As I have wrapped up my beautiful GPP’22 trip to Europe and got a taste of higher education systems there, I sit down to reflect on what I had observed and learned. In the next couple of posts, I intend to summarize my “afterthoughts” and reflect on them, to the best of my ability. My thought process will be more often than not anecdotal, and possibly biased. Naturally, one also needs to be careful not to generalize across different countries or types of universities. Yet, I aim to give a thought-provoking account that hopefully encourages a broader dialogue about what education really is.

In this post, I start with the subject of “teaching”. This might sound like an underwhelming choice. But is it though? I mean, how often do we, PhD students, actually think of the university we are part of as a platform of education, as opposed to a research institute? Here, I would like to compare and contrast my European brief experience to the one I have grown accustomed to in the past few years.

During GPP’22, my cohort and I got to visit several universities in Switzerland, France, and Italy. At each university, I was able to sample some data points that helped me better understand how teaching is perceived by the students and/or faculty there. At Politecnico d’ Milano (PoliMi), a technical university with both graduate and undergraduate programs, I asked our host and PhD school dean, Prof. Daniele Rocchi, about the school’s attitude towards the “teaching vs. research” dialectic. His answer shed light on two practices that were quite in contrast to what I am familiar with:

• Faculty evaluation: Unlike at a typical R1 university in the USA, where faculty evaluation is almost entirely based on their research output with little to no weight that accounts for their performance as educators, PoliMi’s faculty evaluation is much more balanced in terms of teaching and research. While research still accounts for a larger weight, the students’ classroom survey can potentially skew the professor’s evaluation, which in turn affects their funding. Such a measure can be very effective at keeping the professor accountable for the passion and effort they show in class.
  It is important to point here that at most European public universities, funding is heavily dependent on the state, not agencies. This is a major factor that allows the school to decide what criteria affect a professor’s evaluation.
• Research in the classroom: Additionally, it is the culture and an established practice at PoliMi to encourage faculty to bring their research to the classroom, making sure the students are exposed to the latest in the field. This approach views research as an augmentation to teaching, rather than a detractor.

Similarly, at Zurich University of Applied Science (ZHAW), our hosts from the linguistics department emphasized that their faculty are expected to treat research and teaching equally without spending too much time on research at the expense of class preparation.

To me, these instances stimulate an intellectual conversation in response to the culture shift from the system with which we are familiar. The current norm of a typical R1 institute is not the only fathomable way. Teaching is not doomed to take the back seat in the presence of research goals. The status-quo is the product of a system of incentives that can be changed if we are willing to consider the benefits of such change. Finally, if none of what I said convinces you, I invite you to ask the question: What quality of next-generation researchers are we fostering in our classrooms today if we are not willing to give our students the best teaching?