With Canadian universities expecting to hire more than 20,000 new professors by the end of the current decade, this essay on the place of teaching and learning is both timely and welcome.

The broader purposes and priorities of universities are too seldom probed. Although public discussion over universities has not been greater for many years, universities and academics themselves frame the issues and lead debate.

Universities are complex institutions that frustrate external scrutiny. Governance of these institutions consists largely of brokered deals among various aims, constituencies and factions competing in zero-sum status wars. Rarely are there carefully thought out or well understood ideas of why anything is done in universities.

Recent trends to more "business managerial" approaches and the increasing professionalisation of university administration have swelled bureaucracy but had little beneficial impact on transparency and accountability of university decision-making.

The authors advance that a disproportionate focus on highly specialized discovery-oriented ("frontier") research has contributed to the abandonment of the teaching mission of universities and of the types of reflective inquiry that contribute to this mission. The rhetorical excesses of the "knowledge economy" discourse facilitate this shift in priorities: universities are therein depicted as Canada's central research institutions. Allegedly free of vested interests and uniquely informed by interaction with advanced teaching, the benefit of research undertaken in universities is argued to be broader and richer than that undertaken by individuals and other institutions, such as corporations and governments. University research creates intellectual property with potential commercial value, the purported new source of the wealth of nations, and thus enables national economies to achieve international competitiveness.

This view of universities as economic agents, "knowledge factories," justifies extreme specialization of the academic labour force and assembly line work processes in research, overseen by a hierarchy capped by an emergent class of influential academic entrepreneurs devoted to fund-raising, marketing and project management.

Scholars in disciplines whose scholarly activities could be better described as aiming for "reflective inquiry" rather than the production of commercial or economic value have nonetheless been swept up in the same rhetoric of "productivity" by embracing equally narrow and monolithic quantitative measures of formal peer publication and awards of peer-adjudicated funding designed to demonstrate that they too can become respected as scientists.

Pocklington and Tupper describe professors of medicine and medical researchers as the "super models" of academe, nourished on a diet lean in teaching and rich in compensation, status and research funding. Medical researchers thus lead and frame the search for "star" status among all academics and set the "gold standard" for excellence.

Criticism of the new standard of research dominance or of contemporary ideas about university research is discredited and dismissed as old-fashioned, anti-progress or springing from ignorance or misunderstanding. All other views or forms of scholarship are deemed insignificant.

Competition for resources in the academic sector of the knowledge economy requires that scholarship be seen as a commodity. However, unlike a typical "commodity" defined in summative terms such as outcome or impact, the commodity "scholarship" is expressed rather as intermediate measures of productivity: grants obtained, patents filed or page counts of contributions to scholarly meetings and journals ranked in value by their respective prestige and status. Peer review ensures that academics themselves and academics alone establish and rank the indicators of scholarly productivity that fuel academic status wars and govern competition for the resources of institutions.

A considerable disconnect occurs between internal measures of value ("excellence") and any broad social conception of the benefits of much university research. The nature of scholarship is thus transformed, as is the work of universities and professors. The authors point to the quantitative inflation of repetitive and recycled peer publication and the pursuit of research grants as busy work on a vast, almost incomprehensible scale. Where scholarship is associated with wealth production and commercial benefit, they point to the increased risk of unethical conduct.

Proponents of research dominance in universities invariably respond to any suggestion that the teaching mission of universities is suffering by invoking the "dogma of mutual enrichment": teaching and research harmoniously reinforce each other; good researchers are by definition good teachers (though the inverse is seldom argued).

Pocklington and Tupper suggest that this dogma serves more than simply to justify the commitment of university resources to research. It serves also to distinguish universities from other teaching establishments and permits a hierarchical classification of universities, disciplines and professors. Such hierarchies, the foundation of the governance systems of universities, act as a "consolidating myth" enabling an "excellent" professor of literature to feel a stronger common bond with an "excellent" endocrinologist. The dogma of mutual enrichment thus justifies situations in which university decisions about teaching are made by those least engaged in it.

Finally, the authors suggest that the dogma of mutual enrichment serves as a bulwark against governments, parents, employers and taxpayers - barbarians at the gates - who along with occasional internal allies tend to see teaching and learning as the more intuitively obvious goals of universities. Experience suggests it has been a remarkably successful defense. Isolated attempts of provincial governments to fund teaching separately from research have all ended in failure and abandon confronted by the status and power of universities.

Does anyone truly believe in mutual enrichment? The authors point out that, although no convincing evidence exists either way, the actions of university decision-makers and of professors suggest not. No firm would out-source its core business. Yet universities neglect undergraduate teaching: excessively large classes taught by less qualified, inexperienced, non-tenured and poorly supported faculty and delivered in impersonal ways are the new norm.

Faculty most benefiting from the "enrichment" that their research allegedly brings to their teaching are unavailable to most students because they are too busy and teach only upper-level, highly specialized courses that closely match their research interests if they even teach at all. University programs of study are more and more specialized in their first years so as to permit faculty to teach even more specialized courses at the expense of basic introduction to a broad knowledge of a field or fundamental skills that is often more pedagogically challenging and demanding of time and availability. Teaching "relief," course "buy-outs" and "research chair" and "two-track" appointments, exclusively research-dominant faculty selection and promotion criteria and the growth in the numbers of non-permanent teaching faculty all belie the belief in mutual enrichment.

