creatively about pedagogy. Tamara and I spent hours planning and debriefing classes. In almost every class, we varied the discussion format, often breaking the larger group up into smaller groups to tackle specific assignments, answer questions, develop proposals, critique readings, and take adversarial positions for class debate. Such pedagogical experimentation and self-reflection are commonplace among Reed’s faculty, reflected in the detailed self-evaluations that faculty write as part of their biennial performance reviews.
Fourth, as an instructor, you can never be too well prepared. Not every student will have mastered all the readings, but you can count on the fact that every paragraph of the assigned reading will have been mastered by at least some students. And you can also count on the fact that no misstatement or sloppy argument—whether uttered by a fellow student or the instructor—will go unchallenged. The advent of laptops and wireless internet access makes even offhand factual statements vulnerable to instant rebuttal. (This is one of several reasons why some faculty forbid the use of laptops in class! Perhaps I learned my lesson this spring.)
Fifth, both student enthusiasm and modern information technology conspire to extend the class hour virtually around the clock. Students frequently dropped by our offices or buttonholed us in the hallways to talk about ideas left hanging, topics inadequately addressed, or extensions of the assigned readings. We set up an internet forum for the course on Moodle, a learning management system that enables instructors to share course materials with students electronically and enables students and instructors to engage in an ongoing internet dialog about the course. Almost every morning my computer signaled the posting of new questions, observations, arguments, papers, or news items on the course Moodle.
Sixth, teaching at Reed means giving (and getting!) lots of feedback. We assigned six different writing exercises, ranging from short comments to longer papers. Almost every week, I had grading to do, which means reading papers word-by-word, writing extensive marginal comments, and writing even longer summary assessments. In turn, the students are quite willing and eager to share their views of the course, the readings, the assignments, and the quality of the teaching, both orally throughout the semester and on written evaluations at the end of the course.
Finally, it should go without saying, teaching at Reed is both exhausting and exhilarating! Teaching a course is the best way for a president to appreciate just how hard Reed faculty work. The standard course load at Reed is 3/2—that is, three courses one semester and two the other. On top of this, the senior thesis requirement means that the average faculty member supervises two to three theses per year. Many supervise more. As I struggled some weeks to find time to teach just one course and supervise just one thesis, I sometimes wondered how I could possibly find the time and energy to be teaching three times as many courses and supervise three or four times as many theses.
Yet, despite the long hours and hard work, the experience of teaching helped me understand why faculty find the experience of teaching at Reed so satisfying. To accommodate my schedule, our course met one night a week for a three-hour class session. Before the semester started, I dreaded the thought of how those hours would drag on. But in fact, every class flew by. Nathalia King, professor of English and humanities, once said to me: “When you put teachers who genuinely love to teach together with students who genuinely want to learn, magic happens.” For me, magic happened every Monday evening last semester.
I often say that Reed is a community of scholars engaged cooperatively in the enterprise of learning. Faculty members serve as master scholars to their student apprentice scholars. As such, faculty embody and model the scholarly virtues of mastering the literatures and methodologies of their fields, as well as engaging in relentless inquiry, critique, debate, and extension of the bodies of knowledge in their fields. Great teaching both fosters and reflects the development of those virtues. But those activities cannot be pursued fully in the classroom or the teaching laboratory. Faculty need time for reading, reflection, professional interchange, and research. The rigors of the academic year schedule leave very little time, and less energy, for those activities.
For that reason, the college has in recent decades steadily increased support and opportunities for faculty to pursue their scholarly pursuits beyond the classroom. We have established research funds to enable faculty to hire research assistants, purchase needed equipment or materials, travel to professional conferences, access remote archives, or engage in field research. We have funded faculty seminars and lectureships to facilitate scholarly exchange and provide intellectual enrichment. And, surely most important, we have expanded opportunities for paid research leaves. At one time, faculty were entitled only to a one-semester research leave (sabbatical) every seventh year. Over time, a competitive paid-leave program emerged, which enabled some faculty to supplement their sabbatical leaves with an additional research semester. This past year, with my strong support, the faculty converted that program into a noncompetitive paid-leave program. Under the new program, all faculty will be entitled to a second semester of paid leave every seventh year, so long as they present a research proposal that meets certain demanding scholarly standards.
The new program will, to be sure, slightly reduce the amount of time faculty spend in the classroom over their careers. But, as we continue to expand the full-time faculty, we believe that this is a price worth paying. At Reed, faculty are first and foremost teachers. But they are scholar-teachers, and scholars need time to stay current in their fields, pursue their research, and continuously improve their curricular offerings. We work very hard to put just the right students into the classroom. We must work equally hard to put just the right faculty in the classroom.
I am abandoning the classroom this year, in order to focus all my energies on my day job. But I’ll be looking forward to getting back to where the real magic at Reed does happen, every day.
Sincerely,
Colin S. Diver
President