Universities ostensibly aim to promote learning and critical thinking. This is one reason I wanted to become a professor—I share that aim. And this seems to be what most college professors believe too. It’s easy to be cynical. But, in my experience, most professors really do conceive of themselves this way: as purveyors of knowledge and learning.

But, if that’s truly a major aim of universities, then many things about the academy don’t make any sense. I’ve been living in the Ivory Tower for about 20 years now. I’ve seen many different universities over that time. Here are some of the puzzles that I’ve observed:

No background in the learning sciences. There’s a vast literature in educational and cognitive psychology on how we learn and how to effectively teach. While some of this is dreck, certain techniques are well-replicated and highly effective. But, as far as I can tell, most professors know little about this literature. Universities certainly don’t require that professors know anything about empirically-grounded techniques for teaching. It’s hard to make sense of this if a goal of universities is to promote learning. To take an analogy, it would be pretty strange if psychologists knew little about the evidence on how to effectively treat patients—or were never required to learn even a little bit about this.

Assessment of teaching. This knowledge deficit might not be a problem if you could learn effective teaching on the job. Maybe professors don’t need to know about the learning sciences if they could pick up the basics through trial and error. And I think you can—if your feedback mechanism is reliable. But, in my experience, the main mechanism of evaluation and feedback is student evaluations. There’s now excellent evidence that student evaluations have at best a weak relationship with effective teaching. In fact, some studies find that student ratings are negatively associated with learning. So, if that’s your main feedback mechanism, more experience won’t necessarily make you a better teacher.

And most universities seem pretty uninterested in more rigorous ways of evaluating student learning. A personal example: in all my time teaching, no one has ever suggested to me that I try to measure student learning with an externally validated pre-test/post-test. I never even heard of this until I started reading educational research.

Teaching skills. Here’s a piece of educational commonsense: if you want students to learn X, you should teach X, not Y. Take writing, critical thinking, or oral communication. Colleges say that they teach these skills. But, if you want to teach these skills, then you should teach these skills. It’s pretty strange to teach something that’s unrelated, like English literature or political philosophy, in the hopes that students will pick up these skills indirectly. But, as far as I can tell, most classes don’t actually teach skills directly. They instead teach fairly narrow content that most students rapidly forget (or never learn!).

Research. At most top universities and even liberal arts colleges, research is king. To get promoted, you can be a so-so teacher but you must be an excellent researcher. Quick question: why? I have some pretty good hypotheses about what explains most of the above, but this one kind of stumps me. It would be one thing if most research was socially valuable. But, try as I might, that’s hard for me to believe. Let me pick on my own field: political philosophy. Here’s an uncomfortable question: if the volume of academic research in political philosophy were cut in half tomorrow, would anyone notice? Sadly, I can see a good case for the answer that, apart from a couple of academics, relatively few people would notice.

There’s more, but I’ll stop there. What explains these puzzles? Well, the signaling model of education does pretty well. If colleges are just a signaling device/holding pen for talented youths, then much of this makes sense. Our job is to slap a “good worker” signal on students’ foreheads and collect some socially harmful rents while we’re at it. But I’m still having trouble explaining certain puzzles, like the emphasis on research. And, even if the signaling model is broadly correct, there’s still some role for human capital. How to explain the above puzzles if universities are even weakly motivated to actually promote learning?