Stanford Ties Increase in Faculty to Teaching Focus

Stanford University President Gerhard Casper unveiled plans Thursday for the school’s biggest faculty expansion in recent memory, but he added a condition that some consider radical for the elite private institution.

To compete for 20 new faculty positions, which will initially be funded by a $15-million gift from philanthropist Peter Bing, Stanford’s 57 academic departments will have to prove that the slots will be used to let freshmen and sophomores work much more closely with top professors. Departments that find ways to accomplish Casper’s aim--a small class with a top professor for every freshman--will get more resources. Those that don’t, won’t.

“Students should be challenged and their minds stretched from the first year onward,” Casper said in a speech to Stanford’s academic senate in which he stressed the importance of “personal, face-to-face learning. . . . The first year sets the tone. That is why I believe every freshman should have a seminar with a tenure-track member of the faculty.”

Casper’s goal is nothing new. For years, colleges and universities have faced complaints that undergraduates--particularly first- and second-year students--rarely see professors except in large lecture halls. Stanford and many other universities historically have rewarded professors more for research than for teaching.

To remedy that, Stanford has recently grappled with ways to enhance the education of undergrads.

But the carrot-and-stick approach that Casper invoked Thursday, known by the more gentle label of “incentive funding,” appears never before to have been used to force discomfiting change on such an august group as the Stanford faculty.

“Doing this with faculty positions to my knowledge is unprecedented,” said Alexander W. Astin, director of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, who applauded Casper for “having the guts to do something like this. I’m sure not all the faculty is supportive because the currency of academic politics is faculty positions. This is very radical.”

Perhaps in anticipation of faculty opposition, Casper paired his undergraduate proposal--dubbed “Stanford Introductory Studies”--with an announcement of a sizable increase in financial support for graduate students, particularly those in science and engineering. By creating 300 new fellowships to be funded by a new endowment, Casper said, Stanford will become less dependent on the vagaries of federal funding for research, which has become more tenuous every year.

“Students will be freer to determine their own course of research rather than having to select a project based on available funding,” Casper said.

Judging from the warm reception at the faculty senate meeting, Casper’s double-barreled approach paid off Thursday. Generally, science and engineering faculty members seemed overjoyed that Casper had recognized the importance of research, while humanities professors said they welcomed the university’s renewed commitment to valuing teaching.

“I would hope that there’d be a lot of enthusiasm on the part of the faculty for this,” said Gail Mahood, a geology professor who is chair of the faculty senate. “He’s addressing a lot of the issues that we care about.”

There were some critics. Robert D. Simoni, a professor of biological sciences, worried that with increased emphasis on the first and second year of study, “we may begin to define ourselves more explicitly than we do now as a college rather than a [research] university.”

John Bender, an English professor, warned that if professors’ teaching loads were increased, it could make Stanford less competitive in attracting faculty. Casper responded that if Stanford lost good faculty to other universities that don’t require them to teach undergraduates, that was a price he was willing to pay.

“I don’t think we should have faculty who are not engaged in both research and teaching,” he said.

And Provost Condoleezza Rice stressed that senior faculty members are expected to take part in the new freshmen seminars, which will average 16 students per class. The 20 new faculty members are not being hired, she said, to shoulder that burden alone.

Casper’s new plan is not Stanford’s first attempt to alter the culture of the university, which charges nearly $20,000 a year tuition. Five years ago, the previous president, Donald Kennedy, launched a program to give cash bonuses to outstanding teachers and to encourage sophomore seminars with top faculty. But the problem persists, as was documented in a 1994 report on undergraduate education that Casper commissioned.

“Recent arrivals from other institutions are sometimes struck by the comparative ease with which individual [Stanford faculty members] can decide how much, or even whether, they wish to be involved with undergraduates,” the report found. While it acknowledged that research was often still valued more than teaching when it came to making tenure and salary decisions, the report said, “This is wrong. . . . Stanford cannot afford to have ‘free-riders’ in either research or teaching.”

The plan announced Thursday is part of a continuing effort by Casper to address these issues. Mahood, the dean of the senate, said in recent years that the president and the provost have “made it clear that the quality and amount of teaching that the faculty do is being taken into account at budget time. A few departments have even lost billets because they were perceived to not be doing their bit for undergraduate teaching.”

This latest proposal is prompted in part by the success of a program that Stanford launched last year to alleviate the phenomenon some students call the “sophomore slump.” The “Sophomore College,” a three-week summer program that paired 50 students with five of the university’s most notable professors, is widely seen to have accomplished its goals of personalizing education and encouraging a spirit of mentorship.

Ramon Saldivar, Stanford’s vice provost for undergraduate education, who was among last summer’s faculty, said the program energized students by providing an opportunity for intense interaction with committed scholars.

When students were asked for their evaluations, he said, “One hundred percent of respondents claimed they’d recommend it to a friend.”