Visiting Scholar Program

Summer 1998 | By Scott Lowry

With the inauguration of its visiting scholar program during the 1996-97 academic year, PMABS added another dimension to its outreach program. Krishna Kumaran, Marquette University Wehr Professor of Biology, spent one month each at North Carolina A&T State and Fayetteville State during the fall semester, contributing his experience to undergraduate and graduate classes.

"Krishna is one of the early recipients of funding by HHMI's Undergraduate Biological Sciences Initiative," says PMABS Director Skip Bollenbacher. "I've known him since the early 1970s. Since then, we've corresponded and talked about our individual projects, and when he mentioned a couple of years ago that he was interested in taking leave to explore new areas of education, I invited him to visit some of our partner HMUs."

Kumaran was born in India 65 years ago. He came to the United States in 1962 for his postdoctoral training in biology, then joined the Marquette faculty in 1969. He has been a member of the NSF Developmental Biology Program Advisory Panel, won a Distinguished Educator Award, served as a visiting professorial scholar at Harvard University, and administered grants from numerous federal and private funding agencies, including an NIH Institutional Biomedical Research Support Grant.

In his month at A&T, Kumaran taught regulation of genetic material in Professor Doretha Foushee's undergraduate genetics course. He also led sessions in Professor James Williams's graduate seminar on advanced cell biology. At FSU, Kumaran helped teach Professor Valeria Fleming's undergraduate and graduate developmental biology courses.

"I worried that the professors might feel that a specialist had come to tell them how to teach," Kumaran says. "But I wanted them to feel that I was there to assist, and I think they felt that way. The way they accepted me, I believe PMABS must have a good one-on-one relationship among the faculty."

The students in those courses impressed Kumaran. "These students, if you give them enough material and insist on their learning it, perform at levels equivalent to any students I have known anywhere else, whether at Marquette, at Case Western Reserve, or at Harvard. From the way they question and the way they follow argument, I am convinced that they have the ability to succeed in science careers."

One difference Kumaran saw between Marquette and the two universities he visited was the teaching load. At Marquette, he taught two courses each year without responsibility for labs: one graduate level and one undergraduate. Kumaran maintains that the work load for biology professors in both HMUs he visited - typically three to four courses per semester each - asks too much. "With each course connected to a lab, they're literally in the class 14 to 16 hours a week. And without any TAs, they need at least two hours preparation for each lab."

Spending so many hours in classrooms and laboratories robs professors of time they need for other aspects of their careers. "There is no reasonable way they can keep up with the literature, especially cell, molecular, and developmental biology," Kumaran says. "There is practically no time for other work. I saw a paper one professor was working on and it was an excellent piece, but she had no time to write the paper, polish and publish it. And some undergraduates told me their teachers sometimes do not have time to meet them outside class because they are teaching so many courses."

Kumaran offers a solution based on three decades of experience. "I don't see any reason why the same teacher or two different teachers have to teach the same genetics course to 25 students three times. I teach classes at Marquette of up to 100 students and can still see their faces and whether they're following or not. If we put the smaller lectures together into one class and the professors share three lab sections, they would have time to do other things for their profession."

Fleming isn't sure that Marquette's approach is the complete answer for all institutions, but she agrees it is a good starting point. "Reducing teaching loads should increase the amount of significant research in the HMUs, increase the potential for students working with faculty on projects, and increase the long-term productivity of faculty," she says. "Today, the potential for production of good graduate students is not realized, the volume of faculty professional activity beyond teaching does not come close to its potential, and many of the best science professors are lost to other institutions or to research and development in government or industry. Until we address the problem of teaching overload in the HMUs, we are not likely to break this vicious cycle that we are trapped in."

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