Maybe it’s time to split the job of being a professor?

During the pandemic, higher education has been in freefall. If it’s not somebody in a position of power with no experience criticising online teaching, then it’s professors with burnout from the extra workload or PhD students who can’t adequately research without libraries, travel, or structure. This is, in some awful way, a break from the previous higher education discourse: criticising millennials for not being teachable and not ‘taking responsibility for our own learning’ or making inferences about striking professors being Marxist saboteurs of society from their ivory tower rather than overworked educators clinging to the idea of a pension and eventual retirement. It’s in this climate of higher education’s messy, gradual death that I’ve been thinking about how higher education is structured, how we could fix the mess and potentially make the experience better for students and staff alike.

Coming at it from a student perspective, I thought about the few times I’ve openly not paid attention in a lecture. They’ve all been taught by one professor at my college who cannot teach. He simply cannot. He cannot engage the class, he mumbles, reads off his powerpoint (why am I here if you could email it to me and I’d learn the same?)… he is a truly terrible teacher. But despite this, he is not by any means a bad professor. His research is amazing (I’ve read it, he really breaks ground and writes in a compelling, interesting way) and my friends who’ve been in his seminars or supervisions say he’s a fantastic, engaging speaker in the more intimate settings designed for discourse rather than lecturing. I want to take this man, and the many like him in universities across the world into account, when thinking of how higher education can be improved.

The flipside to this professor of mine is Monica Jones, who famously didn’t publish during her career as a professor. Jones was a visionary teacher and editor, and her work as such survives in the writing of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, to whom she was both a character inspiration and a sharp-tongued wielder of feedback. Her decades-long career was not stymied by her steadfast refusal to publish as it became a more common aspect of higher education, and instead gave her more time for reading, planning, teaching, and feeding back. Jones had her finger on the pulse of contemporary literature in a way most professors cannot hope to, and was a sufficiently inspirational teacher that, years after her death, a student wrote a memoir about her impact on him. Is this not what we seek to do in the classroom?

Being a professor seems to me to be two entirely separate jobs. Teaching is a hugely different skill to writing for publication, and by demanding that the same person do both we are stretching them thin and ensuring that neither is completed to the highest standard, however hard the professor works. Nobody would suggest that a solicitor and a barrister did the same job, yet they work in tandem to advocate for their client. Likewise, could a partnership between lecturers and writers push university education to new heights, renewing vigour in both teaching and publishing and ensuring the highest standards of both. Rather than relying on underpaid adjuncts or overworked professors to take on a volume of classes, planned by somebody else and perhaps even outside their sphere of expertise, why not acknowledge that the workload is not only heavy but diverse? Why not acknowledge that there are both too few academic jobs and that the ones that exist are, frankly, a double workload?

I am not suggesting that we take the research out of either position. It is consistent research that, to me, distinguishes higher education from what we experience when we’re younger – it creates a dynamic environment and stimulates debate, whether in journals or in the classroom. I expect, under this hypothetical system, for the writer and the teacher to meet perhaps twice weekly and discuss their field. I also expect a certain amount of crossover: perhaps one term a year the writer might step out of her office and teach her specialism to a class of MA students; perhaps she might give one ‘guest lecture’ to undergraduates. I expect that, over the course of several years, the classroom-based professor might shape her ideas into an idea that is ideal for publication. My idea is not that one will qualify as one or the other and practice just one discipline, as it is for lawyers; rather that the burden of both teaching and publication are set on different shoulders. In this way, we can protect both the forward drive that cements an institution’s reputation and the experience of students that protects its income.

As a PhD student, the future of academia is a direct concern of mine. My colleagues are all concerned about the precarity of pursuing an academic career and the ever-worsening conditions in universities. The idea of splitting a professorship is an answer to the major problems I see in academia and the unsustainability of wanting to be both a dynamic, engaging teacher and a rigorous, competent researcher. The constant criticism of the sector might miss the true issues, but it acknowledges a difficult future for us – and instead of fighting back at misconceptions, we should take stock of what we are offering and work out how to fix it.

On This Topic:

• A little look into the financial crisis higher ed is in
• A memoir of Monica Jones
• How do you know when it’s time to go?

To-Do:

• Shop for this weekend’s picnic
• Run through BARs talk (sign up to hear me speak here)
• Read the New Yorker before I get another one on Saturday

Today’s Culture:

• Did you know you can buy picnic backpacks?!
• Dipping into some Tolstoy
• This adorable Reiss dress I picked up in a charity shop for, like £30 BNWT. OK it hangs a little less loose on me, but it still fits and is exactly the kind of thing I like. Score!