On Being an Effective Teacher: an Interview with Dr. Steve Horwitz
Finkel, Donald L. 2000. Teaching with your mouth shut. Boynton/Cook Publishers, March.
Garnett, Robert F. 2008. Hayek and liberal pedagogy. The Review of Austrian Economics 22, no. 4 (9): 315-331.
Also, don’t adjust your dial! The phone connection for this podcast was a little scratchy. The conversation remains understandable throughout, however, and Dr. Horwitz’s insights are well worth it.
Download this interview here.
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Transcript
Chris Martin. Hello and welcome to this Kosmos Online podcast sponsored by the
Institute for Humane Studies. I am Chris Martin, IHS program officer, and today I am speaking with Steve Horwitz, Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics and Chair of the Economics Department at St.Lawrence University in Canton, New York. Steve has authored many journal articles and two books, including most recently, Micro Foundations in Macroeconomics: an Austrian Perspective. He’s a popular lecturer, not least at Institute for Humane Studies Summer Seminars. Today, our topic is teaching.
Specifically, teaching economics. But also general issues connected with being a good university instructor. Steve, thanks for joining us today and welcome to Kosmos.
Steve Horwitz. My pleasure Chris, glad to be here.
CM. Steve, without trying to date you too much, how long have you been teaching economics?
SH. Well it seems like forever, but it’s not quite forever. I think the first time I stepped into the classroom was when I was a grad student at George Mason, that would have been in the summer of 1987, so that makes it 23 years or so. 24 years.
CM. Couple of cycles it’s been.
SH. Yes.
CM. And what’s your typical menu of teaching commitments over the course of the year, so both, the courses you would typically teach at St. Lawrence plus traveling to different FEE or IHS type of events.
SH. Yeah, well at St. Lawrence, our standard load is 3:3. So I’m teaching three courses each semester. Normally that is what we try to do is hold people to two preparations. So I might teach two sections of introductory economics and then an upper level course, say like, American Economic History or my Economics of Gender course, or my Great Depression Senior Seminar. Something like that. And in the spring it might be two sections of intermediate macro. I tend to, I like variety so I have always been one of the faculty members who said, I don’t mind doing three preparations and I like having the variety in my teaching as opposed to just doing two of the same. So, well I mean, that gives you a sense. You know, usually we teach just a couple of core theory classes and then a range of upper level electives and kind of cycle through every third semester. For example, in the spring, I’m teaching my Austrian Economics course which I haven’t taught in over a decade, because for a while I was doing administrative work and all these other things. So, it’s a pretty wide variety here at St. Lawrence. Beyond that, you know, the last few summers its been two weeks at FEE, you know teaching theory and intro to Austrian Economics and then the advanced one. And then a week at IHS doing a Liberty and Society or Morality, Capitalism and Freedom. And then, you know, over the course of the year I might do one or two guest lectures at another university, college, or something like that. That’s all teaching, but I should add, by the way, I like that my, you know, writing on blogs and my weekly column for The Freeman, those to me are teaching to. I mean, it’s a different thing, right, you’re in a different mode and you are writing but you are writing pedagogically, you are writing to teach.
CM. I like that coming comment because we tend to forget that, we tend to think that there is this really distinct separation between teaching and then research or, quote unquote, popular writing on the one hand. But, so, to you it’s more of a spectrum.
SH. Well, you know, it is. And they overlap, right. I mean, we are all, I mean…One way to think about it is we are always, both teaching and research are about argument and rhetoric and persuasion. And it’s about different audiences, and different modes, depending on which format you are in. But, they all share this idea that we are trying to wrestle with ideas, and convey them to other people. And I think, particularly classical liberals also have this sort of, desire to persuade people that certain ideas are really important for understanding the world more effectively.
CM. Right, well that’s great. Actually, let me comment for people who may be listening that FEE, if you haven’t heard of it is The Foundation for Economic Education based in Irvington, New York and they run programs for both graduate students and undergraduates, probably a little more of the latter.
SH. Mostly undergraduates.
