In university teaching, magisterial courses are as indispensable today as they were in medieval times. In keeping with this, many universities still employ medieval techniques and technology-- classrooms, blackboards and chalk. Even where modern times offer a high-tech twist, with overhead projectors or PowerPoint presentations, lecturers still model their teaching on an ancient system. Students still scribble notes based on oral lectures, when most of the pertinent information is readily, if not more conveniently, available in texts and handouts. In a nuclear-powered, space-age culture, educators and students alike behave as though Gutenberg has yet to be born. But despite its adherence to the medieval model, university education has undergone significant changes, which detrimentally effect the old model. These include a massive student body, uneven classes, the prioritization of short-term productivity, awkward study habits among students and university pressure for big labs and programs.

I always thought that lecturing shared many parallels with stage acting. The successful actor knows how to captivate the audience, and to keep their attention from flagging throughout the show. Clarity is also crucial--for a story to be compelling, it must first be clearly understood. Note that the quality or substance of the information being conveyed often has little bearing on audience satisfaction. A bracing performance can still be carried over by the actor’s style and passion alone. With this in mind, the lecturer conveying both style and substance in the classroom--a rousing performance with an excellent script, if you will--is primed for success.

Style over substance forms the basis of the so-called Dr.Fox effect. In 1973, three medical educators devised an elaborate scheme to discover if an actor, in the role of a noted authority in the field, could effectively seduce an audience of 55 experts on medical education. ‘Dr. Fox’ had phony degrees and publications, and his false credentials were excellent, painting him as a leader in the application of mathematics to human behavior. He presented a seminar on this topic and entertained questions ‘with an excellent use of doubletalk, neologisms and non sequiturs, and contradictory statements.’ Not one of his 55 victims questioned the validity of his presentation. Indeed, the majority was impressed with Dr.Fox’ lecture. This successful hoax served to demonstrate a common deficiency of student evaluations of their lecturers, and the Dr.Fox effect is still widely discussed. Though this study raises many issues, for me it indicates that lecturers must employ all the public speaking skills--if not showmanship--at their disposal to maximize their effectiveness in the classroom. The substance has always been there, perhaps now style deserves a chance to contribute.

While at the University of Tokyo, I was invited to give a lecture. Out of about 60 people, only three dozed off (two undergraduates and a professor). Consider now the circumstances-- a lecture in English to a room full of Japanese speakers, and the common lack of sleep among Japanese students, who often hold outside jobs and face notoriously grueling daily commutes. You can see why I was elated by a mere 5% loss of my Japanese audience! After all, in my regular class lectures, 20% of the students don’t bother showing up, another 10% are lost to sleep and still others chat freely amongst themselves throughout the lecture. The pedagogical experts’ evaluations apparently show that I’m very satisfactory in conveying messages to those students who lend an ear. What about the others? Apparently, the proportion of no-shows and uninterested students is normal for our institution. I don’t believe this must be so, but I haven’t been able to devise some means of improving the situation. Maybe acting lessons?

A crucial skill for the modern student is the proper use of available texts. Learning through reading and the efficient use of reference texts are important not only to promote independent scholarship, but also offer one way to break out of the medieval educational model. Once upon a time, the lecture and note-taking format made good sense, given the rarity of books. Now that every student can possess his/her own textbook, where does the lecturer fit in? Perhaps most effectively as a guide, helping students to find the right materials they need to pursue the given subject. This starts with at least one good text. In choosing a course book then, lecturers should make an effort to critically evaluate all options, keeping in mind that course books often serve as lifelong companions, long after the course itself is over.

Recently, two days before an exam, a student came to my office for help. Her solutions to the assigned practice problems were correct, but she was unsure as to how those same solutions worked. She could successfully plug numbers into the right formulae, but did not understand the principles involved. Further, this student was likely to do well on the upcoming exam.

That students can very often get by on such 'hollow learning' highlights a glaring deficiency in the educational system-- even at primary levels, students are not taught to learn through reading. Perhaps this reflects an enforced fast-food approach to schooling, where educators, faced with overwhelming numbers of students, shift their efforts to emphasize evaluation. As in any Darwinian system, students who adapt successfully to the pressures of rote and plug-in-the-numbers problem-solving will thrive, and even apply such hollow learning strategies in university. To be fair, one cannot blame such students for taking the path of least resistance, but what becomes of the others, the lateral thinkers and creative problem-solvers? In such a skewed academic ecology, creative students often suffer from boredom and a subsequent loss of motivation. These students are in danger of being weeded out at the university level, or in evolutionary parlance, selected against, and so potential innovators are lost.

The present evaluation-heavy system, where actual learning is almost a secondary byproduct, is hardly designed to produce leaders or thinkers. Making changes such that academic success and learning are no longer separate goals poses a significant challenge.