Large classes, recourse to contingently employed faculty and mass-teaching technologies are chosen not for their superiority as approaches to teaching but for reasons of efficiency, to reduce resources to teaching and free more time for faculty to engage in research.

One would be dismissed as a crank were one to suggest that highly specialized researchers be hired on a poorly remunerated, non-permanent, low status basis or, in the same absence of supporting evidence, that good teachers are all equally good researchers, or yet that only dedicated teachers should be considered worthy of promotion or elevation to administrative positions.

Teaching is at best seen as a "necessary evil" undertaken reluctantly for the financial gain of the institution. Good teaching is more a matter of personal conscience than duty, though teaching missions account for more than 80 per cent of university income.

To defend against accusations that they are neglecting teaching, universities also point to measures that suggest the contrary. Students don't complain. In fact, students consistently rate university teaching highly. The authors counter that measures drawn from student questionnaires are notoriously unreliable and at best superficial indicators of the quality of teaching. They suggest that issues such as normative bias, respect for authority, the influence of university reputation and propaganda, poor design of measurement instruments, lack of clarity about student expectations and perhaps even a lack of student interest in what might actually comprise good teaching make such arguments unconvincing.

There is little consensus on what comprises good teaching and the authors do little to address this issue directly other than to suggest that it involves such obvious characteristics as availability, organisation, broad knowledge of the elemental structures of a field, enthusiasm and a non-pandering respect for students. Yet, beyond these simple notions, there is little discussion in this book of what might enable one to recognize good teaching or distinguish it from bad teaching. None of these are unique to university teaching and none address any specific outcome of university education. All could be equally served by "edu-tainment" or courses requiring little time or effort with no discernable learning outcomes.

Imagine if universities stopped delivering education. Institutions could continue to select and admit students according to current criteria, thus preserving their reputations for excellence. Universities could continue to deliver degrees to those who stuck around long enough to meet some residency requirement but would no longer offer courses, give assignments, assign grades or supervise student work.

What would the reaction and consequences be? Tenured faculty would breath a sigh of relief, as they would now be able to devote themselves fully to the pursuit of research excellence and thus ensure themselves brilliant academic careers and the admiration of their peers, deans and presidents. Students would be equally delighted to devote themselves fully to their other pursuits. Administrators would be spared the burden of a host of thankless tasks. The public purse would be spared some expense, as might students and their families if this benefit were shared with them. How many eventual employers of university graduates would notice any difference and how many bridges would in fact fall down?

Universities are not run to meet social needs and, not only is there is no incentive for them to do so, but it is seen as contrary to their purpose. Other than in a very small number of professional areas, little of what is taught in universities is intended to have any direct relevance for future employment and it may further be unclear how much of what happens to students in their time at university might be better explained by simple selection and maturation factors than by any education they are forced to endure.

The intent of my example is to provoke thought about the core social function and value of universities and their teaching mission, something that the authors fail to address. I would be horrified were anyone to take this proposition as prescriptive. Yet, I now wonder if that is not now so far from the current direction in university decision-making. Without a vision of the value of university teaching and learning that is equally compelling as that we are now inundated with of the value of research, there can be no future for the teaching mission of universities.

The authors address a number of other issues that cannot be given equal consideration in the context of a short review essay focussing only on the central thesis. They examine the view of universities as economic agents: as fundraisers, points of access to consumers, "knowledge factories" for private commercial interests, providers of "employability," and as sites for application of new schools of public management. In the weakest and a somewhat troubling chapter of the book, they examine the ethical challenges of commercialism in research by examining the Fabrikant case.

A lengthy chapter deals with a number of faddish solutions to what may or not ail universities: interdisciplinarism, technology boosterism, two-track appointments, "Harvard of the North," a Canadian "Ivy League," abolition of tenure, professionalisation of university administration and market discipline. Each of these issues is dealt with too quickly and dismissed rather unconvincingly. As with some argument of the main thesis of the book, I find little to disagree with but also little that could not be argued more convincingly with some evidentiary basis.

Finally the concluding chapter calls for solutions that often border on triviality: quality over quantity in assessment of research production; discouragement of entrepreneurialism for its own sake; banning of private research in universities; discouragement of "faddishness" on teaching, begging once again the question of how one might distinguish fad from legitimate innovation; a larger proportion of faculty time devoted to teaching; teaching of first- and second-year teaching by full-time faculty with part-time faculty more used for specialized teaching; formal preparation for teaching as part of graduate training; more public space for student interaction; and, a call for attention to the dominance of universities by medical schools and institutions.

In sum, this book will promote much needed discussion and debate. Fortunately, it is unlikely to be the final word.

Ronald-Frans Melchers is associate professor of criminology (criminal justice policy) at the University of Ottawa.

Reprinted from, with permission of the author and the editor, Teaching Options, Centre for University Teaching, University of Ottawa, October 2002.