Allan Tupper discusses his book, <em>No Place to Learn, Why Universities Aren't Working</em>.</font>

No Place to Learn Why Universities Aren't Working

Photo: Permission provided by Allan Tupper

Allan Tupper is Associate Vice President (Government Relations) and Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. A native of Ottawa, Dr. Tupper is a graduate of Carleton University (BA, DPA, MA) and Queen's University where he received his PhD in Political Studies in 1977.

For more than 20 years, he was Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta. He served as Chair of the Department of Political Science, Associate Dean of Arts and Associate Vice President (Government Relations). He was also Vice President (Academic) at Acadia University. His major teaching and research interests are Canadian politics, western Canadian politics, public policy and public administration. He has published extensively on these topics and has authored or edited six books and many articles and chapters. Dr. Tupper is Editor in Chief of Canadian Public Administration, the internationally-known journal of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. He chairs the Centre for Constitutional Studies, an established research institute for the interdisciplinary study of constitutional and human rights issues in Canada and abroad.

Dr. Tupper is actively involved in community outreach, public speaking and media relations. He is a frequent commentator on regional and national media. Dr. Tupper has been an instructor at the Banff School of Advanced Management and the Senior Executive Development Program of the Government of Alberta.

No Place to Learn

Why Universities Aren't Working

Tom Pocklington and Allan Tupper

A description of this book and how to order this publication is available online at UBC Press.

Aurora: You wrote this book together with Tom Pocklington when you were at University of Alberta. What prompted you to write the book?

Allan Tupper: By way of brief background, the book had a long journey, as many books do. The origins of the book were not in anything to do with the book. Essentially the precipitant of what led to the book was a political science question, a very conventional question that interested political scientists. The issue was the release of the Stewart Smith report on Canadian universities. At the time we simply were interested in it as political scientists. The point of interest was that, whereas Smith wrote a long report on behalf of the Association of Universities of Colleges of Canada (AUCC) that said many things that were thought to be the case-universities needed more money, they were poorly funded compared to universities in the United States-it also raised some unexpected questions. Notably the view that universities' undergraduate teaching was not nearly as good as it should be and that probably teaching and research don't reinforce each other, in fact they're conflicting principles or undertakings. What concerned us as political scientists at that time was not really the university side of it, but the political response, which was a severe reaction by the universities of Canada and many spokespersons in them paying almost no attention to the laudatory comments in the Smith Report, but being high critical and going very far out of their way to reject his claims about teaching and about teaching and research. Given the fact that arguments about the quality of teaching and the links between teaching and research are pretty old in universities-these are not new-we became very interested in what exactly drove this very intense reaction across Canadian universities that apparently reflected most professors' views. It seemed to us, given the amount this issue had been debated, to be a little puzzling, a bit of an overkill. The next step was nothing to do with the book or any writing, it was we said well maybe we should teach an upper-year seminar in the politics of higher education in Canada. In the course of doing that, having decided from an intellectual perspective there might be a need for a course. We did the course. That provided the second impetus, the impetus being that most of the students there (and we taught it for several years) were good students from all across the university, many different faculties. The strongest theme was that their university experience had disappointed them. They got into many explanations of it, but cited things frequently like lack of professorial attention to them, professorial preoccupation, and so on. That was the thing that really got us into the book. From there, ultimately, it was a long journey. This was almost 10 years ago. We did bits and pieces of it, and did other things in our careers, and pursued our normal research interests. But then ultimately three summers ago said, are we going to write this book or not? And then proceeded to do so.

Aurora: Right at the beginning at the book you've alluded to the quality of teaching. You're quite up front stating the thesis of the book-that you essentially no longer believe that Canadian universities provide effective high-quality undergraduate education. What, in your opinion, is or should be the principal business of a university?

Allan Tupper: A good question. Our argument in the book is controversial, and I think a lot of people actually missed it. But we did say quite directly that we believed the most important undertaking of a university was the teaching of undergraduates. And we didn't just assert it, we argued it. Principally, the argument was that strong undergraduate teaching is foundational. Everything else flows from it. No higher education system, no university, can ever reach its potential if it is in any way lacking in its undergraduate program, the logic being essentially that a very outstanding program of prior general learning is required for advanced learning, graduate studies, and more importantly for any form of serious research. So we made an argument in that, that we acknowledge that the university has many activities, but that we see teaching of undergraduate as the preeminent one and the most important, the others being subordinate to it. In that respect, the book is profoundly different than other people's view in today's world.