It may come as no surprise that students of mechanical engineering, indeed of engineering in general, ought to have a solid understanding of the principles of mechanics. Newton's second law and the laws of thermodynamics can, when properly learned, persist indefinitely in the student's memory, and can be called upon to cope with a variety of future problems. This kind of fundamental preparedness is the cornerstone of good problem-solving skill. In contrast, solving engineering problems using computer software (truly, the all-purpose black box) suggests a shortcut akin to hollow learning.

The teaching of trendy subjects is often a quick fix, which perpetuates hollow learning, and poses a long-term threat despite short-term gains in productivity. Training students in the use of the slide-rule, for example, was as emphasized 50 years ago as software is promoted today. But just as the slide-rule has become an antiquarian curiosity, so will current software packages slip into obsolescence. In real terms, this translates into a great deal of wasted effort, on the part of both educators and students. The latter will find their hard-earned skill in the use of various trendy tools out of date by the time start their professional careers. In this regard, the integration of software into teaching strategies, even to the point of including them in commercial texts, constitutes in many ways a disservice to students. They become expert software users instead of engineers. A first-principles approach, while sounding old-fashioned or clichéd, nevertheless offers a clear advantage over the utilitarian half-life of trendy, flashy tricks.

During my own student days, an art teacher once explained to me the importance of creating a fine-arts ambiance in the classroom--everyone is encouraged to participate, while the few talented students are allowed to flourish as artists. That this idea of ambiance can be applied in today's engineering classrooms is evident, but going about it would prove no easy task. Today's educational system, surely a mass-production process, presents university lecturers with increasingly larger classes, composed of students with varying backgrounds and levels of ability. Despite assorted entrance requirements, some students still enter the university classroom woefully unprepared, reflecting an overall lack of standardization in their secondary schooling. As any group can only progress as fast as its slowest members, coping with such uneven classes usually means slowing the pace or minimizing in-depth treatment of various subjects. This lowering of standards tends to leave the more talented or motivated students bored and disaffected. How then to provide such students with sufficient challenge while still engaging the rest of the class? Creating an engineering-ambiance would require no small effort on the part of educators.

A remedy for uneven or crowded classes is often the team-project approach, encouraged by lecturers in design, for example. Whether this strategy improves the quality of student learning is problematic. The team approach may indeed serve to equalize disparities in a class by pairing students of various skill levels. However, it may also allow those students having difficulties with basic concepts to fade into the background. They become passive participants and end up learning less as a result. Group scenarios, then, can encourage students to cover up deficiencies instead of working to correct them and improve their performance. As the team concept is common in the workplace, both academic and industrial, the cover-up strategy gains a foothold towards institutionalization.

Though it is my view that individualism is the driving force in university science and engineering research, the team approach is encouraged and favored by administrative powers. This is because the collective approach is more likely to attract greater start-up monies-- big groups, big labs, big money, a simple relationship. However, team-research can only work if the professors involved cooperate with each other and their students to share common tasks and burdens. Otherwise, a few professors (or even one) ends up shouldering most of the practical responsibilities while the rest focus on politics to get their names included on any resulting publications. As team efforts so often degrade into such an antithetical situation, individual research should be promoted, as it allows (forces!) everyone to pull their own weight.

Similarly, graduate students should be able to operate independently from their professors, and in so doing learn the many arts required for conducting research. Professors should be available for guidance and supervision, if required-- they should not do the students' work for them, nor should students be used to do the professor's work.

One money-heavy trend is to propose new university programs and curricula, due to an influx of new funding-- either from governments or else coaxed from the corporate sector. Regardless of its source, the new monies can be used to fund almost all necessities, even if it also allows some to be self-serving. Nevertheless, a flawed system, when fed more money, just tends to get hungrier, even as it fails to produce preferred engineers. New curricula and programs serve only as patchwork remedies, while the teaching of basics and fundamentals is once again ignored in the grand scheme. This is rather like a factory consistently manufacturing defective products, which leave consumers dissatisfied. The introduction of newer, flashier models of equally flawed quality might fool the consumer, but only for a short while. Universities, rather than introducing new programs, should instead focus on issues of fundamental quality. Improving the quality of teaching and of existing programs might be a better use of extant and new resources, and might go further to produce preferred engineers for the marketplace.

University administration operates like any other similar system, with executive and nominal political bodies, a bureaucracy and a governed body. In practice, the executive body (the dean, department chairs, division heads and others) has the power to make executive, political and bureaucratic decisions, while the governed (students and faculty) usually have little choice in these matters. There is little separation of powers, except that the bureaucracy and the governed may run their own day-to-day business. One significant problem is that university administrators are usually academics with little or no practical administrative experience. In short, they are amateurs with a well-meaning, empirical approach, and their experiments usually do not encourage replication. Rather, they result in an inconsistent, confused policy, where an institute's basic teaching philosophy becomes unfocused, if not cloudy. Without clear direction towards the production of preferred graduates, one is left wondering why such administrations even exist. A lack of specialization often signals a concomitant lack of efficiency, and this is most often the case with university administrations run by academic people. Why not have an administration run by specialists and professionals?