How the Best Universities Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools 193
status. Teaching future professors in one’s own field helps maintain that status, so graduate students pursuing Ph.D.s are quite often taken very seriously. Teaching graduate seminars is intellectually stimulat- ing, may help with one’s own research, and is therefore worthwhile to do. But undergraduates are a whole different story. Very small per- centages of them actually will become researchers in one’s field. Pro- fessors are in the fame game. They worry about the prestige of their department and themselves. They care about this because they won’t attract high-quality Ph.D. students unless they maintain that prestige. Undergraduates do not figure into this equation. Except they do pay the bills.
So professors have to teach them. And, someone has to teach those damn introductory courses that typically have hundreds of students in them. Why do they have hundreds of students in them? Because no one wants to teach them so making the sections as large as possible means fewer professors will have to teach them. And, why does our aerospace guy want high school to teach the math his students need? Because he certainly doesn’t want to do it. He wants to teach eso- teric courses about composites, which is his field. Teaching basic math would be worse than teaching Introduction to Aerospace. A great deal of work and no enhancement to prestige at all. And, there is a bigger problem. He can’t teach math because the structure of the university doesn’t allow it.
Math is taught by the math department. If everyone had to learn math, there would have to be an awful lot of math professors. While that sounds OK, it really isn’t possible. Remember, at top universi- ties everyone has to be a superstar or close. Math isn’t that hot of a field. There aren’t large numbers of people wanting to become math professors, nor is there a great deal of funding for math research. Re- member, without outside funding as a possibility, a top university isn’t going to want to create a big department. You get big departments, and lots of professors, only in fields that pay for themselves through outside funding. So math has to stay small. Solution—make sure math is taught in high school.
This solution makes everyone in the university happy. And, it shouldn’t be a big surprise that the original idea of requiring alge- bra of high school students came from the president of Harvard and the chairman of the Princeton Math Department (in 1892). It has al- ways been in the university’s interest to push teaching the basics that
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