Aurora: That ties in nicely with the next question, that's this whole myth of mutual enrichment. You've reserved almost an entire chapter dealing with that. When you talk about the interaction between teaching and research, at universities a lot of people make a strong connection, rightly or wrongly, between the two at a university. What's the explanation for that? Is that a historical artifact, or is that wishful thinking, or is it they happen to be doing both so there must be a tie-in?

Allan Tupper: It's a good and a complex question at the same time. This has been the most controversial part of the book. This seems to be still the matter that irritates or upsets many university people who have taken this mutual enrichment to heart. Our argument was that there are undoubtedly areas in a large modern university where teaching and research reinforce each other. But there are quite few, and they tend to be in the upper levels of science and health sciences field, when there's a very close relationship between a teaching professor and an advanced student. However, it's very difficult to replicate that in other areas. Essentially, our argument was that it's quite clear that in practice there are not strong links between teaching and research, and there need not be, which is another part of it. We cited a considerable number of arguments about that. But we also made the point, and I think at some length, that we thought the principal purpose of the teaching and research idea, the mutual enrichment hypothesis, is in effect to justify a lot of current university practices. For example, it certainly extends advanced social status on professors to say that at one and the same time they are excellent teachers, outstanding and important researchers, and creative contributors to their community, etc. It presents an image of a university professor and a university itself as something very special and very distinguished in society, as opposed to a mere teacher. So we see that there's a very political (in the broad sense) role of this in a large university. We made the other point too that it's very essential. Given the nature of the university, given that undergraduate students are at the heart of it (and numerically they're by far the dominant students) and that they contribute a substantial amount of revenue to the university as well, there needs to be some argument in place that justifies universities' tremendous contribution to research. The mutual enrichment idea is that link. If therefore the university can justify tremendous amounts of effort and time spent on research and money, by arguing that it's really, contrary what logic might say, in the students' best interests. So we spent a considerable amount of time at that. It's very much a conditioned view of a lot of people in universities. Even if some people can see that there's undoubtedly problems in many areas with linking teaching and research, but they generally argue more effort should be made to link it, and it's not that there's a problem in principle, it's simply that the links between them have not been done well enough. But our view is quite contrary on this one, we believe the essential requirements of undergraduate students are for general learning, and the vast amount of professorial research these days is of the frontier research variety, which is quite specialized.

Aurora: I just want you to expand on that a little bit. With the mutual enrichment, you just talked now about how the teaching and research are independent of each other. But when you were introducing why you had written this book together with Tom Pocklington, you actually said that they were contrary to each other. So is it more than just being independent, and they may or may not have a connection? Or are they actually working against each other?

Allan Tupper: It all depends. Again, it's a good question. I think that, in many instances, they are clearly contradictory, because they consume professorial time. There's only so many hours in a day. If the functions are quite different, if you're pursuing narrow research, you're unlikely to be advancing or undertaking your commitment to students. At the end of the day, it's not merely that they're isolated from each other, that you can argue in that context that they take far too much professorial time. In that sense, they focus the professors on other matters. Another set of things you can look at is simply the amount of time that research causes professors to be away from universities. There's no way we can systematically track these kinds of things, but research is a phenomenon or an undertaking that tends to link university professors with other professors, as opposed to their students. That is the principle source of disciplinary credentials and prestige. So almost by definition, the very logic of research in a modern university is to divert professorial attention from students, which is a local matter, towards research, which is a national or cosmopolitan matter, or international in many ways in today's world.

Aurora: You had mentioned one term in your book, which kind of intrigued me, and that is "reflective inquiry". You suggested that encouraging reflective inquiry by faculty is part of their academic life. Can you explain what reflective inquiry is, and how it relates to teaching? The second part of that would be, is there also a relationship to research?

Allan Tupper: Yes. We paid considerable attention to this matter. I'm glad you raised it, because it was actually one of our major arguments in the book. Let me just step back. First of all, the principle argument we make about research per se is that Canadian universities have come to see it in too narrow a way. Whereas the term "research" embodies many different activities and forms, it has come to be seen as something very narrow, and principally about specialized professorial research which contributes new knowledge, finds out things. But we argued there are many different forms of research and one of these we call "reflective inquiry", which used to be the obligation of all professors. That is, it's a form of thinking about your field in broad terms-what we know about things, what we think we know but probably don't, what's right and wrong, what forms of further research are needed, what are the major questions in fields, what are the major questions in other fields, how the fields intersect. That's a form of research that involves very structured, very disciplined and very systematic reading and thinking. It's very foundational. It's a very prominent form of research that used to be the obligation of all professors. But nowadays it has come to be something that very few people undertake. Our point about this is that kind of research, when you see it as reflective inquiry-broad and deep and structured thinking about the world-allows very close links between undergraduate teaching. The undergraduate students want the general learning. They want to see the big picture. They don't see specialized knowledge about professorial research in the conventional way.

