In a 2010 blog post, published in Applying Principles, pp. 52–54, I express my surprise at how much I enjoyed working in business, as opposed to being a student. In my recently republished pamphlet “How to Survive Graduate School,” I give a bleak description of the academic world, especially for anyone pursuing a PhD degree. I acknowledge that exceptions exist, of course, but not in my experience. Below is a description of many of the professors I endured as a student in both undergraduate and graduate school.
I write this partly because I have encountered adults who say they enjoyed their college experiences (the academic part, not the extracurricular activities), including graduate school. I have always been surprised by these confessions, often leaving me to speculate about how serious such persons were about fundamental ideas, especially those who professed to be students of Ayn Rand. But I will give them the benefit of the doubt on the assumption that they went to better schools than I and had better professors.
First, what is a good professor? One who lectures—a rarity in many colleges today and certainly when I was a student. See my post, also from 2010, in Applying Principles, pp. 174–75, where I defend the lecture as essential aid in summarizing and clarifying the text, adding relevant material and examples to enhance the student’s understanding. Lectures, above all, must be relevant to the course description in the college catalogue, not lengthy digressions on, say, the Vietnam War, as they typically were in my day.
Historians (ancient and American) in undergraduate school and statisticians in graduate school were good professors who met the criteria I just specified. (Accountants also, but I only took one accounting class.) The best professor overall was Leonard Peikoff, from whom I took two philosophy courses in 1966 at the University of Denver. (See the preface to my latest book for more on that.) Professor Peikoff had the uncanny ability of throwing off one-liners that not just clearly illustrated a difficult concept in philosophy but were also funny. Young and naïve as I was, I naturally assumed that all of my subsequent philosophy professors would be just like him!
Not even close.
I did not declare my major as philosophy until my sophomore year. I had heard that a youngish graduate assistant had taken Dr. Peikoff’s graduate seminar the previous year on Objectivism’s theory of knowledge, so I chose him as my advisor. At our first and only meeting I asked him what he thought of the theory. He said that Ayn Rand’s use of measurement was “cute.” I don’t recall his subsequent words, but “simplistic” and “not profound” were most likely. For any future advice that I may have needed, I just read the college catalogue. I never had him for a class.
Only one philosophy professor was what I would call “good,” though not outstanding. She had studied under Brand Blanshard at Yale and taught the history of philosophy courses.
As for a “rogue’s gallery” of professors of philosophy and other subjects during my undergraduate years, here they are:
A freshly minted PhD from Yale in his course on ethics made a reference to Ayn Rand as “that broad with the 48-inch bust.” Message to me: don’t think of mentioning her name in his class. I didn’t.
In a course on Hobbes and Rousseau, I wrote a paper arguing that Rousseau was a collectivist. Obviously, said the professor, I did not understand Rousseau. B. Not an atypical grade for me when using Ayn Rand’s name in a paper.
I did get an A in the course on mathematical logic, though the only thing I remember about it is that it involved a lot of p’s and q’s. This, no doubt, prompted me to spend my spring vacation reading H. W. B. Joseph’s Introduction to Logic and just as promptly was ridiculed by the Hobbes and Rousseau professor for having wasted my free time on such an ancient and outmoded text.
In a course on the Philosophies of Democracy, the oldish, former chair never lectured, but conducted the class more like a dormitory bull session, i.e., a seminar. He also was concerned about being “cool” in the eyes of his young students—this was the late 1960s, after all. We read the anti-capitalists Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, and James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution.
Other subjects: The Cultural Anthropology professor, in a megasection of 160 students, spent the first ten minutes of a 50-minute class, going over his seating chart to mark down students who had not shown up. His exams were true-false questions, and not many, perhaps only ten or twenty.
The only thing I remember from the megasection of the Paul Samuelson Economics course is “guns or butter.” The professor kept saying we—meaning “society,” the collectivist “we”—have to decide whether we want more guns (this was the Vietnam era) or butter (consumable goods).
In a freshman English class, the assignment was to write an argumentative paper. So I summarized Ayn Rand’s epistemology. The professor was a freshly minted PhD from Princeton who, more than a couple of times, could not get his you-know-what out of bed in the morning to make it to his 8am class. After reading my paper, he said that it was the best paper he’d read written by a freshman—dot, dot, dot—“but I didn’t like it.” B. It apparently was not what he had in mind for argumentative writing.
Then there were the seminars. I took several. Dr. Peikoff, I was told, lectured in his seminar on the Objectivist epistemology. None of my professors did anything close to lecturing and I resented having to pay money to listen to other students talk. “Dormitory bull session” is an accurate description of seminars. In one philosophy seminar, the only thing I remember is that a classmate said the cockroach will be the only thing to survive a nuclear holocaust! (We did read Blanshard’s two-volume The Nature of Thought, which was well worth the read.)*
On to graduate school (Baruch College of the City University of New York): the teaching was worse:
One professor stood up in front of class badly trying to reword the text and call it a lecture. Another on money and banking—well, I don’t remember a thing he said. After class, I would look at my notebook and find that I had nothing written down.I chronicle more in my “How to Survive Graduate School” pamphlet, including especially my adventures with committees. The most curious one was what was called a “position paper,” the one in which a professor on the committee, said, as I write in the pamphlet, “Marxists are so badly discriminated against in this country.”
