"IF CERTAIN departments are paid significantly more than others, it is legitimate to ask why. If a certain professor, administrator or coach is paid a very large or very small amount, it is worthwhile to ask if his performance has justified that salary."
So said the Managing Board in its editorial explaining The Cavalier Daily's feature on faculty salaries. (The feature and the editorial both ran Monday, April 14.) It's worth asking, though: On what evidence, and by what standard, are we to judge whether professors' work justifies their salaries? And more to the point for an ombudsman, what more can The Cavalier Daily contribute to our knowledge of that evidence and our understanding of that standard?
The activities that comprise the academic life of the University and the work of its faculty are rich and varied. Sometimes, academic achievements are newsworthy enough to rate the front page, but often they are not. Yet since it is the academic life of the institution that brings us all together in Charlottesville, these activities are of fundamental importance.
So I propose that The Cavalier Daily consider adding a new, weekly section, dedicated to teaching and research.
One might suggest that when academic matters are sufficiently important or interesting, they can make it into existing sections of the newspaper -- as some academic matters already do. I would suggest an analogy with sports: Sometimes, sports stories are important or interesting enough that, were there no sports section, they would make it into the other sections. Yet this newspaper, as is widespread practice among both student and professional newspapers, has a separate sports section. This ensures that sports receives more frequent coverage than it would otherwise, and it allows those who cover athletics to develop specialized expertise.
The academic section could, for example, investigate why particular courses or professors get unusually good or bad evaluations from their students, and whether tenure has a positive or negative impact on teaching. It could provide a forum for students to examine critically what they see in the classroom -- and for instructors and teaching assistants, whether as interview subjects or (at least in the case of graduate students) as writers, to explain some of the methods they use. Students' strategies could be discussed as well. Questions about course and major selection could be investigated. One result of bringing students and faculty into one conversation about these matters could even be a greater sense of partnership between instructors and students.
Those stories would be features, written largely on the initiative of the newspaper. Stories more closely tied to events might include reports on guest lectures. Any reasonably intellectually omnivorous member of the University community must find that he does not have nearly enough time to attend all the talks and panels here he might enjoy -- but the time to read a thousand-word news report is much easier to find. By interviewing University professors with relevant expertise, reporters could also give readers some idea of the debates to which the lectures contribute.
Academic excitement doesn't just visit the University. I have often had the experience, and I hope you have, too, of looking at a list of course offerings and wishing I could take about two dozen. A newspaper article can never match a course, a book, or an in-depth conversation about new knowledge or insights. But it can offer a taste, a hint of what's out there, and enrich our appreciation of the intellectual world in which we live. And such tastes and hints could set some readers on new intellectual trails. So the academic section might report on novel course offerings and new research being done by University faculty and students. At a more basic level, it might help students get at least a rough idea of what's being done in departments they've never visited, or perhaps never even heard of.
An academic section would be useful in different ways for different people. For many undergraduates, its most important functions might relate to choosing courses, professors and majors. For graduate students and junior faculty, it might be most valuable as a forum where they and undergraduates can talk together about the educational enterprise.
And for taxpayers, donors and tuition payers? Well, the newspaper will never cover more than a small fraction of the academic work being done at the University, so an academic section would not be a guide to whether professors (or for that matter, graduate students like me) are earning their keep. But it would promote discussion of many topics relevant to that question, thus making it easier to debate it rationally. It might even improve the public understanding of what the academic enterprise is all about.
Alexander R. Cohen is The Cavalier Daily's ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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