Issue 29, Fall 2005

William A. McEachern, Editor

The Grapevine

In the Spring 2005 issue, I noted how a recent Harvard self-assessment concluded that students there should have more direct contact with faculty members through smaller classes and seminars. My University of Connecticut colleague Steve Sacks notes that the more things change, the more they remain the same. In the fall of his freshman year at Harvard (in 1961), he was in a 10-student seminar with the chairman of the philosophy department, a result of a push to put undergraduates in small classes with senior faculty. According to Steve, "the poor professor had not a clue about what to do with what was essentially a group of high school students." Clark Kerr, when he was president of the University of California, observed the cruel paradox that "a superior faculty results in inferior concern for undergraduate teaching." He called this "one of our most pressing problems." NYU in recent years has gained visibility by hiring some academic stars, but adjunct faculty reportedly teach 70 percent of undergraduate courses there.

A running question in these pages is whether the most brilliant economists necessarily make the best teachers. On several occasions I have argued that the best athletes do not make the best coaches. Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestseller Blink , has said in an ESPN interview that the best athletes seem especially clueless about how they do what they do. According to Gladwell, "that's precisely why top athletes so often make bad coaches or general managers. They often don't really know why they were as good as they were. They can't describe it, which means that they can't teach it and they quickly become frustrated at their inability to lift others up to their own level. Mediocre players—or non-athletes—tend to make better coaches because their knowledge isn't unconscious" (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=merron/050203). Speaking of good coaches who were mediocre players, a win in last February's Super Bowl gave New England Patriot's coach Bill Belichick a record 10 victories in 11 postseason games. Belichick is also the only NFL coach in history to win three Super Bowls within four years. His players claim he is a great student of the game and an outstanding teacher. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1975, where he majored in economics and played Division III football. He never played professionally.

Jacob De Rooy of Penn State-Harrisburg has been teaching there for nearly three decades. He relates the following: "Recently a student, about thirty years of age, made a presentation in my class in financial institutions and markets. He summed up his fine lesson by saying, 'And that is the efficient markets hypothesis.' Turning to me, he then quite innocently asked, 'Professor is that what they called it in your day?' Momentarily pained by this student's suggestion of my antiquity, I declared, 'Bob, this IS my day!'" Professor De Rooy then reflects "With an increasing cohort of returning students, and acceptance of the need for lifetime learning, the 'traditional' student on campuses is older. But job tenure of professors is also increasing so that the age gap between student and professor seems to be slowly and monotonically increasing. I feel that there is a significant learning curve in the teaching of economics so that the productivity and quality of a typical teacher is rising over time. While some more mature students seem to appreciate this, this recognition is far from universal in our occidental culture in which youth is highly valued. How do senior faculty react to the growing age gap?" Any thoughts?

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