<p>I’ve heard him give this talk and I’ve spoken to him about the topic. His point is that any research institution is focused on research and that creates an issue for teaching. He’s said in the past one choice would be to hire an entirely separate, redundant faculty for teaching and that some schools in fact do this by hiring tons of lecturers and part-timers who have no hope of advancement within the school. He then says UR can’t afford to do this and didn’t want to do it anyway so they looked at the problem and talked to professors and decided they could better address the problem through the curriculum. That is an explanation - surely not the only one - of the Rochester Curriculum, which dramatically reduces distribution requirements with the express goal of putting students in classes they want to take. The idea is that students who want to be there will put more into the class and that will better satisfy the professors who do the teaching. I think this is generally true as you go out of the lower level classes that you have to take to get anywhere in your major. As in, nothing makes intro Bio or Chem a ton of fun. </p>
<p>In other words, he mixes a bit of truth, that all research institutions, meaning any university or big college, are focused on research, with UR’s approach to the problem. He is 100% correct about the reality of teaching; you need to do research to get tenure and you need to do grants and you need to run labs or projects or whatever is appropriate to your field. The pressure to publish also exists at smaller schools, not as much but of course they also have smaller faculties so it’s hard to say what the net effect is from school to school. </p>
<p>His approach is to talk about the reality that schools usually try to cover up. Think about how you’re told the senior professors here teach and other stuff meant to convey that your kid’s undergrad experience will be great teaching by the best people. It can be true, mostly in higher level courses, of course, though also in some particular intro course. But they leave out the inconvenient facts: first, most of the classes will be taught by untenured people, possibly contract lecturers and part-timers, and second, research and writing come first overall.</p>
<p>Somewhat lost, I imagine, is that UR is a small university but a much larger research university. By that, I mean it is small in number of students but large in research dollars, all of which, btw, are spent at or around the actual campus. That’s a significant point: you have more opportunity to do quality research as an undergrad. One of my kids today mentioned to us that the research work she did at UR not only got her the job she has but prepared her extremely well. Why? Because the kids at UR do actual work in the real world of research and that translates. </p>
<p>At some point, btw, he may mention some figures about the number of double majors, multiple minors, etc. that kids do. That is absolutely true: without the usual distribution requirements, it’s easy to make minors and double majoring is common. I think that reflects a few things: the nature of student body and the interest of the kids in learning as well as the success of the curriculum design.</p>