Campus Confidential: How College Works, or Doesn’t, for Professors, Parents, and Students

By Jacques Berlinerblau
Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2017

Anthony Bourdain, a chef turned author turned globe-trotting TV personality, penned Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. In this best-seller, Bourdain took readers behind the scenes at some of the best restaurants, revealing how he and fellow chefs actually turn out enticing dishes. He also warned about some distasteful things diners might like to avoid. In Campus Confidential, Jacques Berlinerblau similarly takes readers behind the scenes at colleges to expose how teaching is done. And he offers his own gut-wrenching warnings about what—or rather whom—to avoid. I read this book with a sense of familiarity, having witnessed much the same as an adjunct professor at top research universities.

How colleges and universities actually teach undergraduate students is no small matter. Berlinerblau estimates that over a four-year college career the average student will spend 1,800 hours with between thirty and forty professors. All at the hefty price of about a quarter million dollars. Yet information about actual teaching is often obscured from public view, or can mislead, even after a student is admitted to any of the nation’s top 150 schools.

Campus Confidential is therefore a welcome survival guide for prospective and current college students. Berlinerblau has taught at small, liberal arts colleges as well as at large, research universities. Presently he is professor and director of the Program for Jewish Civilization at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He offers a frank indictment of the professorate and, more importantly, a confession that he actually likes teaching, a sentiment few other professors genuinely share.

So, who are college professors? Berlinerblau reminds us they were once students in graduate school, a place where pedagogical training is pretty scant. When I was a graduate student, my department, like many, assigned me and my peers to be teaching assistants for professors. Apart from grading and leading an occasional session, most graduate student TAs have to seek out more in-depth training on their own. Although I actively sought those out at my university’s graduate school, I was rare. As Berlinerblau identifies, the incentives are simply not there. Graduate students are encouraged to spend their efforts on research and to compete for grants to buy their way out of having to TA as much as possible.

After graduate school, few tenure-track jobs await. Those scholars who do find them submit to a hierarchy from assistant, to associate, and ultimately to full professor, a distinction Berlinerblau acknowledges matters more to professors than to most students. Along the way, it is not teaching that rewards aspiring faculty and optimizes their chances at tenure, rather research. Departments expect faculty to produce nearly impossible amounts of it each year, as well as to meet expectations for department service, such as serving on various committees. The demands of faculty along the tenure track are so high, Berlinerblau argues, that lack of time is a main reason professors cannot even focus on teaching. The basis for tenure decisions, such as how much teaching is weighted, is rarely disclosed. Generally, a stellar publications record will outweigh a poor teaching record in granting tenure at most top schools.

The higher up the professor hierarchy, the less the expectation there is to teach. Most tenured professors offer only specialized courses in their respective areas of expertise and those are primarily for graduate students. Besides, sabbatical opportunities put scholars on leave as frequently as every three years. For a department of just a dozen tenured faculty, chances are good that at least a quarter of the them will not teach a single undergraduate course in a given year.

Left to teach the bulk of undergraduate courses, especially introductory ones, are adjunct faculty, also known as contingent faculty. Typically, adjuncts work part-time at drastically lower wages and with little job security and benefits that their tenure-track counterparts enjoy. According to Berlinerblau, adjunct faculty now make up about 70% of professors nationwide, and between 40% and 75% of undergraduate instructors among the top 150 schools.

As an adjunct professor at two research universities, I was lucky to get a decent salary to lead undergraduate courses with relative autonomy. Unlike many adjuncts, I even had an office to meet with students. Berlinerblau points out that for multiple reasons, adjunct professors are more likely to actually want to teach than the tenure-track ones. And in my observation, that was indeed the case. At one university I taught at, graduate students were readily permitted to teach undergraduate courses as sole instructors. Beware of these graduate students unless they are competitively selected and carefully mentored. You still pay the same tuition whether you get a topflight professor or one in training.

If pedagogical training is rare in graduate school, it is not exactly abundant once in the faculty. Some colleges and universities have centers for teaching that attempt to ensure pedagogical quality through workshops, shared expertise, and the occasional teaching award. I found such centers generally helpful for learning how to teach better. But as Berlinerblau appropriately cautions, centers for teaching have no say in tenure decisions, hence regular faculty have little motive to make use of them. To get an idea just seriously these centers are taken by a school, Berlinerblau suggests we consider their location on campus. The more prominently centers for teaching are situated, the more likely the administration recognizes them as vital to undergraduate teaching. From my experience on three different campuses, one center for teaching was located on prime campus real estate and was headed by a senior member of the university’s administration. On another campus, the center had a small office in a well-known building that sat on a major quad, but deployed its staff campus-wide in welcoming conference rooms. On yet another campus, the center was tucked away in a library and was barely noticeable unless you took the elevator across its office door. Guess which campus had the best center for teaching?

Plenty of fluff about teaching comes from admissions office materials and campus tour guides. Statistics about class sizes and student-faculty ratios, for example, can misrepresent the average undergraduate experience. Unfortunately, most college applicants never get a sense of classroom instruction until they are actually admitted. At two universities I taught at, the only prospective students that administrators invited to sit in on my classes were recruits for athletic teams. I am not sure how much those classes influenced those students, but few other prospective students get to observe actual classes. Caveat emptor indeed.

Although much of what Berlinerblau reveals has been documented elsewhere, he offers specific tips to discern the quality of undergraduate teaching. I concur with most of them, like finding faculty who are fulltime professors, regardless of whether they are tenure-track or adjunct. Full-time professors are more likely to have time and resources to devote to undergraduates. Faculty who expressly involve their undergraduates in research or willingly supervise theses should also be on a student’s radar. I advise students planning their courses to not focus narrowly on degree and major requirements, or just what fits a schedule, but also on the opportunity to learn from people committed to teaching. And as Berlinerblau suggests, take a hard look at course syllabi from sample courses you might take. A good syllabus is the hallmark of a good teacher.

The “publish or perish” mantra at most colleges and universities is unlikely to shift to “teach or perish,” as Berlinerblau would like. Still, he remains optimistic about undergraduate education, particularly at the 4,500 other colleges and universities than the top 150 where he believes you can find the best teaching.

To echo another recommendation of his, seek out interactions with faculty beyond the classroom and office hours. A student once invited me to join her to an undergraduate dining hall that was hosting a meet-your-faculty-dinner. As simple as that gesture might appear, at large universities it is a welcome change to the usual distance between most faculty and students. At another university, I knew faculty who sought to live in one of the university’s residential colleges that bridged living and learning spaces. It is a special school that encourages students to learn in proximity to several professors under one roof.

Whether you are just beginning the college search or are already well on your way to completing your bachelor’s degree—or are a parent of such a student—read Campus Confidential. You will be more informed about what actually goes on in college teaching and counseled on how to seek out really good professors. Teaching is only one component of a college education, albeit an indispensable one.