CM. But an excellent organization, so if you have any young friends, maybe just starting college, who had the bug about economics, then FEE is a great place to put them in touch with. Steve, having seen you in action over the years at many IHS seminars, you have definitely developed a teaching style that works well, and I know this is a rather large question for our short conversation but how did you get to be the way you are? How did you develop this skill set? Was it something that you always, sort of, had the kernel of even as a young graduate student? Or did you just build it up over the years? Did you look at different books? Maybe watch mentors, other professors? How did you develop this?
SH. It’s such a great question, and I…part of me doesn’t know the answer. I think the answer goes something like this: I do think there is a natural gift element of teaching, that isn’t to say on lots of significant margins you can’t learn. You can definitely learn to get better. But I think some people just have some level of natural skill that they come with, and I think I had that. But I also think that if you look at my teaching evaluations, they have always been strong. Even, I look back at things I did as a young teacher and I think I can’t believe I did that kind of stuff, but I still got strong evaluations. And I think, one of the things I would say, is that: one of the things that students respond to most is faculty enthusiasm. If you convey, how much you love the subject, in my case economics. And how much you love ideas, I think that, in combination with actually liking your students and demonstrating to them that you respect them, that gets you seventy five percent of the way there. I think students react negatively to faculty who clearly aren’t interested in what they are talking about and who either have no concern about their students or actively disdain their students. I think that is one of the worst mistakes you can make as a teacher. Having said that, you know, its also important to keep the line between you and your students. Sort of veering off right here, but the example right now, I think it’s a real mistake to be facebook friends with your students. That to me, it just, that fuzzes a line that I think I am not comfortable fuzzing. I think you need to continue to have some distance. I think for younger faculty, maybe that’s different. But for me, Im not comfortable with it. I need to have certain kinds of lines there that keep that respect and keep that distance there. But back to the main question, I think once given the natural skill there are so many ways over the years that I have developed it. I think even when I was young and sort of knew that I wanted to teach, I was very conscious of teachers even in high school or as an undergraduate. I can think of a few who I have taken things from who I have seen do things or seen deal with students in a certain sort of way that I have incorporated into my own teaching in particular kinds of ways. I think the other two things that are extremely powerful are: there are good books on teaching. One of the things I recommend to a number of younger faculty and to graduate students, some of the graduate students at Mason, is a book called Teaching With Your Mouth Shut, the author’s name is Finkel. And the name is provocative, but the idea in doctor Finkel’s book is that teaching isn’t just about talking, it’s about constructing environments for students, where they can take on a problem or a challenge and teach themselves in certain sorts of ways. And I think that can work very effectively in certain kinds of situations, but just to get you thinking very differently. It gets you out of the, out of teacher centered teaching and puts the focus on learning centered teaching. There is also a marvelous essay, a paper by Rob Garnet, an economist at Texas Christian in a recent issue of the Review of Austrian Economics. It’s a piece on Hayekian pedagogy. And he makes this same kind of point, this Hayekian idea of the classroom as a spontaneous order and giving students more voice and these sorts of things. So I think you can learn from books, but to me one of the most powerful things in my life, as a teacher, St. Lawrence has an interdisciplinary team taught first year program and I have team taught over half the years
I have taught at St. Lawrence, I have been in the classroom with at least one, sometimes two other faculty members. And I have learned so much from being in the room and watching other people teach and having them in the room watching me teach and engaging. And we have a very well rounded faculty development program where we get together and we talk about teaching. And to talk about teaching with a physicist or someone from theater, or these other disciplines that are very different from what you do, is extraordinarily powerful in getting you to think about your teaching, and about how to teach writing, and how to teach speaking and all these sorts of things. I’m just such a better teacher now than I was say 15 years ago, for the experience of having worked with other faculty here in the classroom, particularly my long time teaching partner who we have been working together now for over a decade, and taught together six or seven times. And that’s a very powerful experience to me. So I can’t recommend that enough to people, to be willing to team teach or, at the very least, ask a trusted colleague to come into your classroom and watch you teach. Its very nerve wracking at first. We are used to teaching being kind of private, right. You feel very naked. You feel kind of naked up there. But I also think that is one of the things that is powerful about IHS and FEE in the summer is, though you are not up there at the same time literally team teaching, you know I get to watch great teachers every summer at both places, and I have learned over the years from lecturers and from teachers there. I think that is extremely powerful for young classical liberals who become involved in these programs, and summer seminar type programs from all over the place, that’s a terrific way to improve your teaching.
