Universities: The Ubiquitous TA

U.S. higher education is caught with a supply of professors trimmed by the low training rate of the times before and just after World War II and a demand of students swelled by the baby boom of the late ’40s. On top of that, the growth of postgraduate education has forced top professors to concentrate much of their teaching effort on older students. The sum of such pressures is that many universities are turning over a large share of freshman and sophomore teaching to graduate students. These teaching fellows or teaching assistants—often called TAs—have for thousands of students become the prime contact with the university.

Frantically pursuing their own Ph.D.s while they carry a substantial share of the university teaching, TAs are generally the most enthusiastic, underpaid and overworked members of a university teaching staff. They are getting more numerous all the time. Of Harvard’s 1,816 teachers, 893 are teaching fellows. The University of California’s Berkeley campus has 1,303 TAs out of 3,460 teachers. The University of Michigan had only four teaching fellows in its Literary College in 1933, has 579 today.

Facing the Enemy. Most typically, the TA handles sections of 15 to 30 students in introductory courses. He lectures, answers questions, conducts lab sessions, grades the students. He is supervised by a professor, who usually also delivers mass lectures in the course. The TA rarely gets much formal instruction in teaching. “You just walk in and face the enemy,” says Cal TA Roberto Bernardo, 27. For the TA, who may be only a few years older than his students, teaching at a major university is heady stuff and valuable experience. “When we get to talking about our classes,” says Michigan Fellow Solomon Cytrynbaum, 27, who teaches psychology, “it makes me wish I had had teachers like us. I was introduced to psychology by one of the biggest names in the field—and it was the lousiest course 1 ever took.” At best, the TA is the equal of an Oxford don. Harvard Philosophy Chairman Rogers Albritton believes that “teaching fellows are often better teachers than the senior men. They have more energy and interest.” Michigan’s Vice President Roger Heyns boasts: “Some of our teaching fellows would be instructors or assistant professors at other schools.”

Jack Daniel’s & Aristotle. Students find it easier to approach the TAs than the professors, and they exchange views more candidly in a TA section or, as at Harvard, in a small tutorial session. “Occasionally you run into a student who really does know more than you do,” concedes Harvard Fellow Howard Felperin, 24. “Then you don’t get a teacher-student relationship but a mutual inquiry.” Sometimes, admits Janis Hull, 27, an attractive brunette and a three-year TA at Cal, “you have to guard against too much social involvement.” She recalls the “young gentleman student” who stopped by her house “to discuss a poor grade on his Aristotle paper—and just happened to have a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his briefcase.”

If the TA chooses to press his own first interest, which is the pursuit of a Ph.D., the system can degenerate into what Harvard Senior Herbert Denton calls “a kind of WPA for grad students.” Harvard pays $1,080 for each section a fellow teaches, allows him to handle up to three, limits the job to four years. Cal pays $2,500 for a half-time teaching load the first year, with small raises later. Thus while an un married TA can survive on his stipend, a married grad must put his wife to work—and even then, says Cal Graduate Dean Sanford Elberg, it takes a “religious dedication to get through.”

“We constitute an indigent class,” says Cal’s Bernardo. “We live below the labor department’s poverty line.” Thus there are duds as well as diamonds among TAs. One Harvard fellow candidly rates 20% of the TAs in his department as “obtuse and useless pedants.” And undergraduate uneasiness about being distant from top-brass teachers is widespread throughout the best U.S. universities.

“An Enormous Amherst.” Dean Elberg defends the TA system on grounds that “it allows the university to break up large classes into smaller units and then give individual instruction—it begins to humanize the institution.” Professor Albritton contends that Harvard cannot increase the teaching load of its top professors without losing “a certain type of person on whom its distinction depends—Harvard would simply become an enormous Amherst.”

The bedrock defense of the TA system is that it is inevitable in the current state of supply and demand of teachers and students. “Short of a major expansion, I don’t see how the system could be changed,” asserts David Thomas, 30, a fellow at Harvard. And for its admitted defects the system offers an ultimate remedy: when the next baby boom (that is, the children of the now-maturing last one) comes along, U.S. universities should have a much ampler supply of professors, many of them former TAs or students of TAs.