Faculty lounge: Harvard's new president explains why college professors can't teach.

• Author: Beale, James
• Position: Our Understanding Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More - Book review

Our Understanding Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More By Derek Bok Princeton University Press, $29.95

A Story I was once told begins with two young men floating in a hot-air balloon across the countryside. After a while, they realize that they have drifted off their intended course and are lost. Seeking help, they call out to a man in his yard below, asking him where they are. "You?" replies the man. "Why, you're in a balloon."

The young men look at each other knowingly. "You're a professor at the local university, aren't you?" one calls back. "How did you know?" responds the man.

"Well," the young man yells, "what you just told me was accurate, but has absolutely no practical use."

It's hard to think of anything more central to a university than teaching. But in the academy, the most obsessively scrutinizing of worlds, pedagogical quality has gone largely overlooked. As a student at a well-regarded university, I've seen firsthand over the last few years how easy it is for students to complete college courses simply by cramming for tests twice a semester while tuning out the rest of the time without mastering the material.

The cause of improving teaching quality--and of perhaps imparting practical knowledge to students--now has a well-placed champion: Derek Bok. The Harvard professor spent 20 years as president of that university before stepping down in 1991, and is now taking over the world's most prominent academic post once again as an interim fill-in for the ousted Lawrence Summers. In his new book, Our Underachieving Colleges, Bok argues that American colleges and universities are paying insufficient attention to teaching quality, and in doing so, are leaving students unprepared for the challenges of the modern world.

Bok calls academia "the only professional system that doesn't instruct its newcomers in how to do what they will spend most of their time doing." The problem, he believes, is institutional: Nobody teaches professors how to teach. New professors--often young and overworked--are assumed to know instinctively how to lead a classroom. So they teach the only way they know how: the way they themselves were taught. This creates a fundamentally conservative bias in the world of pedagogy.

This might be less problematic if we knew that the old ways were effective. But colleges refuse to accurately measure the effectiveness of specific teaching methods--leaving the instructors...