192 Teaching Minds

192 Teaching Minds pursuits. Every university has underground lists, written by students, about courses that are easy or professors who readily give good grades. The real agenda of the majority of students is to take school just seri- ously enough to graduate. If you offered them a diploma after 1 year, most of them would take the deal. This all brings me back to our aerospace friend. Why does he want high schools to teach more math? Because he doesn’t want to teach it. Teaching undergraduates becomes pleasurable at precisely the point where you can teach the very courses this man teaches. He is teach- ing highly technical courses, and, it is safe to assume, the students who are taking those courses are there with serious intentions. They want to become engineers and they want to know what he knows. So he may well enjoy teaching them. But he certainly would not enjoy teaching them calculus. There is a big difference in the experience of teaching when you are teaching people who plan on working in your field some day and when you are teaching a required course that stu- dents wish they weren’t being made to take. But why does it matter what this man enjoys teaching? In the ideal university, the one professors at top-tier universities would have if it were possible, professors, who consider themselves primarily to be researchers in very specialized subfields, would teach only work that directly related to their actual research or was impor- tant for preparing future researchers in their field. Professors at Yale get to be professors at Yale because they are either potentially or actually the best in the world at something. While this might not actually be true, it is certainly supposed to be true. When a professor is proposed to be promoted (or hired for the first time) as a full professor at Yale, the chair of his department must address a meeting of all the other chairs and high officials and explain why the professor in question is indeed the best in the world at what he does. To do this, the chairs often have to define what he does extremely narrowly to have it be at all credible. Isn’t there someone at Stanford or Princeton who is just as good or, perish the thought, even better than the candidate you propose? There better not be or this candidate won't get voted in. So, somewhere in every professor’s mind is the idea that he or she is the best at something or for assistant professors, soon will become the best at something. Under this kind of pressure, and this kind of egotism, a professor’s first and foremost concern is attaining and maintaining that exalted HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023938