CM. And they can also look and see, the undergraduates rather can see: Hey this is something I think I can aspire to, this way of communicating. And so that’s a wonderful thing. I liked your point about how the Hayekian pedagogy both for your students, and maybe also for one’s self development as a teacher to, that it shouldn’t just be this isolated, sort of quest. I certainly have felt that fear, of getting up in front of someone and thinking: I don’t want a colleague to see this, I am making all kinds of mistakes, all kinds of errors.
SH. Yeah. And it has to be somebody you trust and who you think will mentor you, as opposed to trying to take you down. So, its complex and, I should say, I have done a lot of that over the years here, being in other people’s classrooms and looking at their syllabi. Its work I love to do, and its very useful if you are a young teacher, to find someone who has got experience of being on the other side. I should add, for young faculty, it’s not just people coming into your classroom, you can go to other teachers. If you are at a college where there is a good faculty member, say can I come visit your class, and see what you do some time? I think it’s great if junior faculty want to do that with me here.
CM. And so, if people are out there listening, and they are interested in these issues, maybe that is something you can do with similarly minded colleagues, graduate students, or faculty members. Say, hey lets help one another improve. So that would be good.
SH. Right, and it doesn’t even have to be a senior person to you. If you have got a bunch of graduate students, and you are both teaching and you want to, sort of, flip flop and visit each other’s classes, they will still see things about your teaching. At the very least, they will notice if you have the annoying habit of saying OK every three seconds or something like that. So even the simple things, someone else who you trust and are comfortable with will notice those things.
CM. I’m not going to get the quote right but there is a Robert Burns poem that has the line: “Oh if only we could see ourselves as others see us.”
SH. Well, that said, the other thing you can do, you can videotape yourself. I don’t like that because I think when you watch yourself teach in those situations, you get so freaked out by seeing all your weird mannerisms that you can’t really focus on what you are doing. I think its much better to have another person in there, who you trust, and can do it in a way that is much more constructive and less strange than watching yourself teach.
CM. They, in a sense, will do the cognitive works of figuring out what you need to do to improve. SH. Right, and I just visited one of my junior colleague’s classes yesterday and you know, part of the experience is you are in there and you have to put yourself in the mindset of the student, while also in the mindset of how would I teach this? So you as the observer are moving back and forth. And its very helpful for a young faculty member to have someone in there who can say, you didn’t see how the students didn’t get this. But I could see it, sitting there, that they didn’t get this. That’s really really helpful as a teacher.
CM. Steve, going off of what you mentioned about engaging the students so that they are not just sort of passive, thinking about the format of lectures, this way of teaching that really came out, I guess, of the middle ages when it was expensive to print, you had to convey information, so lets get the students in a room and have the teacher talk at them and the students will then transcribe that into notes. It’s sort of an obsolete format in some ways, and yet it is universal. Do you think that there is value to the lecture format even today, and how can you make it more valuable? How can you avoid making it just a passive experience?
SH. That’s such a great question. I think it does have real value. As a colleague of mine said, a psychologist colleague said, sometimes the lecture is the most sufficient way todeliver information. And I think there is some truth to that. You just have to be, I think it depends. And, for example, in economics anyway, at lower level courses like an intro course or intermediate theory courses, I do think you need to do some significant degree of lecturing because they cannot acquire all those tools only by themselves. You need to sort of help guide them through the learning process and sort of demonstrate, at least, how this theory works, or what it means for the demand curve to slope down or, you know, all these sorts of things. But, with that in mind, I think as you move to the upper level, then you back off, and then the learning can become more conversational. The learning can become more student centered, do more of that teaching with your mouth shut kind of thing. But even at the intro level, I have exercises I use in my intro class where I am asking students to work in groups and work their way through, understanding, say, elasticity of demand or something like that. There are ways in which you can construct those exercises where they are engaged in thinking and problem solving with one another. You have to be creative, and you have to pick your spots, especially at the intro level. But if you are going to lecture, it seems to me, the key to it is to be extremely audience aware and to be conversational. I think if there is anything about my style as a lecturer, and I like doing that, I think it can be done well, is that it’s, sort of, I am always checking in with students, and I am always making sure they are following me, and recognizing that after about ten to fifteen minutes of me talking they are going to start to zone out so I need to throw an example at them, ask them to apply something. I need to just break the rhythm, and let them have time to process. And that is part of it to, you introduce some new idea, you can wait. Silence is okay in the classroom, very tough for young faculty to get comfortable but let them process it and then say, do you get it? Just as an example, the faculty member I visited yesterday, at one point in his talk in his lecture where he finished a concept and he said to them, now does everybody understand this? Do you all get this? And the room was quiet. I was behind, I couldn’t see if they were nodding or anything, but no one raised their hand to say I don’t get it, but no one raised their hand to say yeah I get it. It was quiet. And he took the quiet to mean, okay they are with me, and he kind of moved on. But what I said to him afterwards was, “well
I am not so sure.” I said, what I would have done is, I would have had another application to throw at them. I would have said, alright well if you guys get it, then you should be able to explain this to me. Right? So that would have shown me if they really got it or not, right?
