JOHN YI/YH The shield of the Yale Graduate School os Arts and Sciences overlaid on Professor John Gaddis' Cold War lecture. In his lecture, students are cramped despite the 390 seats in the auditorium.

Sending out an SOS: save our sections

When students at Yale complain about classes, one of their perennial targets is the University's system of Teaching Assistant- (TA) led discussion sections. While TA shortages and section mayhem afflict courses every year, this fall the problem has been especially prevalent, particularly in the history department. For the first time ever, enrollment in history department classes tops 6,000 students, while graduate enrollment continues to shrink—as it has for several years—making TAs even harder to find.

The Herald convened a panel of faculty, administrators, and the head of the Graduate Student Assembly (GSA) to discuss the question of the TA shortage and Yale's use of the discussion section and TA system for lecture courses. Present were Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, Graduate School Dean Susan Hockfield, History Chair Jon Butler, History Professor John Gaddis, History Professor John Merriman, American Studies Professor Michael Denning, Economics Director of Graduate Studies Truman Bewley, and GSA head Joshua Warren, GRD '02.

YH: During the first half of this year, several classes have been affected by a shortage of TAs. Enrollment in the graduate school is down, while enrollment in lecture classes, especially in the history department, is up. Why has graduate enrollment decreased in the past couple of years, and was the resulting shortage anticipated?

Susan Hockfield: It was a deliberate decision on the part of the University to reduce the size of the graduate school by about 10 percent over the last five or 10 years. There were two reasons for it. The first one was that we wanted to increase the financial support for the graduate students. I think the second pressure, especially in the humanities and social sciences and less so in the sciences, is that the number of job opportunities has not been what it once was.

YH: But the smaller enrollment has caused a shortage of TAs for undergraduate courses. The history department has convened a committee, on which Professor Gaddis sits, to talk about this issue. Professor Gaddis, what are some of the solutions you've discussed?

John Gaddis: Well, there are several possible solutions, and none of them are particularly attractive. One solution is simply to cap courses. The second solution is to run some courses without discussion sections at all so there's less reliance on them; you only use graduate students as graders and not teaching assistants. A third issue we talked about is the problem of shopping period; it is very difficult to make TA assignments in the first place, since you have no idea what the enrollment of a course is going to be until you walk in the door. The disadvantage to capping classes is that not everyone gets the class that he or she wants. The disadvantage of compromising shopping period is obvious: it would not be popular with students. The disadvantage of phasing out sections is that many of us feel that sections are very important for the instructional mission here. I just met with some of my undergraduates this week and asked them very candidly to tell me how they feel about sections. The sense was almost unanimous that they are very important. So there's a strong sentiment, at least in our department, for trying to find a way to keep sections.

JOHN YI/YH Left to right: John Merriman, Truman Bewley, Richard Brodhead, Susan Hockfield, Jon Butler, John Gaddis, Michael Denning, Joshua Warren

Richard Brodhead: It's important to remember that this program, when it works well, works on the principle of a true mutuality of interests. That is, the solution has to have true educational benefits for the undergraduates and also true advantages in the domain of teaching experience for graduate students. We need to start thinking of the planning of sections not as a staffing issue, but as an educational issue. An idea of the educational goals sections might serve should drive the issue of staffing and allocation, not vice versa. We could never say that undergraduate need for sections is so great that we should simply make graduate admissions a reflection of undergraduate demand. If John Gaddis had 500 students in Cold War, it doesn't follow that we should admit 25 graduate students in Cold War history. In a system with the course selection flexibility we have at Yale, where every student believes it's a God-given right to have a shopping period, achieving balance takes some work.

Gaddis: I think that the undergraduates who are concerned about this issue—and I know there are a lot—need to ask themselves what kind of tradeoffs they would be willing to make. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that several courses are going to be in demand. Would students be prepared to compromise shopping period to the extent of having some kind of a sign-up system in the preceding semester for some particular courses?

Joshua Warren: I went to Rice University, and we preregistered a semester before. We had an add/drop period that was as long as shopping period is. I don't see how you lose flexibility when you do that.

Brodhead: Let me give you the answer to that one. Yale used to have preregistration. But something in excess of 25 percent of the courses were dropped and added in the drop/add period. If you've got that big a swing, the figures you get from preregistration are misleading. The section problem could be made trivially easy if you had mandatory preregistration. The reason that we don't is deeply founded in the educational philosophy of Yale College. This is a school where people don't just take courses, this is a school where people are interested in the courses they take, and the precondition for that is they have the ability to check courses out.

Michael Denning: I do think that shopping period could be modified in some ways. I don't think it should be ended—I've been at schools where they had preregistration and it didn't work. However, we could have shopping period with classes that are shorter in length, so that things could be settled earlier.

John Merriman: I don't think I ever actually got my list of students this semester. We still don't know how many people we have right now. We didn't know how many students there are and so we ended up with this solution that's not really a solution at all: we have optional sections. Given the fact that we only have two electives, this is not perfect at all. We hired somebody from the outside who is very good, a graduate student at Indiana University. We've had to really kind of hustle. Brodhead: So would it have been better to cap your courses?