Aurora: You've talked about two types of research. One was a frontier, very narrowly focused research, and the other one was a broad general look at one discipline and how it's advancing. So is reflective inquiry from point of view related to research?

Allan Tupper: As I say, we actually see it as a very clear form of research.

Aurora: In itself?

Allan Tupper: Yes. Research does and must involve much more than simply finding out new things. There are endless numbers of types of research, but we say reflective inquiry is clearly one. The manifestations of this are what confuse people. Oftentimes it leads to major studies, but sometimes it simply leads to better teaching. But nonetheless, it's a fundamental form of research which says that a professor is a general thinker, not a specialized expert. So we see the reflective inquiry argument as to be very central to what we're talking about. We try and reestablish the view that professors, all of them, whatever their field-science, medicine, various arts disciplines, social science-ought all to be undertaking various forms of reflective inquiry.

Aurora: As I read the book, I was initially thinking of reflective inquiry as an exercise that might also help strengthen more frontier-type research. So if I was doing both, one would help the other. Moving along, one theme that seems to run through the book is the problems with poor teaching, and maybe even some grave ethical problems. You have mentioned one example of the Valery Fabrikant tragedy at University of Concordia in Montreal. There were several factors involved. However, some of those factors surrounding the incident were due to the pressures from research. More specifically, you blame the drive for prolific publication. How serious is this effect? Publications have become such a gold standard at universities to advance your career. Could the trend be reversed or even redirected?

Allan Tupper: Good and hard questions. On the question of Fabrikant, I think it was more a reflection of the various reports on Fabrikant, as opposed to any original ideas we had. Particularly the report commissioned by Harry Arthur, former president of York University in Toronto, on that subject. He was the one who said, there's many forces at work explaining this tragedy. But one sees a very insidious underlying pattern of professorial misconduct and a crazed research environment surrounding the area at which he was working. But we don't in any way suggest that, as a general matter, events of that tragic nature are particularly related to one cause. It has multiple causes. But on the broad question of the gold standard, there's no doubt many people, hundreds of observers of universities, have observed the very heavy emphasis on universities in their reward structure, in their hirings, in their promotions, towards the stellar researcher at the expense of the outstanding teacher or even the good teacher. It will take a very long period of time to reverse that tendency in one school of thought, but one never knows. But certainly our point was simply to give evidence of that and say, look, if this is in the incentive system, we've got to change the incentive. Today universities acknowledge that, but there haven't been that many radical steps towards it. It's unlikely in the short term to evoke a lot of change. Because today's universities and today's professors are riding high, compared to 20, 30, 40 years ago. Compared to different points, I should say. Professors are very well paid. They enjoy high social status, a lot of control over their work, as we all know. For those reasons, modern professors believe their greater engagement in research has brought those benefits, has brought greater societal awareness of what they do, greater social respect, greater pay, and so on. For those reasons, as I say, you won't get a quick reversal. The argument that we make about much greater emphasis on undergraduate teaching implies to people a return to a past, dull world of sleepy universities, as compared with the vibrant places that universities portray themselves to be now-leading edge and all those kind of things that everybody wants to be involved with. So it's seen to be a regression by some people, and therefore you won't get an easy change on that. It's biting the hand that feeds you, and all those kind of arguments come up.

Aurora: So we're not really expecting quick changes in the next 10 years.

Allan Tupper: But one never knows. I think we say at the end, in a more optimistic mode, or not in an optimistic but in an analytical mode, that's it's interesting that things change - they come and go. Universities profess to be eternal beings, yet they change all the time, and in some ways they're quite faddish. So one never knows how societies will change and what forces will impact on universities. There has been, simply looking at things like McLeans Magazine, been a lot more attention paid to student issues, to the quality of teaching. The Globe and Mail is now doing a survey on all those kind of things. There's been a lot more interest in these subjects the last two or three years, and a recognition that whatever the flaws of our book that maybe there's some kernels of truth among those like us who have made these arguments. So one never knows. You can look at a lot of things. There's also, and we talk about this in the conclusions, a lot of large American universities have simply confessed to having very weak undergraduate programs and having professors preoccupied with research, and all those things. They've undertaken some fairly substantial reform at big universities. University of Michigan, Ohio State, Stanford, have all undertaken studies and tried to put in place large undergraduate reforms. Generally speaking, they are the vanguard. When big American universities shift their priorities, other universities through the world often do so. That said, there's a tremendous weight on research these days. You might get a better balance, but not a profound change, in the near future.

