Why Teaching Still Gets No Respect in Doctoral Training

Academics are in love with our own past. Our libraries contain yards of books on higher-education history, recounting the stories of institutions and fields. Next to those books are biographies and autobiographies of prominent presidents such as Charles Eliot and Hannah Gray, and famous professors like Richard Feynman and Edward Said. Yet the first full history of college teaching in the United States has only lately appeared. Why did it take so long to chronicle the one activity that professors have engaged in from the very beginning? The book’s title offers a clue: The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America.

Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, argues in Amateur Hour that teaching has been ignored until relatively recently because it “has never been professionalized.” Historians aren’t the only ones who have ignored it. “College teaching,” he writes, “is a highly public act that has remained mostly private.”