Merriman: No, I don't think so, but then again we're not dealing with [Professor] Jonathan Spence [SY '61, GRD '65] having 950 kids or something. In Modern France, we have 120 and that's a Cecil B. DeMille crowd for Modern France. I'm not about to cap that course at 80 instead of 120.

Who needs 'em?

Brodhead: Let me say something that might be regarded as heretical. This whole discussion has proceeded as if it is self-evident that all courses must have sections, but anybody who knows collegiate history knows that the lecture course with an hour seminar attached is a fairly modern convention. When I went to Yale, I took only two classes with sections. The class that made me go into English consisted of two hours of lecture, and in the third hour the professor sat on the desk and there was a discussion, but no section. I by no means regarded that as an inferior educational experience. While I have had many students tell me that their best sections were enormously valuable educational experiences, I have never had a student tell me that it had been educationally necessary for them to have had all the sections they had in all their courses. Instead of assuming that sections are all equally necessary and treating this as a staffing issue, we should be asking the prior educational questions: when are sections needed? What are they needed for? Are there courses where they are essential, and others where they are less than essential? I believe that we have become locked into a certain unimaginativeness about how to deal with this problem based on treating as orthodoxy something that really isn't more than a score of years old.

YH: But what would relying less on the TA system mean for departments and professors?

Brodhead: I don't mean relying less on it—I meant relying on it just as much or more in the cases where it's highly desirable and there's a big educational payoff. You wouldn't have to have all professors agree. There's no department at Yale where you couldn't take two classes and rethink the way sections are done and virtually solve the TA shortage.

Merriman: Well, certain courses have to have TAs, that's all there is to it. We were talking earlier about Modern France, and I suppose my students could live without a TA—at least they are this semester—and sections are optional, but in an introductory course, which I enjoy teaching, it would be hopeless if I didn't have the TAs.

YH: What about hiring TAs from outside the graduate school? Are there regulations on doing that?

Truman Bewley: I always recruit [TAs from outside the economics department] from word of mouth or e-mail—I send people I recruit to faculty teaching the courses. They're supposed to be interviewed to be sure that they are qualified.

Quality, not quantity

YH: Let's talk about qualifications. Many students complain about the quality of their TAs, and it makes a difference for undergraduates, graduates and professors if you have a TA who simply is not prepared.

Brodhead: But that's not always the case. I might have, for example, a law school student teaching my sociology section because that person is extraordinarily well-prepared for that subject. The matter does not depend on the point of origin of the TA; everything depends on how much knowledge the TA is able to bring to bear on the course.

Gaddis: And any professor that relies on TAs for discussion sections has got to meet with them regularly and give them very specific guidelines for the conduct of discussion each week. It's not a laissez-faire thing. I use mid-course evaluations to get feedback on how all the sections are going.

Denning: One of the difficulties in the relations between graduate teachers and students is the University's way of conceiving of them as fundamentally students but as "yet to enter a profession." Graduate teachers are already qualified members of the teaching profession; indeed, all must have a Master's degree before they teach. They don't approach it as part of their training; they approach it as a job to be done. And they are working under constraints that other people are not working under. For example, virtually all of us have the summer or the previous semester to think about what we're teaching. But many TAs don't know what they're teaching until the week they walk in, and they can't be prepared.

Putting it all in perspective

YH: Professor Denning brings up a good point about treating your TAs more like employees as opposed to teachers in training. Is one of the solutions to the shortage to start looking for qualified TAs from outside of Yale itself?

Jon Butler: I think most faculty members are reluctant to engage in that. The demand for lecture courses is going to require some rethinking about how many lecture courses a department should be giving and about whether lecture courses can be given on some occasions without teaching assistants. It is important to remember one thing: the graduate enrollment should not be driven by a demand for teaching assistants. If it were, we would only be complicating the exceptionally difficult situation which exists in the United States: that we have in most fields a considerable oversupply of Ph.Ds. It simply wouldn't be fair to graduate students.

Denning: It's worth remembering that the issue of how you staff the teaching at the University is an important one. There is a long-term trend in the academy toward more and more teaching—around 40 percent—being taught by people who are not on tenure-track positions, either graduate teachers or adjuncts. But one of the things in the long term to think about is opening up more full faculty positions.

Butler: The use of adjunct or part-time teachers and graduate students is a product of post-World War II development and a product of the G.I. Bill, which sent thousands upon thousands of people to college who had never been able to go before. Yale didn't use TAs until the late '60s or early '70s.

Hockfield: And we are at a very different place now at Yale. There is a substantial number of universities where the only support for graduate students comes from teaching opportunities. We are not in the business of bringing graduate students in to be teachers, we are in the business of bringing in graduate students to provide them with the best graduate education, and a piece of that is opportunities to teach. But with the current size of our graduate student population—I've looked at the numbers for history classes this semester—we're not that far off. So we're not talking about a crisis of insuperable proportions, we're talking about something that needs some tuning around the edges.

Brodhead: And the trouble is, you can't create a permanent solution because undergraduate enrollment is a part of it. If we admitted 10 more graduate students to history this year, so that three years from now we'd have more TAs for a certain lecture class, you may be sure that three years from now, the students who we thought would want that class will want some other class. As long as we have a system in which undergraduates have considerate flexibility about course adoption, we're going to need to have some flexibility at the edges about figuring out how to staff the sections.

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