Research, yes! But teaching?

Thank you, Jeff Sherman, for highlighting UC Davis’ research focus and peripheral interest in undergraduate education.

It is great that UC Davis’ best and brightest researchers glean hundreds of millions of dollars of research funds. Unfortunately, those successful research grantees notoriously absent themselves from undergraduate education and deprive undergraduate students of their promised exposure to the university’s best and brightest faculty minds. Thus emerges an inverse relationship between faculty success in funding research and students’ opportunities for intellectual growth.

It is wrongheaded to demean another segment of California’s system of higher education as a device for inferring the superiority of undergraduate education at UCD. If only UCD did as good a job of educating lower-division students as does a community college like American River, there would be no justification for complaints about the first two years of undergraduate education at UCD.

Unfortunately, it has been true for quite a while that students prepared for upper-division work at American River outperform UCD-prepared students.

Jeff apparently requires validation of UCD’s shortcomings. I suggest he do a little research of his own and query instructors in a position to compare the lower-division preparation of UC students vs. American River students.

Then he might move on to instructors who see students immediately prior to the receipt of bachelor’s degrees and ask for an assessment of their English language skills. He would find widespread shortcomings in students’ abilities to read with understanding and write with clarity. If he were to attempt to assess the reasoning skills of incipient UCD graduates, he surely would be disappointed, no matter what his standard.

Instead of attempting to justify the status quo, perhaps his energies would be better applied to cleaning up the mess.

Sterling Chaykin

Davis

Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=117235

Posted by Letters to the Editor on Dec 22 2011.
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