Gabe Oppenheim | GET-UP's teaching stats force the wrong conclusion

Early decision applicants to Penn's Class of 2011 must submit their forms by today. And this year, those forms ask applicants to discuss a Penn professor with whom they'd want to study.

I like the question. It forces applicants to delve into our University's departments to find a teacher who could turn their passion for political science into real geopolitical game. Or ardor for accounting into real economic expertise. It's a chance for students to prove they're serious about Penn academics.

Of course, the question implies that the University is already serious. It promises applicants: If you find a professor you love here, that professor will love you back. And study with you.

But a report released this past spring doubts that. It's called "Casualized Penn: Where Did the Professors Go?" and it was produced by Graduate Employees Together - University of Pennsylvania, a group of graduate students who for years have unsuccessfully tried to unionize.

Now, let's be honest. GET-UP released the report to pressure the administration into raising graduate student stipends. In fact, in April, the group handed out the report to admitted students who were visiting the school during Penn Previews.

The idea, according to one GET-UP member, was to make potential students "aware of how the administration treats its workers." Or, in other words, the idea was to scare the administration by potentially dissuading students from attending Penn.

But no matter. The report addresses serious issues, even though it was authored for selfish reasons. Primarily, the report says tenured and tenure-track professors (known collectively as "ladder faculty") teach a relatively small percentage of College classes.

For instance, in the fall of 2005, the College of Arts and Sciences offered 1,228 classes. Ladder faculty taught only 491 of those - 40 percent of the total. The rest were taught by adjunct professors, lecturers and graduate students.

On first glance, these numbers seem to reflect a big problem. After all, Penn prides itself on its renowned tenured faculty, but only two of every five College courses are taught by such faculty. Yet, if one looks to another Ivy with a similar "problem," the situation appears less dire.

In 1999, a graduate student group at Yale University claimed that ladder faculty conduct only 30 percent of classroom instruction in its college. The Yale administration disputed the report's methodology and said ladder faculty were actually teaching 67 percent of college courses.

But the Yale report made another mistake that GET-UP also did. It correlated fewer ladder-faculty classes with an increased number of graduate-student classes and a lower level of teaching. As GET-UP put it, "Heavy reliance on temporary instructors weakens the quality of a university's undergraduate education."

But that's simply not true - for at Yale and Penn, the bulk of non-ladder classes aren't taught by graduate students, but by "lecturers" or adjunct instructors. And these lecturers often know their course material and can teach it better than a ladder professor could.

For example, in 1999, Yale employed 266 non-ladder teachers who weren't graduate students. These instructors mostly taught foreign language courses, writing classes and science labs. And for good reason: The instructors often were either native speakers of a foreign language or actual writers and scientists.

At Penn, too, such writing and foreign language instructors make up the vast majority of non-ladder teachers. Graduate students teach only 10 percent of non-ladder classes here. And the instructors know their stuff, as I've seen time and again.

Of the 12 classes I've taken or am currently taking, seven have been taught by non-ladder instructors. One was a native Spanish speaker who taught my Spanish grammar class. Four were professional authors who taught writing classes. Another was a medieval manuscript expert who taught, appropriately enough, a medieval manuscript class.

They all had their subjects down cold.

Besides disparaging the quality of non-ladder instructors' teaching, the GET-UP report paradoxically calls for more job security and better pay for such instructors. Currently, non-ladder faculty can be hired for, at most, four-year appointments, which can be renewed.

But such a model is a welcome break from the tenure system, in which faculty who can't be fired conduct the exact same lectures every year, without ever having to improve or spice things up.

That's a real problem that Penn faces. And one wonders how the Class of 2011 will ultimately receive the professors whom they've already praised.

Gabe Oppenheim is a College sophomore from Scarsdale, N.Y. His e-mail address is oppenheim@dailypennsylvanian.com. Opp-Ed appears on Wednesdays.

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