CM. Especially if someone could explain it.
SH. I think of teaching like coaching, you know. That what you are really doing most of the time inside the classroom, what good lecturers do in economics is they coach students through the material, right? They are saying, I have a skill, you don’t. I can show you how to do this but I also want you to be able to learn how to do it yourself so I am going to show you something, let you do it, and I am going to respond to it, and I am going to show you something else and then give you a chance to do it. And, sort of, you know, that, that’s that always checking in with them to see if they can apply it and do it. Again, I think in other disciplines, you know, it varies by discipline how easy it is to do that sort of thing. But I think the notion of coaching students through material is a very good way to think about what we often call lecturing. I guess the last thing I will say about lecturing is that that word covers a lot of ground. There is the stand up and read my notes I have had for fifty years lecture, there is the Phil Donahue with the microphone wandering around the room, you know. Boy is that an old reference. Im talking but boy I am not standing at the podium and talking to you. And then there is the more Socratic kind of lecture where the person will ask questions along the way, those, to me, are the best ones, right? Because they are the ones that, while they inform you, they are engaging you and making you work at the same time. It is important to say to students that they bear some responsibility for making lectures not passive. With our first year students we will say to them, we are going to lecture today, but you need to understand that doesn’t mean you get to put your pencil down and put your feet up. There are ways that students can be active listeners in lecture, obviously taking notes is part of that. But by asking questions, by paying attention to questions other students ask, you see there are things students can do to engage themselves more in whatever is happening at the front of the classroom.
CM. That’s a really important point, so it becomes a joint project. What are your views on, I guess it’s called cold calling on students. Because I have heard there is some diversity of opinion there, that you might embarrass people. But it seems like a really good way to get that kind of information that you are talking about, like are the students following?
SH. Yeah, I don’t use it. I don’t do it. I think because there are too many students over the years who I know, who just are not comfortable talking in class. And certainly, cold calling on them, it just freezes them. And it’s not a measure of what they have learned. I would rather find ways for the quiet, I would rather… I think if you ask a question like, are you with me? How does this apply to this? And you can tell, a couple of students will raise their hands and they will answer and someone else will chime in and see, you can tell by facial expressions that they are getting it. I am really uncomfortable making… I think it shuts down quiet and shy students if you just jump, you know, out of the blue cold calling like that. I would rather give students ways to communicate with me outside of the classroom, one of the assignments I use in many classes, though I tend not to in larger classrooms for reasons you will understand in a minute, is I have students keep a course journal. Okay? And essentially, what I am asking them is about seven or eight times a semester they have to submit to me one single spaced page of, sort of, questions, reactions, thoughts. It’s not like summary of the readings, but what are they thinking about? I want to know how you are processing this. And it could be anything, it could be something they saw in the news that related to the class, and that’s an opportunity for them…Well, another example is they are taking comparative economics, but they are interested in environmental issues that we are not talking about in the class. Can they apply what we are doing in class to this particular interest of theirs? And it is a way for them, particularly for students who are quiet verbally in class, to interact with me outside the classroom. What I do is, they send me a word file with, say, the one page in it. And I will read it and insert a few responses in bold or something like that. And, sort of, engage in dialogue with them. And then I email it back to them and next time they start another entry, you know, below what we just did. Or they intersperse more comments in what I just said. So, by the end of the semester, we’ve got this, sometimes 20 pages, of dialogue between the student and me. In small classes that is really effective. And I have got to tell you as a teacher that is much more enjoyable than grading papers or exams, or any of that stuff. You are actually involved in conversation with students in a meaningful way. But there are ways to do it.
