(No. 2)

Some "Whys" Behind the "Hows" of University Teaching and Research by Robert F. Cook Professor of French University of Virginia

Modeling the "Hows"

When you accept a position as a teacher, you accept a role as a model for students. If all you did was list facts and formulas, you could be replaced by the Internet--to the extent there are facts on the Internet. But students learn from you not only "what" but "how." They learn by watching how you do what you do--the nature of your choices, your way of talking about your topic, even your hesitations. You are inevitably not only telling them what you know but referring to how you know it. When you stand in front of a group of learners, you are not just giving them information (even though the information you have to give may save their lives or mine). You are also preparing them for the day when you will not be there to inform them--when they have to have their own set of "hows," when they have to do the work of investigation on their own authority instead of borrowing someone else's. And although, thank God, the things I teach about are not matters of life and death for my students, the role of authority in our work is the same. Professors do not become authorities by reading about other people's research and then telling students what other persons claim. We are authorities because we do the research ourselves and we understand the nature of expert claims from the inside. Your job, if I understand it correctly, is even more complex, since you are expected to know and practice law enforcement itself and also to study and to teach the academic fields that can be said to bear on it. I am not in a position to be a medieval French person and to talk about medieval life as I live it--although I am also, by definition, a language teacher and it is not a good idea to try to teach French without actually spending a lot of time in France.

What faculty inside the universities and out have to concentrate on is the training function in which we serve as models. Making ourselves superfluous is a delicate and paradoxical business. It involves several essential principles that are present in all advanced teaching situations whether the people around us are told what we are doing or not. What research does is make that presence, and those principles, visible and available to anyone who wants to see. When we teach, we are teaching principles that go beyond what we are writing on the board or informing students about. One of the great discoveries made in the science of mind in our century is the degree to which every statement about the world is also, simultaneously, inevitably, the expression of a set of principles, or ideas, that we already have, and that are built into what we say. An influential myth about teaching claims that it is somehow something separate from research, somehow separate from the job of thinking and writing about the things we teach. But we are expected here, and in other places similar to the University of Virginia, to do both the thinking and the teaching at once, because doing both at once is true to the way our minds actually work. When we inform students, then, we are really informing them about how we ourselves think, openly or not. I have argued endlessly during my career for being open and not opaque about it, because my experience has shown me that a teacher who is not paying attention to the principles beyond the principles is sending a confusing message. The questions we and the public need to ask--and they are absorbing and exciting questions--are questions about the quality of the research, not about the necessity for its presence and not about its usefulness.