UC Berkeley is far better known than Tsinghua University, the best university in China. Of course, Berkeley’s prestige rests on research and graduate teaching. At the undergraduate level things are quite different. Tsinghua probably has the smartest undergraduates in the world (1 in 10,000 students who take a national test get in); Berkeley isn’t close.
At Tsinghua, every department is assigned a quota of undergraduate majors (e.g., 100) that is the maximum number of undergraduates in that major. The departments fight over this number: Every department wants to increase it. I use italics because the situation at Berkeley (and probably every other American research university) is the opposite: Everyone fights to do as little undergraduate teaching as possible.
I learned these facts from a visiting professor at Tsinghua. Why is the situation so different at Tsinghua than in America? “They’re fun to teach,” he said, meaning the undergraduates. “No one ever says that at Berkeley,” I said. Later I learned he was a visiting professor from Berkeley. Implicit in his comment was that both of us knew that the Berkeley undergraduates are not fun to teach.
That little comment — “They’re fun to teach,” which was said a bit ruefully, acknowledging that Berkeley, where he spends most of his time, was much different — expresses in a nutshell what’s wrong with all American higher education. Berkeley undergraduates would be fun for someone to teach. I liked many of them. They have many good qualities. But very few of them want to be professors; nor do their talents usually lie in that direction. Forcing them to be taught by people (professors) who really only know something (how to be professors) that their students don’t want to learn, and forcing Berkeley professors to teach students who don’t want to learn the only thing they really know, is just a recipe for unpleasantness and low-level misery on both sides (professor and student). That’s exactly what professors and students feel most of the time.
Just as drug companies hide the side effects of their drugs, both professors and students hide the side effects of this life-wasting situation. At Berkeley, few non-professors know the vast array of deals that are struck to reduce one’s undergraduate teaching. In Psychology, there has been long-lasting resentment that you can’t use grant money to buy your way out of teaching. Students hide how much cheating goes on. A Penn student told me: No student project at Penn is completely honest. At Berkeley, surveys have revealed high amounts of cheating. Few outsiders know the low level of lecture attendance at Berkeley.
A better system would be one that helped Berkeley undergraduates — not to mention the students at every other American college — be in contact with people who would enjoy teaching them. (And in that situation, I’m sure their many non-academic talents, which professors usually didn’t notice, would shine.) Simple as that. The current system hinders that contact. Columbia University has taken a step in the right direction by having no classes on Friday, making it easier for students to do internships. When I taught a class that helped Berkeley undergraduates learn what they wanted to learn, my colleagues complained. According to them, my students weren’t learning proper psychology. It’s true, they weren’t. My students were learning what they themselves wanted to learn instead of what some professors thought they should learn. My approach was about a thousand times more effective in producing learning but my colleagues had lived in darkness so long they could no longer see light.