Williams College’s physicist president champions “living, breathing professors”

‘Economic models that define productivity as total output per unit of labor are ill-suited to analyzing the activities of colleges,’ asserted the high-energy physicist and Williams College president Adam F. Falk in a 29 August Wall Street Journal commentary . What correlates most highly with gains in crucial skills, he wrote, ‘is the amount of personal contact a student has with professors.’ On 4 September, the WSJ published five letters under the headline ‘Live Professors are Great, but the Colleges Need More .’

Falk’s concern calls to mind this summer’s drama at Charlottesville, when University of Virginia president Teresa A. Sullivan lost but quickly regained her office in what a Chronicle of Higher Education article called a ‘showdown’ involving ‘debates that have been escalating on campuses across the country.’ These conflicts pit ‘M.B.A.'s against Ph.D.'s,’ the Chroniclesaid, stirring ‘passions about whether the strategies of the business world should be widely adopted within the academic enterprise’ — in particular, whether and ‘how the nation’s top institutions should transform with [information] technology, blending brick-and-mortar education with online, open-course endeavors.’

Sullivan, with ties to both the Ph.D. and the M.B.A. sides in that complicated situation, chaired the National Academy of Sciences study that Falk’s op-ed criticizes: Improving Measurement of Productivity in Higher Education . It proposes, he says, ‘to define the ‘output’ of higher education as a combination of credit hours awarded and degrees earned,’ which simply ‘reduces the work of colleges to counting how many students they push through the system — a bit like defining a movie studio’s output as the number of feet of raw footage shot, with no consideration of whether the resulting movies are any good.’

‘What we do,’ declares Falk, ‘is expensive — and worth it — because these rich, human interactions can’t be replaced by any magical application of technology.’

But the letter-writers charge Falk with scanting the financial dimension. One asks how each of his state’s million postsecondary students can possibly be educated for Williams’s ‘reported $43,190 annual undergraduate tuition and academic fees, not counting room and board.’ That letter stresses the need for ‘mass-distributed instruction’ as one ‘means of addressing’ such ‘real-world challenges.’ The writer adds that he has ‘used online media to teach postsecondary students since 1988.’

Another letter asserts confidently that ‘universities need a sea change in productivity’ that ‘can be achieved by increasing the faculty’s opportunities to teach by sustaining student and faculty interactions outside the classroom using mobile technology, by metric-based faculty evaluations and by using modern management methods.’

At one point Falk had expressed respect for the importance and difficulty of English composition instruction, but one letter writer was having none of that:

‘Extraneous’ humanities stuff in a college education? Physicist Falk seems unlikely to buy that view.

It seems worth quoting one more of Falk’s passages:

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.