Why Should Professors Care About Their Students?

Years ago at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, I passed a group of graduate students who were responding enthusiastically as one described a position for which he had just been interviewed. “It’s a great job,” he told his friends. “There’s very little teaching, and I’ll have plenty of time for my work.” I wish someone had reminded him that, in fact, teaching was his work.

He might have responded, however, that many highly regarded professors give time or attention to the classroom only grudgingly. Instead, they concentrate on their own scholarship.

In doing so they reflect the prevailing theme of academic life: Publication is the key to advancement. The time you devote to research redounds to your benefit; the concern you show students does not.

This attitude is reinforced by various academic practices. When deciding about salary, support, promotion, or tenure, administrators almost always favor success in publishing over success in teaching. After all, the celebrated scholar focuses attention on the institution, whereas even the most outstanding of instructors is at best a local celebrity, legendary perhaps on campus but unknown outside its gates.

Yet despite the absence of encouragement, some instructors are deeply concerned with whether their students become interested in the subject, grasp assigned readings, understand explanations in class, and view as reasonable assignments, examinations, and grades. Why do these instructors care about such pedagogical matters?

Answers to the question will vary, depending on which ethical approach is taken: consequentialist, deontological, contractualist, or virtue-based. In any case, teaching has an ethical dimension, for instructors have the capacity to help or harm others.

Let’s return to a variation on the story with which I began: Suppose you go to a doctor’s office and overhear the physicians discussing with zest the possibility that one of them might be fortunate enough to obtain a laboratory position that would not involve seeing any patients. As you listen, you realize that these practitioners are concerned primarily with their own research, not with your personal medical problems. In such circumstances most of us would seek doctors who are more eager to provide help. Likewise, students respond negatively to any professor who by word or deed reflects the attitude that teaching is merely a distraction from the essence of the academic enterprise.

Nevertheless, a colleague might ask skeptically, “Why should I put effort  into classes, when doing so doesn’t advance my career?” Here is a version of the familiar challenge, “Why should I be moral?” Whatever the reply, if professors don’t care about their students, then those students are the losers.

Steven M. Cahn

Steven M. Cahn is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The most recent books he has authored are Religion Within Reason (Columbia University Press, 2017); Teaching Philosophy: A Guide (Routledge, 2018); Inside Academia: Professors, Politics, and Policies (Rutgers University Press, 2019); The Road Traveled and Other Essays (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2019); Philosophical Adventures (Broadview Press, 2019); A Philosopher’s Journey: Essays from Six Decades (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2020), and Navigating Academic Life (Routledge, 2021).