How much (or how little) teaching should be expected of the typical college professor? Some state legislatures (like Ohio's), spurred by cartoonish images of professors of Old Frisian mowing their lawns on Wednesday afternoons, have already provided a blunt answer to the question: more. In an attempt to head off such a heavy-handed mandate, the University of Maryland's Board of Regents will consider a rather general policy document on faculty workload in a meeting this week at Frostburg State University.

The matter has some urgency, because the Maryland General Assembly has withheld a total of $20 million from four-year state institutions pending the receipt of such a policy. With this pressure, we can probably expect some progress on the issue of faculty responsibilities this year.

Considering how badly debate on the issue has gone in the past, we should be glad. Higher education, rightly fearing the manhandling that often results when legislators try to manage, has traditionally held itself above justifying its priorities, and even when it has agreed to do so it has performed the task poorly. A new policy on faculty workload may push institutions, particularly large research universities, to reorder their priorities more in favor of teaching.

Legislators, many of whom know or care little about the duties of professors, may get more teaching for the dollar by withholding funds. But if they do, they should harbor no illusions that education offered in state colleges and universities will necessarily improve, even though (as many employers who hire college graduates will attest) it needs to.

That's because a number of other factors essential for better teaching and better-educated graduates are absent from the University of Maryland's policy document and must still be faced at the campus level. What follows is a list of these issues, and how they must be reckoned with if public higher education is to fulfill its teaching mission.

Teaching methods

Colleges and universities have traditionally avoided any examination of the way their professors teach their subjects, and the prevailing practices are faulty. Few institutions provide substantial, ongoing teacher training to their tenured and tenure-track faculty. Nor do many graduate programs do so for ** their teaching assistants. Those that do make it very clear (albeit implicitly) that teaching is secondary to research, even though many new Ph.D.s will make their careers as college teachers. Far too often, professors lecture to their students, a practice based on the assumption that a college teacher's primary responsibility is to "cover the subject." This notion of coverage suggests that a certain amount of "content" must be presented to students in the allotted time. Students, kept in a passive role by the lecture format, are expected to absorb the content for later use. But since they receive little direct instruction in how to use the content for higher-order cognitive tasks, they retain little. Analysis of classroom interaction has shown that even in classes designed for discussion, teachers do most of the talking.

To be effective, colleges must encourage teachers to adopt strategies that require active student involvement on a daily basis. For example, it makes little sense for an introductory biology class to be structured around lectures that do little more than restate the contents of a textbook. If this means scaling back lecture time in favor of more lab time, so be it. In an age of information technology, using Ph.D.s merely to impart information wastes their time and expertise.

Class size

Of course, intensive classroom interaction and training in higher-order thinking depend on relatively small classes. But if one follows a group of first-year university undergraduates around for a few days, one discovers that many introductory and general education classes are very large, some numbering in the hundreds of students.

Even if a professor were to teach four classes of "only" 40 students each (a total that would exceed the load of many high school teachers), the possibility of meaningful interaction in or out of class is slim. Higher teaching loads would lower class size somewhat, but if colleges and universities really wish to reduce class size to effective levels across the board, they will almost certainly have to hire more faculty, and these faculty should be interested and trained in teaching undergraduates.

Assessment of learning

The proposed policy on faculty workload gestures faintly at accountability measures for professors. But in the absence of carefully designed assessment schemes or any verifiable definition of student proficiency, any claims for effectiveness amount to mere assertion.

Most colleges and universities still have no comprehensive means of assessing students other than grades; and grades, as the last few inflationary decades have shown, are notoriously poor indicators of student ability. For example, it's not unusual to find that over 70 percent of students in a given institution receive a B or A in freshman composition, but few faculty or employers would allow that 70 percent of college graduates write well, or even satisfactorily.

Grades constitute a built-in conflict of interest, since the same person who has done the teaching assigns the grades. Faculty, particularly those without tenure and those teaching required general education courses, know that grading too hard increases the risk of low student evaluations, and that capitulating to grade-inflation pressure carries no penalty.

Moreover, academic departments have seldom tried to create uniform grading standards for the same course or within a major. Thus faculty grading often varies widely. Colleges and universities must begin to specify in behavioral terms what it is they expect their students and graduates to be able to do, and how well, so that reliable and valid assessment measures can be developed.

In addition, some evaluation of student work should be done "blind." That is, evaluators would know the grading standards but would not know who produced the work. Programs should also involve outsiders in the evaluation of student work. For example, engineers from a nearby defense industry company could help evaluate the senior projects of engineering majors. Blind grading of this sort would do much to strengthen the credibility of an institution's claims about the competence of its graduates.

Part-time faculty

Amazingly, the proposed policy on faculty workload omits a key group of teachers. It is one of the best-kept and scandalous secrets of higher education that a high percentage of classes are taught by part-time, contractual instructors. At some campuses of the University of Maryland, this proportion has run as high as 50 percent. These instructors have no job security and most of the time no fringe benefits. Often, the low salaries (ranging from under $1,000 to $3,000 per course) force part-timers to work at several institutions, teaching six or more sections per semester. Frequently overworked, sometimes underqualified, with little or no investment in their employing institutions, part-time instructors sometimes teach poorly, but few others would know this, since the quality of their teaching is of little concern to most full-time, tenure-track faculty or administrators. Graduate students, similarly exploited and poorly trained, are another way that departments subsidize research and lighter teaching loads for full-time faculty, often at the expense of quality teaching.

Mandating that full-time faculty teach more might help cure higher education's addiction to cheap, part-time labor. But limiting part-time instructors to, say, 10 percent of the work force will require additional full-time faculty, a more expensive proposition. This problem area comprises a real test for both higher education officials and taxophobic legislators. Their professed interest in the quality of college teaching will ring false if they allow this outrage to continue.

Promotion and tenure policies

At the center of these problems is the economy of most universities and some colleges, an economy which rewards research and discourages anything more than perfunctory attention to teaching. While professors pursue their research and teach small, upper-level courses, teaching the larger introductory and lower-level courses is foisted on lesser beings (graduate students, part-time and full-time instructors), who are afforded little or no time for research and are paid less. Professors who neglect their teaching and produce the required amount of research tend to get tenure; those who go in the opposite direction are often denied.

This economy, unless it is altered, will make the reforms mentioned above difficult, if not impossible. Several organizations, such as the University of Pennsylvania's Institute

for Research on Higher Education, have urged colleges and universities to revise their tenure criteria, or at least to create alternative criteria for those who choose to make their careers as teachers. These proposals deserve serious consideration.

In sum, the issue of faculty responsibilities entails much more than legislators and higher education officials allow. The document before the Maryland Board of Regents, if accepted, will pass on to individual campuses the complex task of developing more specific improvements. Political will being what is, college and university faculty may see more teaching in their future. It will be up to them, their administrations, and lawmakers to decide whether this change merely presents a problem, or is an opportunity to improve higher education in Maryland.

Stefan Martin is director of writing and assistant professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland.