Full TA Roundtable Transcript

YALE HERALD: The first and most obvious question is: Classes and the TA shortage is a huge problem this year. Enrollment in the graduate school is down, enrollment in crowded classes, especially in the history department, is up. Why has the graduate school enrollment been going down in the past couple of years, first of all, and was the resulting shortage anticipated?

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: Well I can speak to the enrollment, it was quite deliberate decision on the part of the university to reduce the size of the graduate school, over the last ten years graduate school enrollments have come down by about ten percent, and this was… I would think there would be two reasons for it, and the first one was an understanding on the part of the university that we want to increase the financial support for the graduate students, so you have these two curves that will be crossing of we really wanted to bring down the number of graduate students so that we could increase the amount of support that we can provide to them. We really want to be as generous as possible in the amount of financial aid packages we could offer to the students and I think the second pressure is especially in the humanities and social sciences and less so in the sciences is that the number of job opportunities has also not been what it once was, and I think some of the production in the sciences were done with future career possibilities in mind

YALE HERALD: The question that is obviously when the number of enrolled students goes down you have a smaller pool of graduate students, but the fact is that many graduate students are not choosing to be TAs, and therefore how do you give them more incentives to TA? The TA experience most people would argue is valuable for both graduate and undergraduates, so what kind of incentives are you going to give? Are you going to pay them more? What are you going to do?

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: Let me speak to that, because I think one needs to understand what the standard financial aid package is and obviously some example of let’s say some generic or standard student in let’s say the humanities this year. So we in the students in the humanities curriculum this year received a base level of funding and that financial aid package provides two years of study and support without any requirement or expectation that there will be any teaching so there is standard support and there is also a tuition stipend. Then there is the expectation that there will be teaching in years three and four. So four semesters of teaching with again the tuition stipend that goes along with it, and for every student in the humanities and social sciences we offer a year’s education fellowship that can be taken either in the fifth or the sixth year, and so together we are providing five years of support, four semesters of which are coming from the teaching fellowship, so it’s our expectation that almost all of the students in the humanities and social sciences will be teaching four semesters over the first five or six years that they are at Yale. So again we don’t feel the need to provide any additional incentive it is our expectation that most students will teach four semesters in the first five or six years.

YALE HERALD: Right. The only question is that the biggest thing that has come up this year has been the fact that there don’t seem to be enough people that are choosing to teach. I mean you have people from, I have an American studies TA who is from the Forestry and Environmental School, so there must be other solutions to simply getting enough TAs, and getting enough TAs who want to be teaching. So I know for example the history department has convened a committee to talk about this issue, so what are some of the solutions that you are talking about?

JOHN GADDIS: Well I think there are several possible solutions, none of them are particularly attractive. One solution is simply to cap courses, get upto the number of TAs that you have available and stop at that number. The second solution is to do some courses without discussion sections at all so there’s less reliance on them, you only have graders in that situation and not teaching assistants. A third thing that is talked about which would help in the planning of courses is the whole problem of shopping period; it makes it very difficult to make TA assignments in the first place because you have no idea what the enrollment of a course is going to be until you walk in the door and meet the class. So there are three different options out there that remain, none of which are particularly palatable, but I think it does get at the dilemma that you’re talking about.

YALE HERALD: What are then the disadvantages to each of these, I mean what do you see as the sacrifices in each case when you say, “ok, I’m going to cap classes,” for both graduates and undergraduates?

JOHN GADDIS: Well the disadvantage to capping classes is that not everyone gets the class that he or she wants. That one is pretty clear. The disadvantage of in some way compromising shopping period is again pretty obvious, it would not be popular with students. The disadvantage of phasing out sections is that many of us feel that sections are really very important for the instructional mission here, I was just meeting with some of my undergrads just this week and asked them very candidly to tell me how they feel about sections. Are they a waste of time and the sense was almost unanimously no they are not a waste of time they are very important. So there’s a pretty strong sentiment at least in our department for trying to find a way to keep sections, we think that kind of individual contact is quite necessary.

JOSHUA WARREN: Can I ask a question, just to follow up on that? One thing that I’ve heard from graduate students that is a related concern with eliminating sections, that from moving away from TAs as section leaders to TAs as graders there is some sacrifice of the pedagogical training of the graduate school, and I was just wondering what your reaction was.

JOHN GADDIS: I think that’s absolutely correct, the other incentive that I think could add to what dean hockfield said for the grad students of doing this is that it very much enhances their marketability to have been in the classroom and to have taught, and there are several different ways that can happen. It can be grading, it can be discussion sections, it can be running their own junior seminars, so all three of those are possibilities, but really that experience of running a discussion section is pretty critical.

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: Yeah, I would like to amplify that response it’s not simply marketability. Teaching, for our graduate students it is a very important experience. Many of us that have taught know that you never know a subject the way that you learn it when you teach so for graduate students these are important experiences and the skills that one learns in leading a section is that various kinds of teaching experience that apply for graduate students; these are skills that are applicable no matter what you’re going to do, so I feel very strongly that it’s important that our graduate students have appropriate teaching experience because it will serve them in many many good purposes as they leave here, even if they’re not going to go into the academy.

RICHARD BROADHEAD: But by appropriate we would mean that everyone would have a chance for a certain kind of experience. Some of us in this room have come to be thought of as teachers in certain occasions, but I doubt that any of us would be thought of as good teachers the first time we taught. It takes some experiences and some training and it seems as if we don’t want graduate students simply to staff courses we want them to have such experience as it will help them go on and teach well later on but we want them to have such freedom that they can also do their dissertations and go on and get the jobs that they came to graduate school for.

MICHAEL DENNING: And, it’s worth noting that the relationship between graduate students and undergraduate demand is more than just numbers, that we don’t recruit the grad students in the fields of interest in what they’re working on the basis of the particular kinds of fields of the courses that happen to be popular so one of the difficult types of things is not that they’re not enough but that they’re graduate students who are working in entirely different departments and fields which don’t have large undergraduate enrollments and so I think there are probably some people that have hard times finding opportunities to teach.

RICHARD BROADHEAD: It’s important to remember here that this program when it works well works on the principle of a true mutuality of interests, that is to say the solution has to be one with true educational benefits for the undergraduates and also true advantage in the domain of teaching experience for graduate students and this means that we could never say that the undergraduates need for sections is so great that we should make graduate admissions simply be a reflection of the coursework for undergraduates. I’m sitting next to my most admired colleague john Gaddis, if he had 500 students in a cold war class, it doesn’t follow that he should admit 25 students in cold war history, that’s just not the way, you have to, each domain has its own considerations, you have to balance them against each other. In a system with the flexibility we have at Yale, and when every student believed it’s a God-given right to have a shopping period, achieving flexibility with everything that’s unpredictable takes some will and it takes some balance.

MICHAEL DENNING: I do think that shopping period could be modified in some ways. I don’t think it should be ended by any means, and no I’ve been at schools where they ended it and they had preregistration and it really didn’t work because the people really didn’t say in the courses they preregistered for. However, I have thought that we could have some kind of computer registration where we would know actually how many students there are in our classes a lot sooner than we do now, and also it’s conceivable that we could have a kind of shopping period with shorter courses, something more like final exam period, where you wouldn’t necessarily have the full two-hour seminar the first day, but that maybe in the first week there could be versions of passing out syllabi so that rather than three weeks into this or two and a half weeks into the semester or whatever things could be settled earlier.

JOHN MERRIMAN: I don’t think I even ever actually got my list of students this semester, this is the latest it’s ever been, we still don’t know how many people we have right now. My own course was cited as a problem and it just demonstrates that also the factors tied into the graduate students careers play into it as well. I have about 9 or somewhere between 8 and 10 graduate students and whose work is somehow directed, but a lot of them it just works out that this semester they are first and second year, or they’re off in France doing their theses, or they’re back finishing their theses and teaching seminars and we couldn’t find anybody, we didn’t know how many students they have and so we ended up with this solution that you and I you asked me about the other day that’s not really a solution at all, we have optional sections, which given the fact that we only have two electives is not perfect at all, and we hired somebody from the outside who is the spouse, he’s very good, he’s a graduate student at IU, Indiana University, his spouse is a graduate student in the history departments, so we’ve had to really kind of hustle and in order to really fill people

RICHARD BROADHEAD (?): So would it have been better to cap your courses?

JOHN MERRIMAN: No, I don’t think so but then again we’re not dealing with the throngs of when Jonathan Spence had 950 or something once and remember back when john Gaddis had up to 600 or something and well in modern France we’re having you know 120 and that’s a Cecil b. DeMille crowd for modern France

JOHN GADDIS: I have capped mine because 390 is what I actually have and that’s the maximum number that will go in the art gallery auditorium and for reasons quite apart from TAs I don’t want it to be any bigger than that.

JOHN MERRIMAN: Well there’s the Yale bowl—

JOHN GADDIS: Well it seems to me there are limits on the number of people you can lecture to and have it really work so I think in that sense there is kind of an absolute cap that I wouldn’t want to think about always and then within that limit think about trying to accommodate the students

JOHN MERRIMAN: Well I know that for a course like mine that is small basic national history I’m not about to cap that course at 80 instead of about 120

JOHN GADDIS: There is one other possible compromise solution here and john you alluded to it in what you said, we can draw on graduate students who are outside the history department but nonetheless are knowledgeable on these subjects; in my field somebody who is doing political science or international relations is likely to be as qualified as someone who perhaps say is doing medieval history to do cold war history; so we do have a kind of a reserve system here, and if we had a little more predictability in terms of knowing how many students are going to be in the class we could work earlier to recruit these people from outside the department and make that a more orderly process. The problem now is that you can’t really go to people outside the department and say “would you consider being my TA?” until you know what your numbers are going to be and how many you need and so it’s a mad scramble at the very last minute to try to find people

RICHARD BROADHEAD: Let me say something that might be regarded as heretical, which is this whole discussion has proceeded as if it is self-evident that all courses must make sure and have discussion sections, but it’s a very interesting fact that anybody who knows the history of this knows that the lecture course with an hour seminar is a fairly modern convention. When I went to Yale I was able to remember two classes in which I had section. The class that made me go into English consisted of two hours of lecture, the third hour the professor sat on the desk and there was a discussion with whoever came to it. I by no means regarded that as an inferior educational experience, and I would have to say myself, my experience must be a little different from yours, john – I have talked to many and many and many a student of Yale college and I have never had a student tell me—I have had many students tell me that their best sections were enormously valuable educational experiences, I know that’s true, but 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 it seems to me I actually think my own preference would be to start with the educational end of the subject rather than the staffing end: when are sections needed? What are they needed for? Are they equally needed in all courses? Are there courses in which they are essential? Then by all means one must have them at a high level are there courses in which a lecture experience with the grader might give you nine tenths of what you took the course for in which one case why shouldn’t one consider that? 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.

YALE HERALD: I guess then the question for all of you as professor would be what would making section optional or relying less on the TA system and the discussion section system necessitate in terms of changes in terms of I don’t know if you have been discussing this.

RICHARD BROADHEAD: You understand that I didn’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 but not acting as if every section in every course is as valuable as the most valuable section in the best course.

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: Or for every student in every course.

RICHARD BROADHEAD: That’s right.

MICHAEL DENNING: In general I agree, with dick there and in putting it back to the departments to decide which of their courses should have lectures and seminars and sections and which shouldn’t do that and I know that we’ve actually had conversations in American studies about that particular issue. I guess I’m much more in favor of capping courses because we do de facto cap our seminars all the time and so it doesn’t really seem to me that there is a sort of inalienable right necessarily to take courses and at a certain point I know with the lecture course that I teach I certainly would prefer, and maybe that’s a solution as a more ad hoc one it does feel like the sections are a fundamental part of our course and so I was prepared the last time I did it the numbers came in I think five students under where the capping would have been so it worked out perfectly.

JOHN GADDIS: And that’s not a rare development, strange to say.

MICHAEL DENNING: Because we do have some knowledge from year to year

RICHARD BROADHEAD: Maybe the Herald has in some sense some knowledge that I don’t know that anybody in this room has which is how much of an epidemic are we in fact talking about, is this something that has shown up in 6 or 8 classes is it thought to be something that’s entered in all the departments of the university, I hear it mostly coming out of some departments

YALE HERALD: I know it’s especially prevalent in the history department and the other thing is that obviously within different departments the actual question of what the TAs responsibilities are is very different for example economics I know that it’s probably a little easier because to be a history TA you have to be to a certain extent an expert in the field that you are leading as a TA. Economics, you have to know what the students are learning pretty much to be in the position that you are as a grad student; you don’t have to sort of “bone up” on some of this stuff beforehand, and I know that the economics department to get back to the question of using outside TAs is one that has used a lot of hiring outside of Yale in order to fulfill the TA requirements

TRUMAN BEWLEY: Not outside of Yale, within Yale, in SOM and the law school, mostly

YALE HERALD: Right, and I was wondering if Yale had some sort of specific policy about hiring outside of Yale, or regulations about hiring outside of departments or about outside of Yale.

TRUMAN BEWLEY: Well there are no regulations but I always send people and I recruit from word of mouth or email—I send people I recruit to faculty teaching the courses so when you come up with the course they’re supposed to be interviewed to be sure that they are qualified.

YALE HERALD: To get back to Dean Brodhead’s question, the impression that I get is that it is certainly some departments more than others, but the question is we’ve talked a lot about the grad student side of this, but people are angry that there is a TA shortage, I mean people definitely ask, “why is this law school student leading my sociology course?” for example. But the other question is I’ve heard a lot of complaints from both graduates and undergraduates that I’ve talked to about the quality of section not just numbers in terms of you know it makes a difference for both undergraduates, graduates and even professors if you have a TA who simply is not prepared, who maybe does not have enough contact with a professor.

RICHARD BROADHEAD: But let’s not assume that that’s always the case across school hiring; why I have a law school student teaching my sociology section and the answer to that might be because that person is extraordinarily well-prepared for that subject the law school is full of people who have lots of education in addition to their law courses so everything would depend not on the point of origin of the TA, everything would depend on how much knowledge the TA was actually able to bring to bear on the course.

JOHN GADDIS: I would just say I think there’s a bargain here that has to be struck. I think for anybody that is going to rely on TAs for discussion sections has got to take on the obligation of meeting with them regularly and giving them very specific guidelines for the conduct of discussion each week and it’s not a laissez-faire thing, it’s not a thing where you just turn your TAs loose and let them do whatever they want to do it’s got to be coordinated

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: I think it’s real teamwork, I see it as team teaching not as each being one person over here not talking to each other person over here and this is how this experience can be most beneficial for the graduate students and what they’re going to learn and for the undergraduates and what they are going to learn and we continue to encourage departments to think these ways about teaching, about from the graduate student’s perspective about the teaching experience for graduate students.

JOHN GADDIS: The other thing I’m doing this term and I did last term as well is using mid-course evaluations which is just a great idea for all courses to get feedback on how all the discussion sections are going

RICHARD BROADHEAD: We just have to return to the point though, which is that in your third year of graduate school you can’t know, even if this is your very field, you don’t know it the way you will when you’ve worked in the field maybe 20 or 30 years. And if you teach in a field that isn’t your area of expertise, you’re not going to know the material as well. And so one has to be honest about that. I mean it would not be possible to recruit an infinite number of TAs who are all as expert as the professor, there’s no way that could ever happen. And so again one has to ask oneself: where’s the balance point? Where is the value of individual attention sufficient to outweigh any possible shortfall in previous expertise? And my own sense is that we’ve gotten into a very mechanical way of striking that balance and not really thinking about what falls over the line and what falls under the line.

YALE HERALD: This gets back to the question of what we were talking about a little bit earlier and how do you balance the discussion section as sort of a laboratory for graduate students and the experience for graduate students needing to teach with the importance as a learning environment for undergraduates? What type of things do you do to make the experience beneficial on both ends?

JOHN GADDIS: If I could just add one thing, it seems to me the other great value of discussion sections at a place like Yale is—and this would certainly not be true at a lot of other institutions, is the interaction among the students themselves. I have always felt that students teach other students about as much as professors teach students and the ability to have a vigorous discussion about the topics being that are taught in the class among the students seems to me is a real opportunity here because they are so bright and because the discussions can be so vibrant. I’m a convert to the value of discussion sections because I come from a university where they would not have worked as well and did not work as well just because the caliber of the students. So this is one other dimension to it that I think has got to be factored in to the equation.

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: I think that one of the things that has surprised me is how often graduate students who I talk to about what their skills they learn and they bring to leading sections is the ability encourage discussion, the ability to encourage the stewing of ideas around, and it’s not that they’re bringing all of the knowledge that is to be had in the discussion and I think that’s one of the skills that I think is important for someone who is going to go on to be in a profession in the academy and around the academy is how do you orchestrate discussion more productively

MICHAEL DENNING: I would just like to throw out though is one of the difficulties I think however in the entire relation between graduate teachers and students is the university’s own way of conceiving of them as not fundamentally students, as “yet to enter a profession” it does seem to me it makes sense to already consider them as partially qualified members of the profession all of them having MA, I think they have to have the MA before they can teach in a class, and they are being paid at a lower salary and a lower rate. But It does seem to me there may be certain ways in which it may be much more productive to consider the graduate teachers as a sort of permanent part of the teaching staff of the university, to recognize their demands, I won’t bring up all of those issues in some ways, but it’s a different way of understanding the relationship of graduate teachers to the institution and the kind of “in-training” thing. And I think because most of the TAs I’ve worked with don’t think of themselves as learning to teach while they’re doing this, they’re trying to do a job and do the teaching. The fact that they’re learning how to teach, well one continues to do that. I learn how to tech every time I go in there and try to figure out things I’ve done wrong and try to fix that. But they don’t actually approach it as part of their training; they approach it as a job to be done. And I think that is an important thing. And they are working under constraints that other people are not working under. And two of them are, just quickly, one: the “just in time” thing: virtually all of us have the summer or the previous semester to think about what we’re teaching and a number of them do as well. But a number of the TAs don’t know what they’re teaching until the week they walk in there and they can’t be prepared, they can’t have actually—

RICHARD BROADHEAD: That’s a corollary about shopping period. So people can understand how tied together things they like and things they are told are

YALE HERALD: That’s an interesting point. (And then my misguided question about sliding scale pay structure, etc)

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: The structure of the teaching fellow system was in place long before I assumed the deanship, and many people participated in the discussions that I think gave rise to its current form so there are different teaching fellow levels that roughly correspond to the expectation of the number of hours that a particular kind of teaching experience would take. In 1992, a committee chaired by Jon butler established a level called the 3.5 and that level was used for 2-section teaching in some of the departments in the humanities and social sciences, and one section teaching in other departments. There’s different kind of courses so in a nutshell, those courses that were writing-intensive, that required a lot of reading of drafts, were the one-section courses, and those that relied less on reviewing less drafts and manuscripts were considered two sections. And at the time, professor butler can probably better address the people of the committee, better than I, but over the years this distinction or the lack of distinction between those two modes of teaching became blurred, and I inherited when I came to the deanship a dissatisfaction on the part of graduate students of this single level of the TF 3.5 using both coursing two sections in history and one section teaching in English. So it was never that within the same course students would be in the same TF level for one section and two sections. And the resolution is something that probably came forth from the executive committee, was that two sections in the humanities and social sciences this year is now called the TF 4.0 and one-section teaching in those departments is called…(stop recorder)

YALE HERALD: One of the other things we touched on briefly and I would just like to know a little more about is perhaps professor Denning brought up a good point about treating your TA leaders as employees as opposed to teachers in training, and I’m wondering about the fact that if enrollment in the graduate school s I guess going to keep going down, or it has gone down substantially, is one of the solutions therefore to start hiring more qualified TAs from outside of Yale? Is that something that the departments or Yale is seriously considering?

JON BUTLER: Well I think most faculty members are certainly reluctant to engage in that on any scale and in fact the reduction in the size of the graduate school and graduate enrollment and the demand for lecture courses is going to require in most departments some rethinking about how much lecture course, how many lecture courses a department should be giving, can lecture courses be given on some occasions without teaching assistants, which they were done here for more than a century? Are there ways in which not all students would take sections? We have some faculty members who use optional sections, in most of those cases that I know of, two thirds to three-quarters of students elect to have a section, but there are ways. It is important to remember one thing; Is that the graduate enrollment should not be driven in my opinion by a demand for teaching assistants, if it were, we would only be complicating the already exceptionally difficult situation which exists in the united states which is we have most in most fields, not all but in most fields, not only an over supply, but a considerable oversupply of Ph.Ds and there are universities that do drive their graduate enrollment by the demand for teaching assistants. But the question is it’s not, it simply isn’t fair to the students they are taking as graduate students, because the chances for them to get a real job, and I mean a professorial job, which is what 95% of graduate students in the humanities and social sciences want, their chances aren’t nearly what they think they are, and it simply is unfair to these guys. Of course this is a major university, we would like to think it is THE major university, we would like to think that all of our students would get placed. But that doesn’t happen either.

RICHARD BROADHEAD: There was once a very similar…. But you wouldn’t begin by thinking of this as a staffing issue; you would begin by thinking of it as an educational issue, which is what do you aspire to have happen in the courses? To what extent are sections required by your expectations, by your educational expectations of the course? And then you find ways to have appropriate instructions dictated by the way you thought about that question.

JOHN MERRIMAN: Well certain courses have to have TAs, that’s all there is to it, we were talking earlier about my modern France, and I suppose they could live without a TA, at least they are this semester, and they are optional as I said, but in an introductory course, which I enjoy teaching, you can’t possibly have the course, I could give five lectures a week and it would be hopeless if I didn’t have the TAs –

RICHARD BROADHEAD: Well that’s exactly the point; you couldn’t say “this course, this course,” they’re two courses, they need the same system of supplement; you say what’s the educational function of this course? What’s the educational function of that course? And what follows from that in terms of what further assistance put can put the students in place?

MICHAEL DENNING: But, nonetheless, it’s worth remembering that the issue of how you staff the teaching at the university in an important one, because even as a Dartmouth undergraduate I remember my introduction political theory was a lecture course that had sections where each of the sections was taught by a member of the faculty, who shared the lecturing. And so one of the reasons for this is a long-term trend in the academy toward more and more teaching, figures are around 40% now, being taught by people who are not on tenure track positions, either graduate teachers or adjuncts. I think the reason Yale has relied on graduate teachers not adjuncts is because not living in a big city with a kind of roaming population of partially qualified but unemployed people to serve as adjuncts that’s not a likely solution as it is in New York or the bay area or whatever where that’s driven, and we actually have a large and powerful graduate school which relies on that. But one of the things thinking in the long term is thinking about opening up more positions that are full faculty positions and there is actually a shortage of teachers at Yale and in fact a shortage of instructional staff, which I’m not sure is the same as this crisis.

SUSAN HOKFIELD: It’s a different kind, it’s a different piece of the teaching effort. So it’s not that at Yale a tremendous amount of our courses are led by graduate student which is different from the adjunct model that you’re kind of describing but again it’s true there’s this kind of symbiosis of you know providing each an opportunity for graduate students, providing learning opportunities for undergraduates, but you know it’s not the case that every university in the united states uses the same model. Princeton I know uses a different kind of model for providing section supplements than Yale uses.

JON BUTLER: Most of this, the use of what we call adjunct or part time or graduate students really is a product of post- World War Two university development. And a product of one of the most wondrous things that ever happened in this society which we now forget, which is the GI bill. Which sent thousands upon thousands of people to college that had never been able to go before. And that swamped largely the public universities, but not exclusively. And they began to use particularly in freshman English courses groups of faculty who never did, who never had and to do this day don’t have permanent status in terms of tenure. And then increasingly in the public schools they began to use teaching assistants in large lecture classes. When I was in the university of Minnesota in 1958, I went, I took history 123 and I had Mr. (Buzaky?) as my TA and he was really quite awful, but in any case, he almost destroyed my interest in history, both Yale and you know we didn’t come to use TAs until you know the late 60s or early 70s, I don’t think they were used typically, and which Yale came ten to fifteen years behind the public universities in the use of teaching assistants, I think for two reasons, one to improve undergraduate instruction, but also to give graduate students a chance to teach which they didn’t have. And we have situations in the academy, I don’t actually know about today in 1999 but for many years the University of Chicago would not allow graduate students any teaching, and university of Chicago graduate students would prowl around the city of Chicago because I taught at Chicago for ten years and not at the university of Chicago, but asking desperately would we at lowly university of Illinois at Chicago, would we allow them to come—they would teach for nothing as long as they could get the teaching experience, because they were happy to go into the job market from a very elite university saying they’d never been in the classroom. And they’re clear about this, so there are these two different dimensions of it probing undergraduate instruction as well as teaching graduate students.

YALE HERALD: Well I know for example in the sciences and in the language departments they can require a certain number of sections…(my mess-up question again about stupid “unpaid section” at which point the entire panel has a good chortle at my expense...again—and at which point I apologize ingratiatingly...again.)

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: So in those departments where there are teaching requirements which you described, these are departments where the second level was set at a particular level and that section includes the understanding that there will be some teaching as a piece of it and that teaching will is integrated fairly smoothly into the rest of the graduate curriculum. So it’s not the case that john described of graduate students that are teaching without pay but the second level is constant and it’s sort of the teaching is expected—

RICHARD BROADHEAD: It’s worth emphasizing even these scores that we don’t have to think back that far to the days when the funding of graduate students was very different here and when the pressure students were under was much more severe. There was a time when it was very common in your graduate seminar to have some people who had full tuition and full stipend, and some people with no stipend, some people with half tuition, and I once had a student with no aid at all, all in the same room together. The teaching fellow question as well used to be not just “will I be assigned to a class,” but “will I have any cash coming in at all next seminar, because it used to be you didn’t have any expectation of financial support unless you were granted a teaching position; those were situations that were really worth making a considerable effort to try and change—

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: And we are really at a very different place now at Yale and I know the situation you described still remains at many institutions and now in my conversations with graduate deans elsewhere there are 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 good teachers, we are in the business of bringing in graduate students to provide a graduate education, and a piece of that are opportunities to teach

RICHARD BROADHEAD: And a piece of that is protection from teaching

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: From too much teaching

RICHARD BROADHEAD: That’s right.

YALE HERALD: So therefore if you want to protect graduate students from too much teaching but you still want undergraduates to have the opportunity to have meaningful sections, not necessarily across the board, not necessarily standardized, is are some of the solutions, because I mean there is still the question that in a lot of cases there still just aren’t those numbers, especially this year, is one of the solutions for example, to hire more faculty, or to hire more TAs from outside and really institutionalize practices like that? Has any of this been discussed?

RICHARD BROADHEAD: Well you know, we’re starting by assuming that we will really always be need the same number of sections as we do now and it seems to me that the only way to analyze this would be to go back to the prior question which is where is this an essential form of instruction, where is this a desirable but not an essential mode of instruction, where is this quite a peripheral addition, and how would you know the answer to those questions except for really thinking course by course and talking to lots and lots of students, and I hope that the history department has what every department is supposed to have, an undergraduate advisory committee, and it would be important for the history department to talk to many and many of its students to get a sense, is it true or is it not true? Even that the students in your class, john, or in Jonathan Spence’s class find it essential to have this experience, or is it true that the students would far rather be able to take this course even if they couldn’t have a section than to be shut out of the course? You don’t get into these remote questions about staffing unless you assume that you have to have all full sections

YALE HERALD: But would professors agree not to have—

RICHARD BROADHEAD: You wouldn’t have to have all professors, 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.

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: Let me just say that the history with the current size of our graduate student population—I’ve looked at the numbers from this semester and 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 and I think that this tuning could profit everyone if by truly having an opportunity to think hard about you know all of our educational objectives, we will come out in a better place from where we are now, where we just have this dumb arithmetic about how we make these positions

JOSHUA WARREN: When you say you looked at the numbers, is what you’re saying where you look at the number of TAs per year under the current total enrollment and expectations versus the number of TAs that we used to have and that number hasn’t changed much,?

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: What I mean is I looked at the course enrollments for this semester, the size of the sections, the number of sections, and where the system is a little strained, just in the department of history, I haven’t gotten statements from everybody and you know we’re not far off; we’re off by you know by a small number, and if this small number of individuals might come through the law school or from the French department or you know any one of a number of different places then you know—

RICHARD BROADHEAD: And of course the trouble is you can’t of course create a permanent solution to it because undergraduate enrollment are a part of it; if we admitted ten more graduate students to history this year, so that three years from now we’d have that many 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. And so as long as we have a system in which student undergraduates are going to 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.

YALE HERALD: I guess my question then would be if the numbers are saying that there isn’t really that much of a problem, I know that this has been a subject of great discussion amongst students in general that they perceive that there is just this big problem—either there’s a shortage, or that they’re just not getting enough TAs, or just where is the perception coming from?

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: So there’s a course or two or three every year in the history department where we have a problem; it’s not that every course in the history department is a problem, when you look at the numbers, most don’t.

JON BUTLER: Most don’t. But we’re working on—we do have smaller numbers of graduate students, now we have some problems that we largely didn’t have seven or eight years ago, so seven or eight years ago, let me give you an example, seven or eight years ago in American studies we didn’t have enough courses to give students employment as teaching assistants, only in their third and fourth years, every semester. So therefore the students fell into a habit of saying, and in fact a practice that they only needed to TA one semester of two. When then in fact the number of enrollments went up and the number of students went down, graduate students started saying “yes but I thought in American studies you only needed to TA one semester out of two.” So there are changes and practices, and right now we have something of a crunch at the edges, that’s not to say that people on those edges as John Merriman knows well, don’t suffer; because they do. Other courses have adopted teaching assistants, other courses are able to get the subject matter expertise and such, it’s easier to get TAs from say the law school but that it all needs to be, it’s all hand done. There’s one assumption though that I think does need to be questioned and that is that “you can have a TA or you can get a TA if you have a class of more than 36 students,” or something around that. Or even with less, but I’d prefer not to think about that. But I would say at 36 people automatically say they automatically think they get a teaching assistant. That, we probably can’t do that. That’s not in the cards, or because 36 students, then the department, and not just the history department, and I say a lot of the focus here is on the history department, but a lot of departments face the same problem, there are greater needs I would say my own view would be, I can’t enforce this is that certain introductory courses have a much greater call on available teaching assistants than do certain other kinds of courses and that it’s important for the department to talk about that. Otherwise it’s just really willy-nilly, and we don’t have the bodies to furnish a TA for everybody.

MICHAEL DENNING: On the other hand, john, and I agree with what john said about the numbers, but it does seem to me that as long as one talks about this as being part of the training of graduate students in fact I think some of those TAs in teaching in some of the smaller classes are teaching in the fields where they are going to end up having to teach and where fi one puts it entirely on the numbers of the undergraduates, the force is to push people toward the courses that happen to be in subjects that draw large undergraduate

RICHARD BROADHEAD: But you can’t solve it mechanistically. The parallel or competing interests of all the different parties have to be thought of almost case by case to make it possible.

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: And I see it from both sides, I know there are courses which perhaps might not merit a TA but it is an important experience for a grad student to have, and so a teaching fellow may be assigned to a course. I of course have always seen this from a graduate student’s perspective; graduate students participating in introductory courses is critically important if they want to go on and get positions at the main kind of institutions that exist in the united states.

JON BUTLER: It is important to remember that from the graduate students’ perspective, teaching in a relatively synoptic introductory course is their prime opportunity to watch someone go from 1300 to 1900, from 1850 to the present, and to walk into a new job, and as an American historian who has never taught U.S. history, which in fact at Yale we think we do not need to teach, we don not teach, most graduate students who do that are dumbfounded, and we get criticized because we do not offer that. We are one of the few graduate schools that does not offer the U.S. history survey, and therefore they have not seen it done, so what do we do if in my courses that I teach in my field which is American religious history, I want someone to, how do I go from the puritans to the civil war? You have to make choices; you have to explain that’s what you’re really doing when you meet with the students every week. Part of that is that the discussion involves explaining to them how are you going to discuss the whole question of religion, how do you do the puritans in 45 minutes? And similar kinds of topics. It’s very important for a graduate student to understand that. They don’t really learn that in the seminar, in other words a research seminar, an introductory reading seminar is a different kind of experience.

JOHN GADDIS: Could I just bring this back though to the perspective of the undergrads for a second because I think that something the undergrads who are concerned about this issue and I know there are a lot of them who are, need to begin to ask themselves would be what kind of tradeoffs would they be willing to make; it seems to me that it does not take a rocket scientist to know that several courses are going to be in demand and we have some idea of what those courses are, and we could know in the spring preceding when those courses are offered or in the semester preceding when those courses are offered what those courses might be. Would the undergrads then be prepared to compromise the idea of shopping period to the extent of there being some kind of a signup system in the preceding semester for some particular courses? We already have prerequisites for courses; I’ve said in my course on the basis of last year’ experience that I would not have freshmen because I knew the demand was high, this year I was not able to take all of the sophomores who wanted to take the course, and there are no freshmen in the course. Would students interested in my course in some way be prepared to indicate that and commit to that in the preceding semesters so that I would have numbers and I could go to dean Hockfield and I could go to my chairman and if we don’t have enough TAs we could go outside the department and say to political science or the law school or wherever, “we’re going to need this many TAs,” and have that setup and have some time to work with those people before the course is actually offered. So that would be one way of dealing with this. But that gets back to the question of what the undergrads would be willing to do

JOSHUA WARREN: One thing that’s always struck me as weird, and maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way, but I went to Rice, and at rice we preregistered a semester before, but we had an add/drop period that was as long as the shopping period is and I don’t see how exactly you loose flexibility when you do that.

RICHARD BROADHEAD: Let me give you the answer to that one. Yale used to have preregistration where you would register in the spring for your fall courses and we used to register in the fall for your spring courses, and there was an add/drop period. But something in excess of 25% of the courses were dropped and added in the drop/add period to the point where the paperwork involved in making the changes was far greater than if you hadn’t had the registration in the first place and of course if you’ve got that big a swing for preregistration, the figures you get from preregistration are highly misleading if they can be off by as much as 25% across the board. So in the wisdom of the Yale faculty in a time I don’t remember, it was in my childhood I think, the shopping period was invented. This discussion has been good for showing how tied together things are and how many different parts of the problem have to be get defined simultaneously if you’re going to come to a true solution.

JOHN GADDIS: Well what about the concept of selective preregistration for certain courses?

RICHARD BROADHEAD: What would be the selection? You get fined if you don’t take the course? You put that one to the herald readers, and ask them whether they’d be willing to pay fines if they’d dropped courses they preregistered for—

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: Scalping tickets for football games: if you’ve got a drop slip for john Gaddis’s course…

JOSHUA WARREN: But you capped the enrollment of your class: was that a personal decision of yours?

JOHN GADDIS: I had to, I have only 390 seats in the auditorium.

JOSHUA WARREN: Right, so what have you just said: “if you want to be in my class, you have to sign this list the semester beforehand?”

JOHN GADDIS: Well I would like to be able to do that. I would like to be able to have some such system so that I have a better fix on how many students I am going to have, but I don’t know what the mechanisms of this would be.

RICHARD BROADHEAD: The problem could be made trivially easy if you had a strict mandatory preregistration. The reason we don’t have that is deeply founded in the educational philosophy of Yale college which is this is not a school where people don’t just take courses, this is a school where people are interested in the courses that they take, and the precondition for that is they have the ability to check it out, and for us to think that we can set that aside easily would be to go into as deep or deeper an educational issue than we have discussed in the past hour.

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