The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America

by Jonathan Zimmerman

The first full-length history of college teaching in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, this book sheds new light on the ongoing tension between the modern scholarly ideal―scientific, objective, and dispassionate―and the inevitably subjective nature of day-to-day instruction. American college teaching is in crisis, or so we are told. But we've heard that complaint for the past 150 years, as critics have denounced the poor quality of instruction in undergraduate classrooms. Students daydream in gigantic lecture halls while a professor drones on, or they meet with a teaching assistant for an hour of aimless discussion. The modern university does not reward teaching, so faculty members at every level neglect it in favor of research and publication. In the first book-length history of American college teaching, Jonathan Zimmerman confirms but also contradicts these perennial complaints. Drawing upon a wide range of previously unexamined sources, The Amateur Hour shows how generations of undergraduates indicted the weak instruction they received. But Zimmerman also chronicles institutional efforts to improve it, especially by making teaching more "personal." As higher education grew into a gigantic industry, he writes, American colleges and universities introduced small-group activities and other reforms designed to counter the anonymity of mass instruction. They also experimented with new technologies like television and computers, which promised to "personalize" teaching by tailoring it to the individual interests and abilities of each student. But, Zimmerman reveals, the emphasis on the personal inhibited the professionalization of college teaching, which remains, ultimately, an amateur enterprise. The more that Americans treated teaching as a highly personal endeavor, dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the instructor, the less they could develop shared standards for it. Nor have they rigorously documented college instruction, a highly public activity which has taken place mostly in private. Pushing open the classroom door, The Amateur Hour illuminates American college teaching and frames a fresh case for restoring intimate learning communities, especially for America's least privileged students. Anyone who wants to change college teaching will have to start here.

Genres: History, Teaching, Education, Nonfiction

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Jonathan Zimmerman is professor of education and history, New York University. His previous books include Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century and Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools. He lives in Narberth, PA.

Reviews

[Julian Dunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Amateur Hour is a comprehensive look at what ails college-level instruction in America today. Actually, Zimmerman's investigation shows that for over a century, the complaints from both students and faculty have remained relatively consistent: students decry poor-quality teaching practices like monotonous lectures and rote memorization, while instructors struggle with balancing research and teaching, and in the case of many non-professor-level instructors like TAs and adjuncts, are also hopelessly untrained not only in pedagogy but often in the subject matter they're supposed to be teaching itself!

There are several fundamental causes for this situation, mostly owing to unresolved questions about the role and identity of the university (or college -- I use the terms interchangeably) in society. To wit:

* Is it supposed to be a research institution, or an institution for imparting knowledge?
* Is it meant to be vocational (churning out workforce-ready graduates) or philosophical (teaching individuals how to think and become better people)?
* Who bears primary responsibility for students not learning -- students, or instructors?
* Who bears primary responsibility for students who show up at the university without the prerequisite skills for success -- and who bears subsequent responsibility for bringing them up to standard, if that is even the role of the university? On the spectrum of mollycoddling students versus harsh "get with the program or get out", where should universities lie?
* Is the university meant to challenge students, or give them what they want ("the customer is always right?")

Unfortunately, colleges have long tried to be all things to all people, infuriating everyone and pleasing nobody. The college identity crisis could still result in better instruction over time if not for one additional flaw, which is that university-level instructors are loathe to have their skills observed and evaluated by their peers and supervisors, seeing this as "infringement on academic freedom". In no other profession worldwide would this fly, yet for some reason, instructors in colleges are exempt from actual evaluation. Thus the only measure available to adjudicate their performance comes from mandatory student evaluations, which are an extremely imperfect and often biased instrument that everyone despises. Over one hundred years, barely anything has changed, and it seems unlikely to do so for the next hundred years.

All of this you can glean from the book -- eventually. The problem with it is that Zimmerman's prose is, ironically, itself like a bad lecture! Although his writing is relatively jaunty, he chooses to examine this subject in a completely historically linear way, which results in extremely dry repetition of the facts, and regurgitation of the same themes and observations over the decades by different individuals, and without enhancing the points that he seeks to make as the book progresses chapter-by-chapter. Combine this with an excruciating amount of statistical detail used to justify his points and it makes for a slog. There's just a bit too much inside baseball & citations of long-dead academics and administrators that do not materially contribute to the arguments once they have been made within the first couple of chapters.

Accordingly, I'm not sure at whom this book is targeted. It's far too boring and not compelling for a layperson audience who seeks to understand why college education is so bad. Zimmermann’s arguments are sound, but I've just summarized them above and saved you reading the book. The problem is that the reader has to work extremely hard to get them, which suggests a lost opportunity for Zimmerman to have simply made this more of a popular title: Freakonomics it is not. It’s a shame the book isn’t more accessible, as the subject is extremely valuable to those of us who suffered through a horrendous undergraduate education.

