Boyer - Mixed Results A Decade Later
By Will James Imagine a research university where classes are small and intimate. A place where researchers' time in front of the classroom is as valuable as their time in the lab, and undergraduate education is based on active inquiry rather than passive note-taking. Imagine a university where quality undergraduates - rather than faculty-published papers - are the school's main commodity. This is what Stony Brook University envisioned for itself in 1998, the year the academic world identified a crisis in the way undergraduates were being educated in America. A task force of academic experts called the Boyer Commission, chaired by Stony Brook's newly installed president, Shirley Strum Kenny, called for sweeping reforms in undergraduate education at research universities throughout the country. Ten years later, a very different Stony Brook has emerged as a result, but some of the core complaints of the Boyer Commission report remain fixed in Stony Brook's identity. Students here acknowledge large class sizes as a fact of life, although it grieves some more than others. “I can’t ask questions,” Veysel Indi, a junior pursuing a degree in economics and political science, said of his large classes. His most crowded class, Economics 108, has about 500 people, he said, adding that his class sizes shrunk as he advanced in his majors. Often, in lower-level psychology and biology classes, hundreds of students are packed into massive lecture halls where they feel cut off from their professors and the information being taught. “The class size at Hofstra was a lot smaller than at Stony Brook,” Justin, a mathematics student who transferred from Hofstra, said, asking that his last name be omitted. “I feel you don’t have as much one-on-one with the professor.” Some students have come to expect large class sizes and impersonal professors while remaining indifferent about it. “I don’t really care,” said Elizabeth Horn, a sophomore. “I still get my work done.” “I kind of like the big classes, actually,” said Katherine Volpe, a sophomore biology major. She said her classes are “pretty big, mostly lectures. She added that sometimes she likes to disappear in the crowd because she doesn't like speaking up in class. The Boyer Commission report, named for Ernest L. Boyer, a former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching who originally chaired the commission, condemns this model as outdated because it squanders the potential inherent in a research university. The report says, “The experience of undergraduates at most research universities is that of receiving what is served to them.” It continues: “The ideal embodied in this report would turn the prevailing undergraduate culture of receivers into a culture of inquirers.” Although administrators say that making courses smaller and more interactive is a goal of the university, Mark Aronoff, associate provost for Undergraduate Academic Affairs, said Stony Brook is limited by its state budget. “We would like to do those things,” he said. “Talk to the governor.” Aronoff’s daughter is a junior geology major at a private liberal arts university where she has a class with eight people. “In Stony Brook that would be very difficult to do because the tuition at her school is 10 times Stony Brook’s,” Aronoff said. “We certainly have more large classes than we want to. We have less professors than we want to. But the tuition is very low.” The Boyer Commission report stresses training graduate students to be effective teachers and depicts “teaching assistants who speak English poorly, as a second language, and who are new to the American system of education,” to be one of the “conspicuous problems of undergraduate education.” But teachers who have a poor grasp of English are still major sources of complaints at Stony Brook. “In general, a lot of teachers are not English-speaking,” Justin said. “I feel it’s more rampant in the mathematics field.” Justin said a math professor who is not a native English speaker is making a course difficult for him this semester. “It should be a six-credit class because I’m trying to diffuse what he’s saying and understand the topics,” he said, adding that he didn’t have this problem at Hofstra. Justin, a senior, said he transferred to Stony Brook because he heard it had a respected math department. He said he was too close to graduation to justify transferring again. Training graduate students to be effective teachers is one of two Boyer Commission initiatives that Kenny said needed the most work at Stony Brook. The other was a call to impart better communication skills to undergraduates. Kenny pointed out problems inherent in the way professors are evaluated. The Boyer commission report says that teaching skills, as opposed to published research, should play a bigger role when a professor is up for tenure. “We say we take teaching very seriously,” Kenny said. But she said examples of great teachers with few research accolades being awarded tenure are rare. "I can count them on one hand," she said, adding that the problem was not unique to Stony Brook. Stony Brook's evolution from “mud-ville,” a nickname from decades past that described the once-unsightly campus, to its modern day national prestige under Kenny is a well-documented story in the business of higher education. And although administrators are aware of the Boyer Commission report throughout its transformation and growth, it's difficult to link it directly to any of Stony Brook's initiatives or modern qualities. "It drove some of the budget decisions," said Mark Maciulaitis, the university budget director. "It's a very important report." He said the Boyer Commission report is kept in mind during budget decisions but added that it's "not talked about continuously." And although people like Ellen Hopkins, an assistant director