<p>I was a student at Yale, mainly in the humanities, many decades ago, but I don’t think the system has changed much since. In four years, I had exactly one class taught by a graduate student – and it was a seminar I signed up for specifically because he had been my TA in another course, and he was one of the best teachers I had in my life. I would have taken a course in alphabetization or gardening if that’s what he had wanted to teach. I had a number of lecture courses where there was a once-a-week discussion section (and in some cases a lab) taught be graduate student TAs, but there was no question that the professor giving the lectures was teaching the course, and he (I’d love to say “he or she”, but I didn’t have any lecture courses with women professors then) was accessible to undergraduate students. I thought the TAs were extremely valuable as a bridge between undergraduates and top-rank professors. Among the TAs I had were future English Department chairs at Harvard and Yale, and a German Department chair at Michigan – they were pretty high quality. My wife was also a Yale undergraduate, and the graduate student who taught the one seminar SHE took with a grad student teacher became, within five years after we graduated, the author of a widely read book in her field and a well-known, controversial public intellectual.</p>
<p>And to put all that in context, I had two courses where the weekly discussion sections were lead by full faculty, in one case a world-famous full professor. I had six seminars with fewer than 20 students taught by tenured faculty, plus an independent reading course supervised by a famous visiting faculty member, and another taught by a leading non-academic critic in the field. I had a household-name full professor as my academic advisor for two years, and I wasn’t even majoring in his department.</p>
<p>If you go to college at a research university, you are going to have contact with graduate students – that’s a given. Personally, I think it’s a good thing, because they have all recently gone through the process of becoming sophisticated in their field, and they understand more viscerally than older faculty what it takes to get from a high-school level of understanding to a graduate-school level of understanding. Plus, as I indicated, if the university is a strong one, the graduate students are not intellectually inferior to the faculty, just younger and less experienced (and often more energetic and passionate). Graduate student TAs are a strength of Yale’s, but they don’t even begin to eclipse the role of ladder faculty in teaching undergraduates, and they don’t perform any kind of gatekeeper role at all.</p>
<p>(As a qualification to all of this, let me say that I never took an introductory math class. I believe that at Yale, as at every comparable institution, introductory math classes are mainly taught by graduate students, and while the curriculum may have been developed by full faculty, it would be misleading to suggest that anyone but the grad student was teaching a particular section. But that’s the exception, not the rule.)</p>