CM. Of course, its time consuming like you said, you can’t do it in larger classes.
SH. It is. But if I’ve got, you know, fifteen, say, even twenty you can do it. And if it’s twenty you say, you know, six times a semester and you don’t weigh it as much. But it gives those quiet students an opportunity; it gives the really smart students an opportunity to take the course in other directions. And, you know, if you have had a student two or three times, and you know they have an interest in something, you can use that as a place to talk about it. You know, it just, it works really really well. And it’s writing. You know, we think about writing as writing papers but, you know, but this is writing too, and it’s more of confirming that they understand the material.
CM. And it’s fulfilling that function of giving you information about where they are headed.
SH. Exactly, exactly.
CM. Without the dangers of this cold call method. That’s awesome. I’m going to borrow that technique from you if you don’t mind. I hope other people will do so to. So you are already giving us some really practical tips but, I guess, if you had to think of one thing, that economists do in the classroom now that is really harmful or, conversely, some technique that they could do that is really beneficial, what do you think is the most leveraged change based on your knowledge of the way economics is taught. The best thing people could do to improve their teaching. SH. It has to be asking students to see economics in the world around them. Robert Frank has this, Robert, or I think its Thomas Frank, I get them confused. The good one, I think it’s Robert, has this economic naturalist assignment where he asks students to find a puzzle and show how economics would explain it. And I do something like that in intro, I just call it the economic way of thinking assignment, where a couple or three times the semester they have to write like a one page thing, where they take something, either in the news or in their own lives where they observe how they can explain what they are seeing by using things we have talked about in class. So maybe it’s an example of price discrimination, or opportunity cost, or whatever it is, I don’t care. But it forces them to recognize that economics is all around them, and that it’s a way of thinking, as opposed to this set of stuff you memorize. So I think that is the best thing that economists can do, to continually ask students to apply apply apply, and sort of live in that world of the economic way of thinking. And conversely, the worst thing that economists do, I think is teach economics as a bunch of equations and graphs. You have got to do that stuff, and it’s important, and it’s part of the economic way of thinking. But when you fetishize that, when it becomes only about that, and it doesn’t become about conveying the economic way of thinking, then I think particularly at the intro level and the intermediate level, then you have lost them. What turns students onto economics is, you ask any economist and they will identify the moment where the scales fell from their eyes, and they said now I understand the world because economics has made this thing clear to me. I think we as teachers need to spark that moment in students, and I think the way you do that is by continually asking them to apply. One of my teaching mantras in almost any class I teach, though I know I am not always good at following my own advice, is to do more with less. To not overwhelm students with material, but to really go deeply, richly, into material in ways that force them to really develop it, and learn it, and master it. Again, I don’t always follow my own advice in some classes. Right now I am teaching comparative for the first time in a long time and I am very guilty of not following that, and wish I had, but it happens. But I think that is a really good thing to keep in mind. Especially coming right out of grad school, the temptation is, oh I am going to have them read all the articles, I am teaching industrial organization, they have to read every major article. No they don’t. They need to read a couple of things, think of five concepts you want them to get over the semester.
CM. And the other advantage, in a way, of staying focused on the real world is for one’s own intellectual rigor. You could even say some parts of the profession have their own actual understanding of what is going on. But that’s a long story, not for this podcast I guess.
SH. Yeah it is. But, yeah I think you are exactly right. And the other thing I will say is look, Paul Heyne, the great economist had the best line about this. He said, “If you teach intro as if it’s the first class students take, you will be terrible. If you teach it as if it were the last econ class that students will take, you will be great.” If you teach intro as if it’s the last econ class students are going to take, you are going to make sure you emphasize the economic way of thinking, because most of those kids in fact, in your class, aren’t going to take any more econ, or many of them aren’t. So what do we need to get out of this one class? It’s that sort of fundamental view of the world, that you hope they will take themselves as citizens and make them more informed, more critically thinking.
