OCUFA President Constance Adamson wrote an Op-Ed that is featured in today’s Toronto Star. The article takes issue with the recent attempt to pin declining university quality on professors. This is a bit of an absurdity, and Adamson skewers it well:
The decline in per-student funding has had a variety of negative effects. Universities have simply been unable to hire enough full-time professors to meet the rise in student demand. Our student-to-faculty ratio is now 27-to-1, the worst in Canada. In 1990, it was 18-to-1. So let’s be clear: the problem is not that faculty are not teaching enough. It’s that they cannot possibly teach enough to compensate for the acute shortage of faculty in the university system. We simply need more professors.
This is also nicely put:
Scholarship — which I define as the creation of new knowledge, the critical analysis of existing knowledge, and the communication of these insights — is central to the university. The teaching and scholarship equation is not zero-sum. Teaching is scholarship, and the two are inextricably linked. The critics will point to research that says being a good researcher does not make you a good teacher. This misses the point. You simply cannot have university-level teaching without the kind of intellectual inquiry that scholars are trained to do. If you remove scholarship from the professoriate or from our universities, you are no longer giving students the education they expect.