184 Teaching Minds
liked it as a student. Who said that listening to what I happened to be talking about was an important thing to do? And, who said students should be graded on how well they had listened to whatever truth I was espousing? What if I was saying nonsense? I didn’t think I pos- sessed a direct line to the truth any more than I had thought that my own teachers did. The system didn’t make sense to me as a student and it didn’t as a professor.
But it was a very easy job. And the pay, despite what people think about professors’ salaries, was pretty good.
How hard was this teaching obligation? At Northwestern I was required to teach one 3-hour- a-week course for 1 quarter every other year. This came to about 36 hours of work in 2 years.
Yes, really.
So, how was I part of the problem? Actually my light teaching ob- ligation is the tip of the iceberg of an enormous problem. It brings up the question of how and why that light load works for a university, the answer to which sheds light on what is wrong with our school system.
How do the economics of a university work such that a profes- sor can teach so little? That is an important question. But an equally important question is how it is that a professor, who is after all, in the mind of the public at least, a teacher, teaches so little and is happy about it?
People used to ask me, when I said that I was a professor, what I taught. I would always laugh. I would suggest that they ask me in- stead what I was a professor of, which was, of course, the only relevant question. I didn’t teach much and when I did teach, I hardly taught computer science, which was actually what I was a professor of. I usu- ally taught my view of how the mind worked. Sometimes I taught how education needed to be fixed. But, anyhow, as I have said, there wasn’t all that much teaching going on in my life. Sometimes I taught more often than required of me, simply because I was feeling guilty. The rules said I didn’t have to teach much but there were students, usually graduate students, who were thinking that as they had attended this university in part to interact with me, at least I should teach a course that included them at least once. So I did it because I felt guilty, not because anyone higher up in the university cared what I did.
I remember a Yale undergraduate who wanted an appointment with me. He was screaming in the halls, after he had been told that he could see a graduate assistant instead of me, that he had paid $20,000
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