That Time the Numbers Lied to Me
By Nick Klagge
PUBLISHED MAY 2, 2007</p>
<p>My Lit Hum teacher was an adjunct professor. My CC teacher was a graduate student. Ditto for my Art Hum and Music Hum teachers. In other words, I went through four years at Columbia without learning about a single Masterpiece of Western Anything from a full professor or even a tenure-track professor. Statistically speaking, I should be furious. The conventional wisdom would say that core curricula become liabilities when universities can’t get enough qualified people to teach the courses and that my experience just goes to show how much Columbia is struggling. But-as an econ and math major, I hesitate to say it-the numbers just don’t tell the whole story.</p>
<p>In fact, my experience with teachers has been practically a wholesale inversion of what I expected when I came to Columbia. Like many of us, I was attracted by some of the marquee names on the faculty. I knew that there was a chance that some of my Core teachers would be non-professors, but I vowed to thrash or slink my way into a “real” section if that ever happened.</p>
<p>I didn’t follow through, though. I loved them too much. My Lit Hum instructor nearly made me cry over Book VI of The Iliad and has remained a dear friend to me throughout college. My CC instructor stayed after class to talk with me about why people really obey the law. My Art Hum instructor got me into cubist art, and my Music Hum instructor demolished all my preconceptions and made me appreciate John Cage.</p>
<p>This strange experience wasn’t limited to my Core classes. I’ve just finished three semesters in a row of Czech literature from an amazing teacher who happens to be a lecturer-in-discipline. My academic adviser and one of my favorite teachers of economics have the same title. Meanwhile, the one real exposure I had to a “marquee” professor-being a teaching assistant for Joe Stiglitz-imbued me with the certainty that being a good teacher has little to do with being a brilliant researcher.</p>
<p>I suppose this could be a good time for a polemic against the tenure evaluation system at major research universities, which puts academic publication on a pedestal and consigns teaching evaluations to the circular file. But I don’t presume to know enough about the inner workings of the system to put forth a comprehensive critique.</p>
<p>When I look back at my decision of which college to attend, I am always taken aback at how subjective and practically random it seems. It is as futile to try to imagine being a college student before you actually are one-let alone to imagine what it would be like to go to a particular school-as it is to try to imagine what it would be like to be a bat.</p>
<p>Faced with such a conundrum, the worst response is to try to base one’s decision on some rubric of objective statistics. It’s pretty common for students on tours of Columbia to ask what percentage of Core classes are taught by full professors. Perhaps I even asked it. Had I tried to make my decision based on such coldly rational statistics, I would have never encountered the great teachers I had who happened to be of lesser rank.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to say that hard data are useless. But they can be misleading to those who don’t have the experience necessary to understand them. Without having actually attended college, to base one’s decision on statistics like student-to-faculty ratio would be either arrogant or irresponsible-arrogant because you’re pretending to have the experience necessary to use them wisely and irresponsible because you’re delegating your choice to U.S. News & World Report, which told you it was important in the first place.</p>
<p>Stephen Colbert said it best: did you know that you have more nerve endings in your gut than in your brain? Regardless of your inability to imagine with any degree of accuracy what it was like to be a college student, you probably had some subjective-a fancy word for “gut”-leaning. At best, statistics from outside our experiences are a way to help us rationalize the decisions that, in truth, originated in our guts. At worst, they lead us to mistrust ourselves.</p>
<p>This is a time when many of us are making big decisions about our lives: what jobs to look for, whether to go to graduate school, whether to stay in New York. It’s important to recognize that you don’t have the experience to make a perfect, unassailable choice and to make yourself comfortable with that fact. Let the decision, right or wrong, be yours.</p>
<p>The author was the 130th managing editor.