CM. Fantastic advice because, it really is, you have this precious semester in which students can get some tools that they aren’t going to find anywhere else in their lives. It’s a huge responsibility.
SH. It is, I think that’s a good way to look at it.
CM. Well, sort of shifting gears a little bit away from the techniques and the practicalities of teaching. Obviously, you are an Austrian economist, a classical liberal, very dedicated, and are wonderful at conveying that vision to students. When you are not at an explicitly classical liberal teaching forum, you are not at FEE, you are not at HIS, you are at home at St. Lawrence, how do you navigate the issues of being a classical liberal and teaching a discipline that has a lot of view points in it? Do you put Austrian business cycle theory, for example, off to the side? Do you give it equal billing with the more conventional theories? How do you approach those topics?
SH. It really varies from class to class. I think in an intro, or intermediate theory class you have these responsibilities to the discipline. Where you have to make sure they understand the basic models. And while in an intro class you can get a lot of Austrian ideas in if you use, lets say, the Heyne, Boettke, and Prychitko book, which is an Austrian intro book, Austrianish. And that’s fine, but you still have got to make sure they understand supply and demand and those basics. And if you teach intermediate macro, they have got to understand the basic Keynesian model, the Monetarist model and growth theory and all these sorts of things. But you can say, you know there is also this other point of view. Or you can structure things in certain ways that suggest that there is an alternative way of looking at these things. And then I think as you move up, to the upper level classes, you get a little more freedom to teach it the way you want to. My comparative economics course, is basically centered around the socialist calculation debate, and the question is the rise and fall of socialism, and the revolution of capitalism.
It’s a very…Austrian isn’t quite the right word…But it’s certainly a very classical liberal oriented class. But you know, when I teach monetary economics, again, they ask I don’t understand how central banks work, I don’t understand monetary policy. So I think it just varies, students have no doubt what my views are I think, they shouldn’t anyway, but I am not out proselytizing in an explicit way in those classes. I think there is a line you can walk between making clear to students that, there is a…My course has a thesis to it, an argument to it, I have a point of view. I am going to profess something in the classroom, that’s okay. As long as I am open to student opinion, and as long as I am treating students who don’t agree with me fairly, and sort of judging how well they make the argument they want to make, I think that’s okay. So I think it varies, and you have to fulfill the responsibility to the discipline. If you take monetary economics, other people need to know that you got the basics. And that is my responsibility to make sure they do.
CM. Otherwise, they can’t understand the news. SH. Exactly, or if they go to graduate school, or they go to get a job and the employer says, “well you took monetary economics, what do you mean you don’t know what open market operations are?” That’s my fault, not the student’s fault.
CM. Right, right. That’s a great point. And also, I think what you said is very important, that if you are open about the fact that you find one theory more persuasive, you still have to treat students fairly who don’t. And based on the quality of their arguments, even if you are diametrically opposed.
SH. I am the judge, not the jury. When you write a paper for me, I’m not declaring you guilty, or not guilty. I’m the judge saying, “I want to make sure you are following the right rules to make the case that you want to make.” Obviously I am going to push students who aren’t making good arguments, or ones who are making a kind of argument, which I don’t think they can carry out. I am going to push them, but at the end of the day, if that’s what they really believe, and if they can make the argument well, good for them.
CM. Again, that’s another really deployable approach I think. Well, sort of going more into time management, I guess you could say. Obviously, you do a lot of teaching, and you are also very active in researching, you are very active in public intellectual type of activities. How do you approach that? Do you have in your mind, a division of your time? Like, I want to spend fifty percent of my time on teaching this semester. How do you prevent that from being all consuming, or neglecting something you don’t want to neglect?
