In Praise of the 4-4 Load

My recent article “A Roadmap to Take Back Higher Education” got a mixed reaction from tradition-minded professors. They liked the general framework of the scale of the problem facing the humanities, the suggestion to support the new autonomous schools being developed rather than individual professors, and the suggestion that philanthropists dedicate large-scale grants for these schools. They didn’t like my suggestion that philanthropists need to focus on supporting teaching, not research:

If [philanthropists] fund professors with 2-2 teaching loads and a half-dozen worthy books to their credit, they will have wasted their money. Their dollars will be far more effective if they create a corps of professors [who have] a vocation for teaching, have 4-4 teaching loads, and have no more than a handful of published articles to their name.

It was put to me that this was a misguided suggestion. Ambitious professors want teaching positions with a serious research track. The autonomous schools that are succeeding (for example, Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership) are working to attract the best professors by offering them research tracks. Philanthropists will waste their money if they support jobs with 4-4 teaching loads, since no professors worth their salt will take these jobs. 

This is a counter-argument worth taking seriously. It’s also a counter-argument that underscores both the necessity and the difficulty of shifting the professoriate from a research focus to a teaching focus. Professors’ professional self-respect is bound up tightly with the research vocation. We risk the demoralization of tradition-minded professors if we make them do nothing but teach. Yet we also face a Long Night, in which a research vocation is a luxury we cannot afford. Western civilization may not survive if tradition-minded professors don’t shift to a teaching focus.

I said we face a Long Night—and it is worth reiterating the gravity of our challenge. The radical establishment seized control of the intake to the academy two generations ago. There are so few tradition-minded professors left, especially so few young ones, that the new autonomous schools, small as they are, have had trouble staffing themselves. Even with financial and political support finally coming in, we are barely able to train new tradition-minded professors, and barely able to teach new K-12 teachers, because we have so few to do the training and so few to teach.

A large majority of the tradition-minded professors who remain are more than 50 years old. A majority may be more than 65. Among the younger cohorts, there are a fair number of survivors in the political science and economics departments—hence their overrepresentation in the tradition-minded cantonments in the universities. In every other department, tradition-minded professors are scarce as hen’s teeth. For vast areas of the academy, there are only handfuls of tradition-minded professors, perhaps only one—usually gray-haired and approaching retirement. 

This is the Long Night. A professor of medieval political theory will retire in Texas, and no university in the world will hire a new one. A Renaissance historian will teach his last class at Harvard—and Harvard will never offer Renaissance history again or will never offer it properly. The last sane psychologist will retire at Rutgers, the last sensible sociologist at Bucknell, the last English professor who actually likes American literature at Emory, the last Spanish professor of the Golden Age from Northwestern, the last rational anthropologist from San Jose State University, and, at the University of Arizona, the last composer who loves the high tradition of European music.

They will go, and no one will replace them—not at their universities, not anywhere in America, perhaps not anywhere in the world. The Long Night will deepen, retirement by retirement, because the professors will leave no heirs. The memory of Western civilization will be buried in unread books.

The Long Night already is barely reversible, because new professors do not spring up from the ground like mushrooms. They require careful cultivation—not only administrative and financial support but also enough professors in their discipline to teach them general knowledge and to serve on a dissertation committee. You must have bodies of professors teaching related subjects in a single institution, as well as a network of professors in a discipline to form a professional body around the country. And we have dwindling numbers of professors scattered disconnectedly around the country, individuals who cannot raise up new professors to replace themselves.

We need coherent groupings of professors in each discipline and subdiscipline—a multitude of lifeboats to save the disparate, irreplaceable fragments of Western civilization. At most, we now have a tentative assurance of lifeboats for political theory and economics. Nothing else is sure. It probably is too late for a great many disciplines. They are Ents without Entwives.

We face the Long Night—not in a distant generation but now. We do not have the luxury of time. We have at most 20 years to craft the lifeboats that will save the memory of the West—20 years before there are too few professors left to revive each of the myriad disciplines in the academy. We must engage in triage now, choose which disciplines we can save, and decide which must die.

This is why I judge subsidizing research tracks for professors to be a luxury we cannot afford. The difference between a 4-4 teaching load and a 2-2 teaching load is the difference between educating enough new professors that a discipline can survive and not educating enough. It is the difference between educating enough K-12 teachers to provide a body of ready and willing students in each discipline and not educating enough. The difference in teaching loads is the difference between compounding growth in the numbers of professors and K-12 teachers that can bring a discipline through the Long Night and the dissolution that ends with another candle dying in the dark.

We do not need more books written now. We need to keep alive the communities of professors and teachers who want to read the books we already have. Fifty years from now, a hundred—then we can dedicate professorial careers to writing books. Now, it is a luxury we cannot afford.

I have been trained enough in the professorial mold to know how difficult it is to abandon the instinct that research is what makes the professor. We judge one another by our books. We think that our books last and that our teaching is evanescent. It is the scholarly heart of our vocation—the point of all the dreary routines of the workaday life. And teaching surely can be a dreary routine, even for those who also have a teaching vocation.

Then there are the tempting arguments to continue the old ways. The ambitious professor rises by research excellence—and we want to attract the ambitious to pursue the preservation of Western civilization. We may even want some new books to address new situations, to inspire new movements. We want a living tradition. We have reasons to preserve the research tradition and to reward excellence in research.

Yet so many of these arguments ultimately are founded on disdain for the 4-4 professor who does the hard work of educating the mass of students in college—on pride at having become a 2-2 professor oneself, who is really important. But there’s nothing more important than training new scholars to preserve the West. The 4-4 professors are what we need.

But we won’t get them unless tradition-minded professors learn to honor the 4-4 professor. They must learn a new way of thinking, which praises the Hero Teacher who has educated 1,000 professors and teachers more than it lauds the Hero Scholar who has written 10 excellent books. And that way of thinking can’t simply be imposed on professors. Tradition-minded professors must take up a teaching vocation themselves.

They must want to change. If they cannot, then the West they love will die.

The memoirist Glückel of Hameln wrote a story of a father bird deciding which of his three chicks to take across a wide and windy sea to safety. Two of the chicks said they would honor his sacrifice by helping him in his old age, and he dropped them in the sea. The third said:

My dear father, it is true you are struggling mightily and risking your life on my behalf, and I shall be wrong not to repay you when you are old, but I cannot bind myself. This though I can promise: when I am grown up and have children of my own, I shall do as much for them as you have done for me.

The father bird said, “Well spoken, my child, and wisely; your life I will spare and I will carry you to shore in safety.”

Professors must carry their children to safety, with no reward of scholarly joy in their lifetimes. Nor, as likely as not, in their children’s lifetimes. That joy is for their children’s children, or for those even farther down the years. They must be father birds with 4-4 teaching loads—and so must the children they educate.

Only in that way can their descendants make it through the Long Night to the dawn. 

David Randall is executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars.