202 Teaching Minds
how teaching occurs in a great university. (There are exceptions to this, of course. In engineering, agriculture, and even in journalism, practice does occur. But it always occurs in the presence of lots of theory.)
University professors are not practitioners. Usually they don’t know a thing about how what they teach actually is used in the real world, never having been in the real world themselves, so they have created a culture where theories and ideas are considered to be more important than simply being able to do something. So one reason his class would have to go is that it inevitably would be seen as threaten- ing to the other faculty.
Another reason that it threatens the other faculty is that it is a lot of work to do what he did. He was there all day. Professors teach 3 hours a week, 6 if they aren’t superstars. No one wants to see a new standard of teaching created that is both practical and takes a long time to do. When would the professors do their research and write their books? This man didn’t have that agenda. He just wanted to teach. There is no room for that in a top-tier university.
And, how would this class fit in a student’s schedule? Students can’t spend all day at something without missing those important required classes that meet 3 times a week for an hour. Totally consuming classes that take all day, and may even take all week, cannot possibly exist.
Two years later this man was gone.
It is actually very difficult to change the way a university runs, and this includes trying to change any aspect of how courses are offered or structured.
I learned this when I took on the job of building a new West Coast campus for Carnegie Mellon University. (By building, I mean design- ing its offerings, not its buildings.) As I am an advocate of learning by doing, in just the way our former network head was doing in his class, I decided that there would be no courses, only projects, and that each project would build on the one that preceded it. The administration in Pittsburgh let me get away with this precisely because there were no faculty hired in California and the Pittsburgh faculty wouldn’t much notice what we were doing 2,000 miles away.
We had to lie to the registrar about what we were doing because courses had to be in parallel to make it into their system and we weren’t offering courses at all. The projects had to be labeled as cours- es, but they varied in length (not every project takes the same amount of time). These “courses” ran in sequence not parallel, so we basically had to lie about it to get by the registrar.
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