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OPINION

Miami’s ‘teacher-scholar” model is under attack

Attention Miami University students!

When you were recruited to Miami, or when you came as a prospective student, you heard about Miami’s “teacher-scholar” model. Remember that? Vaguely? Well, now is the time to think about it again.

The teacher-scholar model means that you are taught by faculty who are both devoted to teaching and pursuing research that makes them leading figures in their fields. This balance is simply not found at most other universities. I should know. I spent 20 years at The Ohio State University where research is really all that matters, and undergraduate education is mostly an afterthought. Our model has served generations of Miami students and faculty very well. It has made the Miami experience singular and it creates the cachet of your degree.

And now the university is proposing to wreck this model.

The university wants to impose a new bean-counting system that will make the teacher-scholar model virtually impossible for most of us to achieve. This new bean-counter is a one-size-fits-all instrument that does not recognize the differences in scholarly work between speech pathology and history; between finance and physics. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how research gets done and instead treats it like line-production in a factory, or burger flipping at Wendy’s.

If faculty fail to meet their annual burger quotas, then they will be assigned more and more students to teach – and this is where things will get worse for you.

More students every semester means I can’t spend as much time with any one of you – I won’t be able to work with you on your skills or direct you to interesting opportunities. I won’t have the time.

The new system does not count things like independent study, one-on-one mentorship, honors extensions and letters of recommendation at all. It treats these things instead as “volunteer work,” in the words of administrators. Sort of like serving in a soup kitchen I suppose. Nice, but not really a part of our job description anymore.

In other words, the very things you were promised when you considered coming to Miami, and which faculty love about working here, are under threat.

You might think that in contemplating changes to the teacher-scholar model so dramatic and potentially damaging, the university would consult the faculty – you know, the people who actually do the teaching and the scholarship. But you would be wrong.

Instead, the university bought the bean-counter from Bain Consulting and paid them handsomely for it. They paid $5 million in fact – enough money to send 35 of you to Miami for four years for free. And for the record, none of the men and women from Bain will be doing any teaching or research here or anywhere else. They went straight to the bank to cash their $5 million check, giggling all the way.

Miami faculty are genuinely perplexed by these proposals. We were not consulted and thus far have heard no explanation for them. No one has answered the question: what is the problem with the teacher-scholar model for which the “Bain Bean Counter” (registered trademark?) is the solution?

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If this doesn’t sound like the Miami you want to attend, now is the time to make your voice heard.

- Steven Conn, W. E. Smith Professor of History

conns@miamioh.edu

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