(No. 2)

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

Modeling the "Whys"

Beyond information, there are things a student has the right to know and indeed will come to learn--or think he or she has learned--whatever we do. Consciously or not, students analyze our performance globally: what kind of subject is this that we are teaching them? Is it valuable? Can a teacher prove that merely by saying so? Does the university prove it is valuable just by requiring it? Is the subject interesting or just a hurdle to be gotten out of the way and then forgotten? (Because forgetting, as you well know, is what happens if it is only a hurdle and nothing else.) Is the subject some kind of sorcery that can be practiced only by the initiated, or is it something that can be presented and grasped systematically by anyone intelligent who cares and tries?

The modeling is something we do inevitably, for students are on the alert all the time. "That teacher just said something I would never have thought of on my own. I am not sure I even believe it. Why should I believe the teacher? Why should I give my attention and energy to this process? What is the teacher's authority made out of? Does the teacher believe this stuff? How did the teacher decide it was right?" In higher and postgraduate education, these naturally occurring reactions are encouraged and made explicit. To the student's instinctive queries I add here the basic elements of investigation that are essential to what we all give students before they go out into the world, and that are the framework of all research practice. How, indeed, do teachers "know"? How do teachers decide whether they know something or not? What gives them the right to make these statements about management or human behavior, or history, or religion, or the role of art in the world, or the nature of language--things of which they cannot, in fact, have complete, personal, direct knowledge? What kind of witness is it that they bear? What process have they been through? How did they start and how do they know when they have finished? You will recognize these questions, and the kind of thinking they imply, as among the bases of all decision-making, and I am certain they are also as much a part of criminal investigation as they seem to be on TV, despite the fantasy element. They are the backbone of research in higher education whatever the topic, and their shared, almost unavoidable presence is the reason why good teaching and good research go together.

These are things that teachers pass down. For me, algebra has always been a hurdle and nothing more, because that's what my algebra teacher so plainly thought. Students are not merely constant observers but good ones. In fact, to anticipate a little bit, there is research on that question. It is something that can be studied systematically, and it has been. Students are good observers, though they may not see what we planned for them to see, and certainly will not see only what we want. After all, they are going to get grades and certificates; and, besides, the best ones realize from the start that they are going to have to be able to do what we do and had better find out everything they can about whatever it is. Obviously things can go wrong. A teacher who is not interested in the subject is not going to stop making statements about the world for that reason. But that teacher will model a lack of involvement. You have all been through that, and I bet no one in this room wants to be that kind of model. Research work is, in the first instance, proof that we are interested in what we do, and in that sense it serves as a guarantee of our teaching. But I will suggest shortly that there are even better ways for the teacher to think about the role of research, ways that will serve us and the students both.

How, then, does the experience as a whole look to the practitioner? I won't make too much of this, but even literary scholars are detectives in their way. I have a trio of brief examples that touch on areas that might even be of concern to law enforcement professionals--theft, incest, suicide--even though these events happened a long time ago and are now of interest not as open cases but primarily as examples of types of investigation and as object lessons or case studies. As research cases, they involve such matters as excessive reliance on circumstantial evidence, or the unreliability of witnesses, which are important to academic researchers not just because they affect what we say in our books and in class but because they embody the processes of thinking, deciding, judging, and saying, which entwine to make teaching and research both work in the same direction.