Still another balanced his checkbook in the back of class while we were “working” in our groups, figuring out who was going to do what to piece together some kind of communal (collectivist) paper. The typist was the lucky one who did not have to do any research or reading!
On the second occasion when we were “working” in our groups, this same professor went home. After about a half hour, which we assumed was time enough for him to get home, the lights of New York City went out for the second time in history—the blackout of 1977, reminding me, of course, of Atlas Shrugged. The problem with this blackout is that we were in lower midtown Manhattan on the 19th floor of a building at 26th street and Park Avenue. I lived in Flushing, Queens. After getting about halfway to my apartment (walking, and hearing plate glass being broken behind me by looters), I spotted a cabbie who stopped to take me the rest of the way home. He didn’t want any money, but I paid him anyway. The character and generosity of New Yorkers usually comes out in situations like this.
Once in the doctoral program (beyond the MBA), the teaching continued to get worse. The finance professor put seven or eight books on the reading list, but told us not to buy any of them because he just put them there to get free copies from the publishers. (Business ethics anyone?) The course was all math based on perfect competition theory.
The professor of organizational behavior (formerly called industrial psychology or, sometimes, worker motivation and behavior) asserted at the beginning of class that the group is now the unit of analysis, not the individual.
Advanced micro- and macroeconomics classes were all math, based on perfect competition. A managerial economics class was all math and, of course, a forecasting class was all math. Foundations of Behavioral Research was all positivism, and quantitative.
There was a class on calculus and trigonometry required of all doctoral and MBA students. The professor was good, but he catered to the MBA students who could not remember their algebra. We never got to partial differentials.
There was one class that was quite good—on how to use the library! It was a zero-credit course, required of all doctoral students. Everyone tried to get out of the class, but no one ever did. The professor was a PhD in library science and gave us valuable information about the sources and functioning of libraries. The assignment was to write an annotated bibliography of a subject or author, based on the contents of the school’s library. I chose Ludwig von Mises. Quite a few of his books were in the library.
Then, there was the advanced consumer behavior research class that was actually a course on multivariate statistics. The professor did nothing. We all had to prepare and make presentations. When I was doing mine on canonical correlation, the professor nodded off. I was tempted to slam a textbook on the floor or a desk, but, probably wisely, chose not to. The professor’s reputation preceded my attendance in the course; I did not want to take his class, but could not avoid it. I learned next to nothing.
A finance professor did discuss capital budgeting in class, but also said that he was not going to discuss six or eight chapters of the text that were to be on the exam. I accumulated about twenty pages of notes on those chapters, condensed them initially to about eight or ten pages, then finally to three, which became my study notes. The process was one of essentialization, which enabled me to retain an enormous amount of material. I aced the exam. I did not appreciate the professor’s abandonment of teaching responsibility.
This professor, who received his PhD from New York University when Mises was there, made a derogatory comment about “those people who wanted to study with that von Hague fellow.” Yes, “Hague.” I think he was thinking of Hayek, but did not know that it was Mises who was at NYU, not Hayek.
I say “curious” about the position paper because I had already written a master’s thesis. I suspect it was put in the curriculum for doctoral students who bypass the MBA and go straight to the PhD. Someone on that committee said that my paper was not really a position paper. I had presented three schools of economic thought—neoclassical, Chicago, and Austrian—and what their theories had to say about marketing, taking my stand, or position, with the Austrians. Much of this paper ended up in my book In Defense of Advertising.
I think the position paper was supposed to be, in good positivist fashion, a review of a few dozen statistical studies and my concluding judgment of how the studies had “advanced” science.
The committee, without putting it into words, convinced me that my subsequent book on the defense of advertising would never fly as a PhD dissertation.
So much for my rant about professors. I don’t know if I would survive in today’s academic climate. Politicization is everywhere. Censorship, punishment, and firings for saying and writing the wrong thing are rampant.
It would probably drive me to seek a job as an electrician—and make upwards of $200,000 a year!
Why is academia so bad and unresponsive to its paying customers? I answered that question in Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, chapter 5, especially the section on bureaucratic education. Schools, all schools, including the universities, are bureaus of the government.
Hey profs—I want my money back!
* I think the model of a good seminar is that of the professional musician’s master class given to a number of students of a particular music teacher. Each student performs a short piece or study. The master then critiques and recommends solutions to problems, to improve the student’s technique and expression of the music. The Ludwig von Mises seminar at New York University, so I’ve heard and read about, began with Mises, the master, talking about some issue for about 30 minutes or so, followed by questions from the group with Mises analyzing and answering the questions. Often, a student would read a paper, followed by the master discussing what was presented. Only once was I present at a master music class (as observer, not student) and never did I experience a master teacher in a seminar.