SH. I have no freakin’ idea. I take it as it comes. Honestly. I tend to be pretty disciplined about not letting myself get distracted by, too distracted, by other kinds of things. Ill say in the morning, Ill give myself half an hour for facebook and blogs, and those sorts of things and then say, now you have got to stop because you have to do these other kinds of things. So I think, at least, you can do all these things, but the thing is to know how much time it takes for you to do things. And as you get more and more experience, you get faster at things. Like with this weekly Freeman column, I thought, how am I ever going to keep doing this once I am teaching three classes? The reality is, if I have the idea, it takes me half an hour to type eight hundred and fifty words. So it’s not that big a deal. You just get good at these things. And organization is key. If you are going to try to do all these things, you’ve got to have an organized email system. You’ve got to have either a to-do list, or a really good memory. You got to keep track of things. The other thing for me is, I called my Freeman column The Calling, and I think that’s part of it. If you are really called to this work, if you really feel like the work you are doing is this obligation almost that you have to get good ideas out there and to make the arguments you think are important, you will find the time to do all of these things. People ask me, do you sleep? Do you have a life? Yeah I have other things I do. In fact, I cleared my schedule today so that I could go back home tonight and watch the redwings on TV. So it’s a matter of being disciplined and organized in how you manage your time. I’m also, it’s one of the jokes among my female colleagues, my married female colleagues, is they say I wish I had a wife. Because balancing work and home is sometimes a bigger challenge. And my kids are now old enough that they are largely self maintaining, so that that is not an issue. But when your kids are young it’s harder to do a lot. You just have to figure out what you can fit in where you are, at the stage in your career or life at home, or whatever it might be. But you know, if you are really committed to it you will find the time to do all the things. You know I have a difficult time saying no when people want me to write something, or speak, or whatever. But you find time.
CM. Which is both the blessing and the curse. Working is something you get such joy in while people who work a 9 to 5 job…
SH. Your right, your right. There is no leaving the office.
CM. I know but that’s both good and bad.
SH. Yeah.
CM. So you seem to be navigating it even if you don’t have a single magic bullet. You seem to…
SH. No I don’t but it gets done somehow.
CM. How do you think this relates to this issue of being at a liberal arts college as opposed to a big research university? I believe you spent your whole career at St. Lawrence.
SH. Yes, I have.
CM. So do you find that it’s a… When you look at your colleagues in research universities do you think, hey man there are some tradeoffs there? Or do you feel that this is the right choice for you? How does that bare then on research vs. teaching?
SH. Yeah, that’s a complicated question. One of the things I like to say about St. Lawrence is that we’re a place that rewards teaching, and supports research. And I think that, in some ways, is an ideal combination. Ultimately, what gets you tenure here, and what gets you promoted, is your ability as a teacher first and foremost, but not only. You’ve got to have a research agenda. You’ve got to be publishing stuff. We have very generous support for faculty travel, and these sorts of things so… this is turning into a St. Lawrence commercial but…I think finding the mix, one of the challenges is, can you find a place that seems to have the balance between those two that matches your preferences? And I’ve been very lucky here that it does seem to match my preferences. I will say this though, in the last few years especially, as I’ve had more publication opportunities, and you know, as I say to people, the recession has been very very bad for most Americans but it’s been great for Horwitz. The demand for Horwitz has never been higher. So I’ve got more things to do, and my profile has gone up a bit, and I’m getting the research bug in a way I didn’t have before. And being at a place where I am teaching three courses per semester, is feeling like more of a constraint than it ever has before. And so when I look at my colleagues at research universities, in the last few years, I had a couple of sabbaticals in there to, I do get a little envious like, well it would be nice if I was teaching even 2:2 or 2:1. I love to be in the classroom, so half my teaching load would be great and give me that time to do more writing, and traveling, and those sorts of things. You know, it just depends on what your preferences and your skills are. But I’ve been very very happy here, and I’ve been treated very very well. And interestingly, I’ll note, treated very well despite the fact that there is no secret of what my politics are, there’s no secret.
You know, here I am on the judge’s show on Fox Business, so there’s no hiding. And the university has publicized that. So I think, one of the things I would say to young classical liberal faculty members is, you do not have to be in the closet. You can be out of the closet, as it were, as a libertarian, as long as you do good work. And I think if you are at a teaching school, you have to be the best teacher you can be. You have to demonstrate that you are concerned about students, that you are concerned about the institution. We think of the folks we know, the folks I know who have been very successful at liberal arts colleges like, say, an Emily Chamlee Wright. I think she has followed that same formula,
which is to say, I’m not going to act like I can’t stand my colleagues, I’m going to be part of this community, I’m going to be a great teacher, I’m going to write, I’m going to do all these other things and take on responsibilities. And, you know, at the end of the day, people don’t care about your politics so much as they care about your pedagogy. I used to joke, that’s the real PC here is are you pedagogically correct, not, are you politically correct. So, if you’re good, it’s an old reference for the younger folks but, Hawkeye Pierce on Mash. If you’re a really really good surgeon, you can get away with a lot of stuff.
