In the final year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Calgary, I took two classes with a man named Ronald Peter Glasberg. He is a communications, media, and film professor by trade. He was also, as far as I could tell, the most radical man on campus.
Does that mean Dr. Glasberg preached various alt-right conspiracy theories or incited his students to stage dramatic, liberal-minded sit-ins? No—he didn’t espouse any particular viewpoint at all. Instead, what stood out about Glasberg was his approach to teaching: an approach that flew in the face of established educational doctrine.
‘Too easy’
Glasberg’s curricula included an overview of virtually every major religion and philosophy in existence, from the Christian Bible to the Quran to the teachings of Aristotle and Gandhi. His mission was to expose us to as many different worldviews as possible, and ours was to study each one in good faith without jumping to conclusions. Glasberg practiced a principle that I believe strongly in:
Here’s what truly made Glasberg radical, though: he allowed his students to choose their own assignments. It didn’t matter if we wrote essays, built sculptures, painted artwork or recorded podcast episodes— as long as we demonstrated an honest and accurate understanding of class material, we could express that understanding in virtually any way. Far from penalizing his students for holding the “wrong” opinions, Glasberg didn’t even care what medium we did our homework in.
What a strange hack, right? Surely he didn’t last in the regimented world of academia.
Not so. Glasberg has a whole host of awards to his name, and twice in the mid-2010s he was named Best University Teacher in Calgary. That’s because most of his pupils, including myself, could actually engage with his teaching style. Rather than abuse his seemingly lackadaisical methods, we seized the chance to take ownership of our education.
One day, Glasberg recounted to the class a conversation he had with a colleague. He’d been wondering aloud why most universities hire faculty as researchers and then force those researchers to teach, irrespective of their competency in a classroom. Wouldn’t it be better, he said, if our institutions of higher learning tried to fill its lecture halls with the best teachers available?
“That would be too easy,” the other professor remarked.
Glasberg had no idea what she meant. Neither did I.
Quality education
I was not mature enough at 18 years old to have made something meaningful out of a post-high school gap year. Instead, I needed the structure and direction of university life to remain on a productive path. I’m grateful for my bachelor’s degree and my master’s degree, because I gained all kinds of valuable experiences in earning them.
That does not, however, prevent me from looking upon North American post-secondary education with a cynical eye in some respects.
Speak nothing of the exorbitant tuition fees that universities, especially American ones, burden their students with (and then have the gall to ask for donations afterwards). Table for now discussion of mandatory course textbooks with artificially-inflated prices. Let’s circle back to the question Glasberg posed to his colleague: why don’t we hire more professors for their teaching ability rather than just their scholarly credentials?
Those of my friends who took STEM- related majors like engineering and computer science can tell all kinds of horror stories about lecturers who run the gamut from oblivious to disorganized to blatantly incompetent. I’ve heard so many of these tales I can organize them into tropes: the monotone slide-reader, the consistently inconsistent marker, and the foreigner whose understanding of their field far outstrips their command of English (despite the fact that they teach in an English- speaking nation).
I myself once dealt with a professor who was both wildly scattershot in terms of her marking scheme and unexpectedly flippant in how she disrespected her students. Eventually, I dropped that class.
This type of farce should not happen to young men and women who are paying five or six figures for what they hope will be a quality education—and whose prospective career paths often demand extremely competitive grades.
Admittedly, there’s much I don’t know about how universities operate, and perhaps our current paradigm is deeply entrenched for a reason. Still, I find myself siding with Dr. Glasberg on this topic, and while not every class can be like his, I know that he taught more intuitively and effectively than anyone else I’ve ever learned from.
University is a privilege and degrees should be challenging to complete—but only in ways that students stand to benefit from. A good university equips its disciples to think outside the box, both in their field and in life itself. The institutions themselves should try the same thing when it comes to staffing and curriculum delivery, rather than shoving researchers into classrooms by default.
