S PROBABLY THE ranking member of the Columbia
faculty in years of service, I have observed the changing preferences and obligations of my
colleagues during the 61 years since my induction into the teaching staff in 1935 (plus an
additional seven years as a student
at the college and the graduate program). My appointment has been in the Graduate School of Business, with
tangential relations to the Graduate Department of Economics,
General Studies, Barnard College, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and
the School of Public Health. In most
segments of the university, the pendulum of priorities has oscillated between teaching and
research.
In the 1930s the Columbia faculty included a number of outstanding scholars, three of whom
were awarded honorary degrees at Harvard's tercentenary in 1936: Franz Boas in
anthropology, Robert M. MacIver in sociology and political science, and Wesley Clair
Mitchell in economics. I studied with all of them, and while each was a leading contributor to
his discipline, none was a memorable teacher. Boas engaged in field research for many
decades, with support, I believe, primarily from external sources; MacIver was a theorist with
little interest in empirical research; and Mitchell was a co-founder of the National Bureau of Economic
Research, the first and still most productive center of quantitative economic analysis in
the world.
Mitchell was always concerned about the amount of time and effort that
classroom teaching might command, to the detriment of scholarly output. Columbia 's other
outstanding economist in the prewar decade was John Maurice Clark, recruited from the University of Chicago with an agreement that he
could teach as little or as much as he wished, even not teach at all. In point of fact, he
taught about four hours a week, but his performance
was so dreary that several of us took turns trying to stay awake to take notes. However,
Columbia also boasted inspiring teachers such as Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren in the
English
department, Irwin Edman in philosophy, and Carlton Hayes in history.
As for research
funding in those years, I.I.
Rabi once told me that the Department of
Physics in 1929-30 had a total research budget of $10,000, and that future Nobel
laureate in chemistry Harold
Urey shared his $5,000 research grant with Rabi to help him get started. A decade later
I began my interdisciplinary research in economics and group behavior with two grants on a
similar scale from the university's Council for Research in the Social Sciences.
World
War II was the great watershed that divided the old Columbia and the new. Increasing
external sources of support for basic research and expanded opportunities for selected experts
(particularly in law, business, and engineering) to do outside consulting contributed to a
downgrading of teaching responsibilities and a loss of institutional commitment by many
faculty members. As a measure of how the research enterprise expanded, Walter Palmer of P&S estimated in a report
to Vannevar Bush that U.S.
medical schools could make constructive use of $5 million to $10 million a year for
biomedical research. As of 1995-96, the total R&D funding (governmental and
non-governmental) of P&S alone amounted to $200 million.
The growing preoccupation of research-oriented faculty members in the social sciences with
quantitative analysis, and of the biomedical science faculty with basic research, had major
effects on student selection, curriculum, and career progression. Economics was progressively
transformed into econometrics, with mathematical skills the prerequisite for a career. No
longer did a budding economist need to be acquainted with Adam
Smith, Marx, or Veblen, much less
with U.S. history, sociology, or politics. I recall Arthur F. Burns' dismay on his return to
Columbia, after spending four years as President Eisenhower's chairman of the Council of Economic
Advisors, with the singlemindedness of his graduate students in applying the new
computer technology to manipulate data sets, with little interest in the policy relevance of the
results. And P&S, like most other leading research-oriented medical schools, gave a low
priority to undergraduate instruction, concentrating instead on the training of residents as
subspecialists who could be absorbed into the research enterprise.
For more than a third
of a century after my return to Columbia from service in the Pentagon during World War
II, I led a tripartite professional life. I taught classes and seminars, usually three per semester,
until my colleagues persuaded me to reduce my teaching load, since they were negotiating
with the dean of the business school to limit their schedules to no more than two classes per
week and he countered by noting that I seemed to have no difficulty with three. Most efforts
were directed to overseeing the Eisenhower Center for the Conservation of Human Resources,
an externally funded policy research unit comprising researchers from 10 or so disciplines. I
was also busy consulting with the federal government, serving presidents from Kennedy to
Reagan as chair of the National Commission for Employment Policy and its predecessor
agencies.
Unquestionably, in the prewar and postwar eras alike, most of Columbia's outstanding
scholars had a greater interest in research than in teaching. In the postwar era, however, in
response to liberal external funding, the research enterprise expanded by orders of magnitude
at the expense of the educational functions of the university.
It is time for a turn of the
wheel. This appears to be under way, with increasing attention being given to teaching. Even
more important is a retreat from specialization and subspecialization in favor of a
university-wide social science policy consortium based on interdisciplinary cooperation. The
problems confronting the advanced nations of the world cannot be solved by specialists off by
themselves. Collaboration among the leaders of the various disciplines is a sine qua
non, the critical challenge that Columbia and all other major research universities face.
The real issue is not teaching vs. research but the faculty's capability to do both and the
cultivation of an atmosphere that facilitates their effective cooperation.
ELI GINZBERG, Ph.D., is Hepburn Professor of Economics,
Emeritus, Revson Fellows Professor, and Special Lecturer at Columbia's Graduate School of
Business. publications.ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Howard
Roberts.
PHOTO CREDITS: University Public Affairs (Rabi, Trilling), A.
Tennyson Beals (Urey, Huffman).