Science Soapbox

A corner for occasional brief opinion pieces and editorials written by UVic faculty and students. To submit, contact sciedean@uvic.ca.

Protons, poetry and productivity
By Vern Paetkau,
Professor emeritus, Biochemistry and Microbiology

Universities are inefficient places, inefficient in the way of symphony orchestras. You know the type of expert analysis: couldn't we cut the number of cellos to one, amplify it electronically, and outsource the complicated stuff? Applied to the university, this high-productivity thinking might ask whether we couldn't have one professor write a given lecture (for the whole country, why not?), hire actors to read the lectures, and let industry do the research? The actors would be more entertaining and industry would be more efficient (i.e. it would cost the government less). Early in its reign, the Klein government in Alberta actually floated the actor-as-lecturer idea. That was by way of a friendly suggestion to help the U of A meet the 18% cut in its operating grant that the Kleinsters were imposing. I have to admit that I've been in university classrooms where a more dramatic performance would have been welcome. Maybe some of Ralph Klein's cabinet members were just remembering a poor experience in English 101. Probably not.

The counter-argument to actors-as-lecturers (or, less risibly, having all courses taught by teachers who do nothing but teach) is not based on efficiency, of course, but values. If you see the university primarily as a credentialing institution, and a trainer of fungible assembly line wrench-turners, then it isn't obvious that it needs scholars as teachers. But there's no question that scholarly academics can teach in ways that others can't. There's everyday (and, realistically, large chunks of the undergraduate life are mundane), and then there's the mental equivalent of the Mentos-in-Diet-Coke eruption. Once in a while you find yourself with a professor whose delivery and take on a subject resonates with your own mind, and the experience may change you for life. That professor may never be a nominee for teacher of the year; she may even be guilty of being "difficult".

I had one of those experiences as a student in Chemistry at the University of Alberta. By fourth year I had largely exhausted the undergraduate course offerings. Looking at the graduate courses potentially available, I noticed one in carbohydrate chemistry taught by Professor Raymond Urgel Lemieux. I asked around and got two stories on him. One, and pretty much everyone agreed on this, was that Ray was quite possibly the greatest carbohydrate chemist in the world. But from some people I also got the message that he didn't much like teaching undergraduates: he wasn't a great success at entry-level Organic Chemistry, apparently. Intrigued, I looked into registering. Yes, I could if I really wanted to, be the first undergraduate to take Ray's course. So I did, and thereby exposed myself to a stimulating mental workout that offered a clear, rational, and exciting view into the way one brilliant scientific mind analyzed and organized his discipline, and that created new domains of understanding. Ray had achieved international star status by devising a synthesis of sucrose, a feat that at least one textbook referred to as "The Mount Everest of synthetic chemistry". However, that achievement didn't even come up in the course, which focused on a number of more recent developments. For me, the most stimulating lectures were about his own use of recently developed Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy (remember, this was in the early '60s) to invent a new approach to conformational analysis of sugars. No one else could have talked about the subject with his insight and authority, because Ray had invented it and he had intellectual ownership of it. He had generated, with the collaboration of some of the physical chemists who had developed NMR, a systematic way of converting chemical shift information into structural determination, in a field where that was an extreme challenge by any other method. (Individual sugar molecules contain numerous identical chemical groups, and determining their structure in space is difficult by conventional means. Today it's routine: NMR spectroscopy's your best friend.) Ray's course really was "higher education". I still have my notes.

A second adventure in undergraduate studies for me was somewhat orthogonal in character to the Ray Lemieux experience. It began after an evening of beer and argument with a friend about the significance of 20th century non-novelistic literature. It was a subject in which my ignorance was pretty much perfect, and my opinions were, as sometimes happens, correspondingly resounding. However, by the end of the evening my friend had convinced me to go to a class with him the next morning, a class in 20th century poetry and drama, with a professor who had something of a reputation as a teacher. This was one Henry Kreisel, author, survivor of "alien internment" during World War II, scholar, and incandescent teacher. He was that most formidable of intellectuals, an academic and an actor. After a lengthy explication of the text of T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland", Kreisel proceeded to perform, and I use that word intentionally, Part I, "The Burial of the Dead". When he finished there was dead silence, his audience afraid to break the spell. An actor would also have read it well, but Kreisel had prepared us in his scholarly way, and the conjunction of that preparation and his masterful performance could not have been reproduced by anyone less intellectually complete, or for that matter almost anyone.

One more. The physicist Richard Feynman describes, in one of his unique, humorous little books about his interactions with the world ("Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"), how important teaching was to him when he began his academic career after the Manhattan project. "The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on... It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again... The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things."

OK, these are anecdotes. But they illustrate the counter-argument, that a university experience cannot be reproduced with cardboard cutouts and voice-overs. I'm convinced that there is a place for the exceptional teacher, the scholar who can transmit the wisdom of scholarship to the receptive undergraduate. Not every professor can do this in every instance. And I don't buy the notion that there's a linkage between good teaching and good research ability. If you made a two-by-two table of good/mediocre teaching and good/mediocre science, all of us could immediately think of some names to put into each of the four squares. But there have been, and will continue to be as long as real scholars endeavor to do real teaching, instances when teaching and learning go way beyond what Degrees-R-Us-dot-com can deliver.

That result, of course, comes with a price. There's a price for the government that provides the budget to hire several cellists, and there's a more personal price for the academic scientist trying to find as many hours as possible to pursue a research agenda. We all know that there are times when the expostulations of desperate or possibly even entitlement-deluded students seriously compromise our ability to pursue scholarship. But aside from the important consideration that teaching is a major (in the minds of our legislative bosses, the major) reason to keep paying for our way of life here at the university, there's the consideration I was reminded of by Tom Buckley, recently retired from my department: if I can significantly influence the life of a student for the better by my teaching, is that always less important than producing another chunk of research instead? Maybe not?

Just like the kind of research that can be pursued in Faculties of Science, our teaching can work in ways that won't happen elsewhere. That's why we call it a university. You may agree or disagree. That's also something we do here.

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