at the Academic Advising Center, and Elena Polenova, an assistant director at the Career Center, said that they've watched their undergraduate-focused departments grow since 1998, they don't know what role the report played in the expansion. The case of freshmen at Stony Brook is an exception. Suggestions like engaging freshman and integrating them into the university's research spirit have played out visibly at Stony Brook, where freshman have been organized since 2004 in six undergraduate communities based on interests such as “Arts, Culture and Humanities” or “Science and Society.” The Boyer Commission’s call for intimate, intellectually stimulating freshman seminars has yielded increased focus in courses like Arts, Culture and Humanities 101 and Science and Society 101, mandatory for all freshmen based on their community. According to the report, the freshman year must act as a bridge from the pre-college world, dominated by home life and high school, and it must “excite the student by the wealth, diversity, scale and scope of what lies ahead.” The report emphasizes getting researchers out of the lab and into the classroom- specifically in front of freshmen, who the report says need an especially stimulating environment. Jean Peden, director of Undergraduate Colleges, said a second freshman seminar was invented for that purpose and made mandatory for all freshmen in 2005. The freshman seminar 102 courses, like “Philosophy and Jazz” and “What it means to be Human” are designed to put freshmen in direct contact with senior faculty. Stony Brook, though, has done its best work in the opposite direction, Aronoff said - getting students out of the lecture hall and into the lab. “Stony Brook has really put a lot of effort in undergraduate research and has had a lot of success in undergraduate research,” he said. “We’re probably better at integrating research in the medical school than just about any other place I know of.” But some humanities students feel left behind, seeing science students as reaping these Boyer-inspired benefits disproportionately. “I see people doing really awesome research in science, and I’m a humanities major,” said Natalie Crnosija, a freshman who said she’s considering pursuing journalism. “I just wish there was some equivalent. You really have to dig. You really have to look into it to find research opportunities in humanities.” “The real problem is very hard, to figure out how undergraduates do research in the humanities,” Aronoff said. “That’s a national problem, not a Stony Brook problem.” Kenny acknowledged the transformation of the freshman experience and the push to get undergraduates involved in research as the two places where Stony Brook reflects the vision of the Boyer Commission report most closely. When the Boyer Commission report was issued almost 10 years ago, Stony Brook was under an ultimatum to revamp its undergraduate school and was at risk of losing accreditation, said Kenny. Shortly after she became president in 1994, she said, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education threatened to strip Stony Brook of its undergraduate accreditation if it didn’t manage to fix some of the flaws that would be outlined in the Boyer Commission report. “Then we thought, ‘we’re not the only place with these problems’,” Kenny said. She approached Boyer, then the president of the Carnegie Foundation, with the idea of addressing problems in undergraduate education on a national scale and they formed the project. Boyer died in 1995, shortly after the project began, and was succeeded by Kenny as chairperson. Since then, Kenny said, the spirit of the report has permeated undergraduate education in the United States. She cited the shift of college ranking criteria in U.S. News and World Report to match the Boyer Commission initiatives more closely. “It really has pervaded undergraduate education,” she said. “Freshman seminars are givens now at modern colleges.” Although the commission’s criticisms were met with considerable defensiveness and hostility when the report was first published, Kenny said, some schools may have learned from Stony Brook’s long-standing shortcomings. Kenny said Stony Brook’s history was defined by the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union weeks after the university’s opening in 1957, prompting a state initiative to transform the new school from a teaching college into a science-oriented research university. Since then, Kenny said, Stony Brook was built up in reverse of most universities, with graduate studies and research developed over undergraduate studies early on to help advance the national interest in science during the Cold War. The Boyer Commission report was part of an effort at Stony Brook to remedy the resulting imbalance between research and undergraduate teaching. The commission leveled “one of the harshest indictments yet of undergraduate education at research universities” when it came out, according to a 1998 article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. In its introduction, the report said of research universities, “Recruitment materials display proudly the world-famous professors, the splendid facilities and the ground-breaking research that goes on within them, but thousands of students graduate without ever seeing the world-famous professors or tasting genuine research.” “It was all right,” said Jess Grossman, a senior in the English department, of her undergraduate experience at Stony Brook. She said never got to participate in research and she never felt like she had opportunities to learn outside the classroom, but her classes were generally small enough. “I feel that certain professors treated me as an equal and a professor I have now treats me like trash,” she said. “It really depends on the class. Every class I've taken has been a different experience.” |