Aurora: I'd like to talk about a book that came out shortly after your book, entitled Universities in the Marketplace: Commercialization for Higher Education, by Derek Bok from Harvard. He attributes commercialization of academic institutions and the desire to profit financially for undermining academic institutions. When I read his book, the focus was mostly on athletics. But he did talk about commercialization of education that goes on at universities, and research. Are we also experiencing similar sorts of things at Canadian universities? Does it have an impact on the quality of learning provided with particular emphasis, of course, at the undergraduate level?

Allan Tupper: Derek Bok's book is a very controversial one. He said some very critical things of American universities, and universities in general. On the question of commercialization of universities, there's a number of issues that have come up. One we talk about in the chapters we wrote about, the sorts of forces of commercialization on campus as greater access to retail foods and restaurants and those kinds of things, as opposed to a more ivory tower environment-that kind of commercialization with the infiltration of business principles into university management, etc. His concern was some of that stuff, but more generally, as you've correctly pointed out, on the athletic side, which is not prominent in Canada. But he has these grave concerns about the immergence of a desire in universities to shift their priorities towards making money. One of them, and certainly not principally but a major one, being the capacity to make money out of scientific invention and whatnot. He makes the case, as many others have made before, that those activities, if taken to the extreme, can create serious problems of conflict of interest within universities, as it's unclear who people believe they're working for. That I think is a very significant thing, and it leads people away from believing their role is to educate in the public interest towards a much narrower view of education, of working for particular clients. Some critics call it a commodification of education. Education is a product to be bought and sold, and so are the outputs of research. Bok is quite pessimistic about the future. He says that, whereas there's still a commitment to traditional academic principles of seeking truth and those kinds of things, there's also an emerging view of younger scholars that commercial profit is worthy in itself, which worries him a lot. Of course those forces are in Canada. They've been noted. There have been controversies. There are dimensions of that in the fabric at issue. There's been any number of controversies about people fabricating data and misleading others and misappropriating students and colleagues' work, and all those kind of things. None of which are new to academic life, but which seem to be more institutionalized in universities than heretofore. People vary a lot on the question of how widespread these things are. Some people say there are undoubtedly problems, but it's kind of a bad apple argument. Other people say, like Bok implies, it's systemic. With regard to your question, which is an important one, on undergraduate teaching, our argument in the book was essentially that those forces are simply an extension and intensification of the already-strong drive towards research. It's a different form of research that leads to further problems. We didn't see it as at this point deeply threatening, but certainly something worrisome. But again, we saw it really at this point as a subset of the more general concern we say. This is now just a form of applied research which has certain consequences, some of which are good, some of which are very dubious. That's one that we were less argumentative about. We took very much a "wait and see". Basically our argument was that there are enough problems now. This one seems to be an extension of the basic tension that's over research as opposed to one that's self standing, but that there was cause for concern.

Aurora: One thing that captured my attention was you state that if you were to set up a teaching of an elementary class in the same way and standard that you would set up university courses, parents would be outraged. In fact, they would consider that to be unacceptable. Why then do we have more tolerance for poor teaching at a university? Should we be training and licensing professors to teach?