[Ben Mercure · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting history of teaching at university over the past 100+ years in the US. One of the main points of the book is that college instruction is suboptimal because we don’t have a good set of (proven) standards to which we can hold professors accountable. This is due to a number of reasons, including the preference of the institution for research over teaching and professors’ defensiveness of their individual “private” teaching methods. One measure we do have, the student evaluation, is flawed because the student is biased to rate highly professors who give high grades and low workloads. Another trait that students reward, a professor’s ability to “entertain”, is looked down upon by the professor’s peers.

I think it’s important that we improve college teaching, but more importantly, I think we need to understand the objective of a college education in the first place. Is it to prepare students to be good civilians, good employees, or something else? This answer probably differs based on the institution and subject major, so the teaching style will also need to differ. But in a country where there is a lot of momentum behind “free college for all”, I think it’s important to answer these questions.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

great, detailed review of trends in college teaching up to about 1990's, my first full decade as a professor. So some of it was certainly not news to me (e.g., ubiquity of course evaluations, along with professors' doubts about their validity, alongside failure to develop more valid alternative methods to evaluate our teaching), but some of the history was more novel, esp. the widespread reliance in 19th century and early 20th on "recitation" (i.e., one student at a time simply recites a memorized portion of the textbook) as the standard way to run a class.

I'm a big fan of complaining about modern people's short attention spans, but wow, not too surprising that even BITD this was considered a boring way to pass the time in the classroom; I wonder why it ever went down as an acceptable method of teaching, let alone the dominant one.

One theme of the book is extent to which similar reform ideas crop up anew generation after generation (ex. standardization vs. let each faculty member do as they see fit; use of the technology of the day (TV, computers, zoom......) to disseminate the work of teaching stars vs. try to improve teacher training for all; resistance to what little research exists on how best to teach; suspicion of the popular teachers as perhaps shallow personality-driven showpeople............).

I'd say college teaching is about 40-50 years behind my other profession (psychotherapy) in terms of interest in research, but lots of parallels (do you get better with training/experience, or are some just better in the first place? Is the PhD optimal degree to prep for it? How can we get more to follow "best practices"? Are those practices indeed more effective or just the current fads?).

I'm not certain how interesting this would be to readers who are not themselves in the field, so no promises, but an enthusiastic recommendation just the same.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this but I am very much the intended audience. I read it at exactly the right time too - just as the new semester is beginning, and I am working on how to make this year's classes at least a little more effective than last year's classes.
It amazed me, the whole way through this book, how little has changed in this world. Go back two hundred years, and students are complaining about boring lectures, while professors are complaining about unprepared, disinterested students. You read (unofficial) student evals from way back when and they sound basically just like evals today. For generations professors have tried to stimulate discussion, found it to be very hard, and fallen back on lecture. Classes have been foisted onto overworked TAs forever. Grade inflation has been a problem forever. One of the most surprising things was learning that everyone thought TV was going to revolutionize college in the 50s, giving thousands of people the opportunity to learn from the best professors. Only to realize after a few years that taking away all in-person classroom interaction was a mistake. It's just like massive open online courses! It's crazy. It's so funny - every generation has had this moment where they are like "this is it! This will change college teaching forever! It's a brave new world." And then nothing ever really changes. We go back to the same old courses, with some students reporting "This guy is terrible! Boring, tedious, not worth it" and others reporting "Great class! The professor really knows how to get people interested in history." And so things will continue, to the end of time.

[Quintin Myers · Rating 3 out of 5]

For anyone who went to graduate school or works in the academy there isn’t much new here. The historical chapters were enlightening about the reasons college teaching has become what it is. But in many ways I felt myself saying the same thing I did all through graduate school “and that’s why I don’t want a traditional academic job.” The fact that 2/3rds of your time is teaching but it doesn’t help in promotion is just sad. This was an interesting book, and one I’d assign in a pedagogy course like the ones I took in grad school, but it also just hashes out the reason so many graduate students are disillusioned and it’s not going to illuminate that point to a wider audience given it’s an academic press. I’m sure a catch 22 Zimmerman was forced into in the name of scholarship and promotion…

[Deborah Quazzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this history of higher education teaching and learning in the US going back to the 1800s. It makes you realize how engrained the system of lecture/sage on the stage and the elevation of research over teaching has evolved and how little accountability there has been for outcomes and quality. It could have been edited shorter but I enjoyed it. It’s really ridiculous when you think about it.

[Omi · Rating 3 out of 5]

gave this book a good skim, and it's interesting to see the history of how college teaching and the institution of college changed over time in America, and how many of the early problems are still pervasive. some of the chapters started to feel repetitive. would've preferred to listen to this but there was no audiobook

[Neal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative but a bit of a slog. Lots of documentation and first person sourcing but given the cyclical nature of issues surrounding college teaching, it got a bit repetitive. Also, there seemed to be no particular thesis to speak of. Still, no regrets but glad that it is done.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of the book is interesting, and it has lots of cool examples, but mostly it is too long and too dry.