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IN AN IDEAL WORLD -- the one with the 48-hour day, successful lectures, satisfied students, and funded grants -- there would be no reason for competition between research and teaching. After all, the next best thing to doing science itself (research) is talking about it (classroom teaching), and even better is talking while doing(the research apprenticeships of undergraduates, graduates, and postdocs). The rub, and this should come as no surprise, is money.
Modern science is expensive, and obtaining grants from the federal government, particularly the National Institutes of Health, can only be described as grueling. Supporting a moderate-sized laboratory of four postdocs, four graduate students, four undergraduates, and a research assistant typically requires two separate grants and an annual sum of about $500,000, all of which must be raised by the faculty member unless the students and postdocs can obtain individual fellowships (and even then, these must be supplemented; such stipends are too small for survival). The success rate of grants has plummeted; many applications must be written or rewritten before one is funded. Research funding is an essential part of education in the sciences, especially at the graduate and postdoctoral levels: Without it, experiments -- the intellectual tool of the scientist -- cannot be carried out. The stresses of combining research and teaching can, in this analysis, be viewed simply as the heaping up of a large number of demanding tasks. When one considers that science itself can be incredibly difficult intellectually, the sources of strain are transparent.
An added irritant is the denigration of teaching, particularly undergraduate instruction. Comments like "Oh, he's just an undergraduate teacher" or "Stopped doing research, mostly a textbook writer" or even backhanded compliments ("Where she really shines is in the classroom") are irritating at best and demoralizing at worst. In the spirit of disclosure I reveal that I am particularly irritated and puzzled by these remarks because both my children are in college, and I know how important the quality of instructors is to them. It should be that important to us all. Some extraordinary researchers write fine texts: The Molecular Biology of the Cell by Bruce Alberts and colleagues is a sterling example. Some incredible texts are written by the faculty of undergraduate institutions; I am deeply grateful to Scott Gilbert at Swarthmore for Developmental Biology. I suspect that most academics have been profoundly influenced by their teachers, and not just at the graduate level.
The attitude may have societal roots; perhaps teaching is regarded as an extension of child care, an essential but tedious chore to be off-loaded on the least protesting adult. I think on balance, however, part of the denigration of teaching comes from how difficult it is. It is simply hard to understand something so well that you can explain it 50 different ways until it finally clicks in the mind of every student. Science changes daily, and the research scientist knows this. I cannot myself deliver a lecture that I know is outdated; every one requires sometimes frantic perusal of that past year's work to make sure that what I thought I knew is still regarded as true. Given that teaching is often out of one's area of specialty, research comes as a relief; what we cannot do well we may devalue.
Beyond these issues, however, is a deeper problem, one peculiar to the research perspective. It has to do with what knowledge in science is like. Most of what we teach are stories that have been made up to fit the results of experiments. It is extraordinarily hard to teach students (especially those bent on professional careers such as medicine, in which ambiguity can be threatening) that we actually know very few things in biology with certainty and that a real understanding of science requires knowing how new knowledge is discovered, how scientists do and interpret research. This particular approach skates the thin edge of pedagogy, and the risks of failure are high. The riskiest endeavors, however, are the most exciting. Teaching as a research scholar and learning from a research scholar are why Columbia and other great universities are national treasures.
Reconciling research and teaching will require giving up some deeply entrenched attitudes. "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" is one. Another is the caricature of the preoccupied international scientist whose unsupervised students and postdocs carry out dubious experiments for their mentor's fame and glory. While these caricatures fit neatly into cultural stereotypes, they mask the nature of the conflict between research and teaching. Both are vocations, not jobs. I consider it impossible to be either a great scientist or a great teacher with the sole motivation of monetary reward. I suggest that we accept that some scientists have one or the other vocation, while others are cursed (or perhaps blessed) with both. Columbia is fortunate to have this mix of vocations represented on its faculty, and our acceptance of the mix will go a long way toward the necessary reconciliation of our missions.
DARCY B. KELLEY, Ph.D., is professor of biological sciences at Columbia and co-director of the doctoral program in neurology and behavior, a joint effort of neurobiologists on the Morningside and Health Sciences campuses.PHOTO CREDIT: Jonathan Smith.
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