On that score, the last time I looked at research on how often the typical scholarly article was read, the number was something like 3 to 5 times, and it applied to the sciences as well as the humanities. (Alas, I cannot provide a citation. I will note, however, that this was over two decades ago. I have no idea whether or not things have changed since then.) That’s not exactly an indication of overwhelming intellectual significance for typical science research.

As far as I can tell, most university research is a crap-shoot, regardless of discipline. The problem, however, is that there’s no a priori way to determine the value of a given research project. So we’ve got to fund/tolerate a lot of crap in order to get the good stuff. Sciences and humanities alike.

My teaching load is 2/3, though I typically also teach several independent studies or directed readings in a year on top of that.

Basically, you’re hiding from the main point people were raising: a liberal arts college is devoted to teaching. Not to graduate students, and though research is expected, teaching drives the enterprise. If any have graduate programs, their graduate programs are tiny and do not change this basic profile.

Keith, Swarthmore does not offer graduate degrees. If you got that from US News, they’re wrong. In any event, wherever you got it, you’re wrong on this point. I don’t think Williams does either, but I’m only absolutely certain about Swarthmore. We confer nothing besides the BA and the BS (for Engineering students). No graduate degrees.

To make matters worse, I’m also from Albuquerque, so I feel like my home-town and my research have been implicated in idiocy, all in one fell swoop!

Oimoi talas!
—Boo!
(who went to a liberal arts college so she would never be taught by graduate students. That was the frickin’ point!)

Hmm. It’s possible that they’ve beefed up their grad-programs offerings since I was a student there in the mid-late 90s, but at that time “Offers Graduate Degrees” meant that very occasionally someone got a – I think it was chemistry – master’s degree. Afaik most students weren’t aware that there was any sort of graduate program, and had not encountered any graduate students at all, much less ones teaching courses, since those were taught by actual faculty (one partial exception – there was an African Art seminar taught by someone who, iirc, was just about to get his Ph.D. from NYU. Rather good class.)

Uses the wonder of the intertubes to confirm – well, Wikipedia claims that “All classes are taught by members of the faculty, and there are almost no graduate students and no teachers’ assistants. ”

I don’t know if the other high-ranking liberal arts colleges tend to share this general model or not.

Actually, I have Bauerlein’s book on pragmatism, which does look interesting. Maybe I’ll get to read it someday, when I’m not trying to churn out pointless crap.

P.S. The “love” and “amateurism” argument that Dan Simon sees in Bauerlein has recently been addressed to good effect by Marc Bousquet.

At Illinois, where I taught for twelve years, researchers in the sciences usually had teaching loads of 1/1; in the life sciences, it could go as low as one course per year. Scientists were explicitly researchers, and everything depended on their ability to secure grants (private or federal)– their working conditions, their graduate assistants, their chances for tenure and promotion. From the moment they set foot on campus– or, perhaps, from the moment they embark on doctoral work– they are encouraged to see themselves as grant-writing and grant-winning machines, because that’s the only way they’re going to get their research done. So yes, they tend to resent anything that distracts them from that process– and it can be, for some scientists, a year-round process– such as teaching the basics of biochemistry to a bunch of 20-year-olds.

Humanists, by contrast, have no such funding structure and no such expectations. Sure, if we’re lucky enough to teach someplace that awards released time, every once in a while we get a semester off to do research in France and come alive in archives. But we don’t have to spend our days chasing multimillion-dollar grants to keep our labs running and our graduate students employed, and consequently, we don’t see undergraduate teaching as a distraction. Quite the contrary, many of us think it’s the best thing about the job.

Now, it’s true that at a tiny handful of elite research universities (did I stress the “tiny handful” part?), even professors in the humanities can devote themselves primary or exclusively to graduate education. That’s why, in the literature on American academe, people who are familiar only with Harvard or Yale complain about the amount of undergraduate instruction done by graduate students. But having worked now at two large public research universities outside that charmed circle (three, including my four years as a graduate student at Virginia), I can assure all interested parties that nearly all humanists at places like Penn State and Illinois teach undergraduates and do so with enthusiasm. How much enthusiasm, I imagine, depends partly on the undergraduates themselves.

Last but not least: I shouldn’t have said that graduate students don’t exist at liberal arts colleges and comprehensives. I meant that they generally aren’t employed as teachers in such institutions, since we were talking about teaching done by graduate students. My mistake! But I want extra extra bonus points for anticipating Mr. Ellis’s final paragraph @ 124 with my own final paragraph @ 120.