Allan Tupper: It's a very good question. I don't think anyone who ever read those words or thought about them would deny them. If you were told your kids who were going to go to grade one down the street in the public school would be taught by a sessional lecturer or an amateur, a person who's actually just a student, in a class of 600, you'd be at the premier's door so fast you'd be burning up the pavement getting there. People would be outraged. So why do you tolerate it in a different system? I think we never made a precise argument about that, but we really argue ultimately that universities operate in a set of deferential attitudes. People are not overwhelmed or in awe of their local school principal. It seems something that's part of their community, it's part of their life. They might have differences of opinion, they might agree or don't. But it's a very common process. Even with an expansion of university participation, universities are still very distant from society. People within them really don't understand them fully. For that reason, very few people, including democratic governments, really ever take on universities in a profound way. There are very few people in the general public who feel that they have the capacity to take on a university. Over time that argument builds on itself, or that feelings build on itself, that the university becomes in some ways untouchable to public opinion. Increasingly, it's a vicious circle. Because the longer that cycle develops, the few people feel they can intervene in their affairs. You do get a lot of sense of that. Many people wouldn't think twice about intervening in some matter with regard to the schooling that our kids have in an elementary or secondary school. But when it comes to universities, they just don't see the capacity. They're very deferential, and they really don't know how to engage the system in any way that they could reform it. Moreover, there's now this tremendous emphasis in society on the fact that all the good paying jobs in society will demand minimally an undergraduate degree, and probably some graduate one, and that there's not enough spaces to go around. So you've got an institution that's very highly respected, that seems very important, that seems very significant to a person's economic future, that's also very intimidating. You're not going to get a mass response to it and say, let's change the university systems in Canada. So that's one of the things. The other thing that was very interesting in this matter is the question that we alluded to and didn't answer, but at least we bravely asked it. That is, universities will always tell you that, contrary to critics like us, students are quite pleased. Look at the surveys. This has been noted often. It's kind of interesting, because it's an extension of your question. Why do students themselves tolerate this sort of theory of different teaching? Again, they don't know much different. They don't have a vision or an ideal of an alternative university that they would participate in. For those reasons, our thesis was they come into university in first year with great ambitions, but they quickly catch on in the first term that it's not at all like their vision suggested, and that it's a system, just like any other educational system, and you play the game in a particular way. A view that's emerged in the United States on this question-and we allude to it but don't make any judgment-has been that there's a trade-off going on in large universities. That is, a professor in effect buys their students' support or acquiescence by high grades. In order for them to really cut short their teaching and put less than adequate effort into teaching, they compensate that with high grades so the students don't rebel. We don't get into that. But it's certainly been mentioned, and there's certainly a wide concern about grade inflation in universities.

Your question is a good one. On the other matter of licensing, we never responded to that. Certainly there's been a white paper in the United Kingdom recently which has implied that university professors ought to be subject to some external evaluation of their individual capacity to teach. This has never really been proposed in Canada. We never did get into that. You could probably make legitimate arguments that the importance of university teaching warrants such a system. But we did say very strongly that one of the things that needs to be done as an imperative is to teach university professors a lot more about how to teach, and who teaching is important.

The fundamental flaw of a PhD degree is still that it's about research, it's about a form of advanced learning. It is not about what a person will do as a practicing academic at a major university. One of the duties there is to teach, but there's no instruction in this. So in that sense, it's a form of advanced education, PhD programs that are required for admission into the professoriate, are absolutely at variance with the demands and duties and core obligations of professors. We make a lot of recommendations about that. We don't get into the licensing, but we say we've got to teach professors a lot more about teaching, offer much more enhanced programs of professional development and intellectual development in that area.

Aurora: My own experience has been that there is some movement that way. There are universities that are encouraging teaching, especially for incoming professors and post-docs. But it's still not required.

Allan Tupper: No. And I think those are worthy trends. Universities have gotten into these areas and have set up centres and all those things that try to encourage professors to take it. It's essentially all voluntary at this point. On the other hand, it's a step in the right direction. We didn't speak to those initiatives directly, but they're important, there's no doubt about that.

Aurora: Right at the end of your book you suggest several solutions to the present university system in Canada. I'm making a proposal to you. If you could start a university from scratch, what would be your ideal university? Would it just be one university, or would it be several schools or universities that you would foresee?

Allan Tupper: This is a very good and hard question. In fact, one of the students we had asked us several years ago if she could read some chapters. Her question at the end of it was exactly yours. She said, it's great, but why didn't you write a final chapter, not with those reforms that you're talking about, but with a vision of an alternative university? Several other people have made that point. What is it that we really want? We had essentially two answers. One weak one was that the book was challenging enough to do to conclude with at that point, and the vision part of it would be sort of implicit in it. The other one was that we just really didn't envision doing that. Those explanations notwithstanding, I think we could point to elements of it. We never put a structural vision in the sense that you're driving here. But what we said was, by implication, that universities would be student-centered, not professorial-centered. Universities would be teaching and learning centred, with a very heavy emphasis on general knowledge. There would be obviously, and we acknowledge this as well, there would be an emphasis as well in the idea university. But there would be also a recognition of diverse types of research, and an appreciation of them and a reflection of those. Particularly the ones like reflective inquiry that genuinely support teaching and research. It would also be, and this is one that is the most challenging to present occupants of universities, it would probably proceed at a slower pace. There would be a lot more focus on students and a lot less on a frenzied kind of research treadmill. The research that would be undertaken would be aimed at much deeper questions and much longer term perspectives, as opposed to articles on very discrete things that are essentially written for other professors. So we'd see a fairly substantial revolution in that sense. Another thing would be quite different in our line of thinking. We would substantially reduce the number of non-permanent professors. Professors would be the principle instructors. There would not be the current army of sessional lecturers, part time lecturers, and so on. Not to in any way diminish their contributions, but to critique the system. There's no doubt in our system professors would be in the classroom more, and work with students more. Whether or not this would lead to a system of specialized universities, we don't know. But we sort of hinted at that argument that we didn't buy it, and we didn't think you could resolve this problem by screening universities or by saying that within universities there's a teaching stream and a research stream. What we would envision would be very fundamentally different in its priorities. It would have the student first, not the professor. It would have the undergraduate programs as the preeminent obligation. It would have the professors in the class much more, and it would have a very wide ranging form of research, not a narrow one in the sense of simply doing more frontier research. So it would be quite a different place. And the other thing we stressed, universities would probably look physically different. We tried to make them places where people wanted to be, as opposed to places where people commute to and leave quickly. And by that, we made the point that over time Canadian universities have been physically transformed. Because they've expanded, space has been at a premium. A lot of common space and teaching space and space for people to interact, public space as we call it, has been given up to other purposes. We also say the physical structure of universities should begin to again reflect the essence and central role and contributions of students and learning.

Aurora: I think you had made the point that a lot of learning is not just in the lecture hall, but from other students. Having that physical space was very important for students to interact and have those discussions.

Allan Tupper: I remember Tom Pocklington wrote those words, and I think they were quite intelligent words. He said the sign of any good university course is that the students are actively engaged amongst themselves outside of class. To do that properly, you've got to have space and facilities. We're not talking about luxury, we're talking about function and availability. You go to University of Alberta or here (UBC) and University of Toronto, there's no place for students. They're sitting in the corridors and everything else.

Aurora: Since you've left Alberta you're much more active in administrative duties. I did enjoy your book very much. I'm just wondering, are there any other projects underway?

Allan Tupper: My mind is heavy always about universities and their priorities. I haven't really decided what I'm going to write about next, as to whether it's going to be a more conventional political science subject, or something on higher education still. There's lots of other issues.

Aurora: Thank you very much for a great interview. Any final thoughts?

Allan Tupper: I'll just say one last thing on this. To a degree the book had a real edge, because we wanted to make a point. We didn't want to have it in a conventional scholarly format that said we think universities are not doing a good enough job of teaching undergraduates, then qualifying it with 37 points. Such that at the end of the 37th qualification, nobody knows what the original point was. We've never bought one or two criticisms. There's been any number of valid criticisms made. There have been a lot of things written about the book. But one of the ones we never bought was that for some reason we're anti-research. It said explicitly right in the book that we believe all professors in universities should be undertaking active research programs leading to publication, or scientific experimentation leading to the advancement of knowledge. That was one that always kind of caused us to bristle, insofar as it was completely at variance with our own words frequently throughout the book. The other thing to a degree, although it's the way of the modern world, people said it was negative. It is I guess in one sense, but it has a whole chapter of reform. It says we're not doing some things right, and here are some ways we could think about doing things better. Also, again I give Tom the compliment on this, he wrote most of the material on the qualities of good teaching, which is a whole substantial section of the book. We started it off with here is the norm of teaching in big universities. But here are the alternatives, and here are the principles. I think those are as clear a set of principles as has been written anywhere. In a positive way, to say if you really want to think about five or six ways to guide your university life as a professor, here's a good start. They were in there. We did it to be controversial, we're not denying. But some of it was areas that we never accepted.

Aurora: Can I turn that around? You were criticized for the book, but what has been the strongest positive response? What do people like about it?

Allan Tupper: It's hard to say. A lot of people wrote us from many different walks of life, from students, from people who have never been at universities, from current students in universities, from professors, from university executives, from people outside of universities, in business, and so on. Some people just said they don't buy any of it, and it's all wrong. But most people, almost no one challenged that the teaching was weak and that we made a very good case about the need to do something about it. What should be done, and all those things, caused a lot of differences. But we got no one who ever took the book on that basis. That was just a given. That was the most positive part of it. The controversy was our views about research, particularly the reflective inquiry argument and the teaching and research part of it.

Aurora: It generates a lot of discussion.

Allan Tupper: That's what it's all about. We never did it to win the debate or say we're right, you're wrong. It's just a scholarly book or a book that tried to get people's attention and say, we've allowed something to drift for too long and we've got to do something about it.

Aurora: Thank you very much, it's been a pleasure.

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