CM. Well Steve, I see we only have just a few minutes left so I wanted to throw you a, kind of, crazy speculative question. There’s been a lot of speculation recently that the nature of academia as an industry may be about to change. That the rise of online education is going to mean that maybe some universities are going to close. And particularly the industry is going to get refocused on the value provided to students. So the student, the consumer, will become king, and maybe arguably extraneous parts of the industry will get stripped out. Do you buy that argument? Or do you think that is going to have an effect on how teaching is valued going forward?
SH. Yeah, I think those are some real concerns. We are certainly talking about them here as an institution. How do we convey to people that $52,000 sticker price, and again not everybody pays the sticker price, but what’s the value from that? What are you getting out of that vs. when you could go out and take an online course or all these sorts of things. So I think, what’s happening is, it’s forcing teaching intensive places like mine to really think very carefully about what our value added is, what is it that we deliver for students that other things can’t deliver? And we know from the research, I was just looking at a New York Times piece today that said something like one on one mentoring is one of the most powerful learning tools that we have. And, teaching oriented places…I think what we are going to see happen is the teaching oriented places are going to move to try to give students more and more experiential kinds of opportunities, to get them out doing internships where they are working closely with alumni. Or opportunities to do research. And I think it is going to change, I’ve already seen it happen here in the 20years I’ve been here. I think we are going to see, even the teaching oriented institutions are going to change the way they do things. I think it will be more, as you said, more consumer driven. That students will have more power, more ability to shape their own education. Just think of how blackberrys, you know smartphones, have changed the classroom in the following way: I can walk in the class now and we’ll be talking about something and I can say, gee I wonder what the growth rate was in the Soviet Union in the 1950’s? And there’s a kid with a blackberry or a notebook ready, who can look it up, right? Or alternatively, and more dangerously, as it were, I say something in class, kid thinks, that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, looks it up on his blackberry and a hand goes up. He says, so what are you talking about? Right? I mean, when I speak to libertarian student groups I say, you guys don’t realize how great you have it. When I was in college, and some faculty member said some crazy thing, we had to go to the damn library, and spend hours researching it. You’re sitting in class with your blackberry going, that’s stupid I can get all of this on a website and find out what income mobility numbers are or whatever. So, it’s a really different world. It’s a much more challenging world for faculty because we don’t own the information anymore. But what’s not out there is knowledge, and wisdom, and context, and these sorts of things. So I think part of what we are going to see college teaching become increasingly about is not conveying information, but helping students to evaluate information, to become critical thinkers, to be communicators, to learn how to use new media in these kinds of ways, to learn how to technology in effective ways, to sort through the maze of information, and to make good judgments. That, I think, you can’t do online or from a distance. That has to be through interaction, some sort of human interaction. I think good teaching will always be there the same way good coaching will always be. But the industry is going to change. And I will say that the lots of smaller liberal arts colleges who can’t adapt to that change, I think, are going to bite the dust. Because it’s harder and harder to make the case for that kind of money. Even with aid, for that kind of money, unless you can really identify what your value added is.
CM. On the individual level, we can also say that individual teachers and scholars will probably face some of these same effects.
SH. Yeah, I think so. And I think one of the most interesting developments is the independent scholar, blogger, writer. You could make a living, you know, like I do. Lots of young people in the libertarian movement who are making a living with, its not clear what their job is.
CM. Well Steve, you’ve certainly given us a lot of fascinating and applicable hints that those of us who are just learning to teach can apply today.
SH. Well, thanks for having me. It’s been my pleasure to be here.
CM. Our guest has been Steve Horwitz, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics and Chair of the Economics Department at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. For more interviews with leading scholars, visit our website at kosmosonline.org. Kosmos, connecting the network of liberty advancing academics.