Colleges and universities should close teaching and learning centers because they threaten good teaching, That’s the argument of a recent Chronicle of Higher Education column, and I wanted to address it here.
I’ll summarize the substance of “Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong: In offloading pedagogical expertise to nonscholars, colleges degrade the classroom,” as it’s behind a paywall. Next I’ll share my negative reactions, followed my trying to take a more temperate stance. I’d really like to hear from readers.
Before beginning, I should put my cards on the table, as my professional background gives me a perhaps atypical take. On the one hand, I am a university professor and have taught in higher ed for many years: as a grad student; at a liberal arts college, like the author of the column under question; at a nonprofit, leading workshops; now at a research university. Throughout those positions and years I’ve been committed to improving my own teaching by a variety of means, from classroom experimentation, using emerging digital technologies, taking workshops, talking with colleagues, interviewing practitioners, and publishing on the results. All of this should make me a receptive reader to Paul Schofield’s call for a return to faculty teaching faculty how to teach better.
On the other hand, I have had many connections to teaching and learning centers. Among my many relationships with nearly all aspects of academic institutions I have done a lot of work with teaching and learning centers and related faculty and staff. To pick just one example, we hosted Mary Wright, a leader in that world, on the Future Trends Forum in 2024:
I mentioned my current teaching, which is in Georgetown University’s Learning, Design, and Technology MA program. Some of those graduates have gone, or will go on, to work in or adjacent to teaching and learning centers in multiple nations. And LDT is deeply intertwined with the Center for New Designs in Teaching and Learning (CNDLS) office.
The latter experience drove me to fume at Schofield’s article. I’ll portray that rancor below, then try for a more balanced response.
1 Putting teaching and learning centers on the chopping block: the argument
Bates College Associate Professor of Philosophy Paul E. Schofield wants the reader to understand that teaching and learning centers are a bad mistake for higher education. They degrade rather than improve pedagogy, and as a result should be closed.
Schofield’s article begins by describing an institutional arc. Teaching and learning centers appeared on campuses through donor intervention, not by organic faculty demand, and grew in influence and power over time. Such centers eventually supplant, then replace the pedagogical development work faculty members previously did on their own. This yields two problems: first, the centers’ scholarship is often poor; second, faculty stop doing pedagogical work within their own departments. “[I]t is those who work and teach in these specific fields who are the real teaching experts.”
Schofield then expands his critique. Faculty using teaching and learning centers entails outsourcing a key function best done by professors themselves. It also involves too many metrics, crushing the full rich complexity of teaching into a few quantitative measures. This is a form of value capture:
when an institution’s attempts to quantify or measure something of significance cause a person’s rich, subtle values to become flattened and distorted — often so much so that those values transform into something alien or even hostile.
The results are poor, as faculty “are being acculturated by staff outside of their discipline to talk and teach in the same, insipid, homogenized ways that faculty in every other discipline do.” Centers crush the important differences between academic disciplines.
The article ends with two calls to action. Faculty can just skip teaching and learning centers:
Faculty members can simply reclaim the various roles they’ve outsourced. We can resist using pedagogical jargon to characterize what we do; we can ignore spurious advice based on spurious studies; we can spend less time attending workshops about how to teach students and more time actually teaching them.
Or campuses can just shut centers down: “teaching and learning centers should be considered good candidates for the chopping block.” (I think discussion of the article has largely missed this clear call to fire a lot of academics.)
2 Some critical reactions
So what’s wrong with “Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong”?
My first response was that the article offers a weird caricature of the centers for teaching and learning world. Everything I’ve seen of the reality has been of thoughtful people, deeply committed to teaching and learning, embedded in scholarship, humble and caring. Unlike Schofield’s picture of a campus-capturing Goliath, they instead to be lightly funded and overstretched Davids, trying hard to scale up their work. Instead of being Powerpoint-wielding robots they are people devoted to listening and relationship-building. Centers staff are uniformly eager to learn and improve.
Indeed, the picture Schofield sketches offers a nearly cartoonish opposition. On the one hand there are malign, soulless, ill-informed and -educated staff who crush teaching and learning. On the other, good-hearted professors energetically focused on improving their teaching, housed on departments keen on student learning. It’s easy to pick out counterexamples from life which oppose either of these images, as I’m sure the reader can do. I can easily think of centers staff with advanced and terminal degrees as well as faculty members who are not interested in changing their teaching practice. Some of those centers staff are also faculty members, and some – many – faculty are not full time employees (see below). But this simple, fictional binary is what powers the article; questioning it undoes the edifice.
I mentioned my own experience and the reader’s because that’s the sole evidentiary basis for the article: the author’s account of his experience. That one person in a single department in one college apparently speaks for the immense diversity of roughly 4,000 American colleges and universities. There isn’t even a gesture towards national studies, nor any awareness of institutions other than an elite liberal arts college. We could consider research universities, for example, which place teaching firmly in second place. We could also consider the largest segment of the teaching professoriate, which is not, unlike Dr. Schofield, tenured faculty members. Instead, adjuncts teach more than anyone else and generally lack the deep or cozy departmental immersion the article celebrates.
Adjuncts are, sadly, utterly absent from the column, which offers an interesting picture of privilege. The author opposes tenured faculty to centers staff, who are usually staff, lacking the protections and power tenure can afford. To readers attuned to questions of positionality and power, it looks like a simple case of punching down. And punching down hard – don’t forget the author’s call to fire these people.
More, I simply don’t buy the argument that teaching and learning centers are somehow black holes on campus, dragging hapless faculty to their doom. (The gravitational metaphor is Schofield’s.) These centers lack the ability to prevent professors from having conversations with each other, from reading the scholarship of teaching (in Boyer’s famous phrase), from consulting with peers elsewhere. Indeed, they support and celebrate faculty doing such work beyond the center. Here’s what Trey Conatser, Assistant Provost for Teaching & Learning and Director of CELT at the University of Kentucky, has to say:
We don’t have anything close to that authority by many orders of magnitude. Like, none of us do, anywhere. And we will be cheering when we learn that faculty have started a teaching excellence committee, or a pedagogy reading group, or a course redesign initiative, or whatever, in their own department. The idea that a professor would feel so intimidated by a CTL that they would hesitate to discuss teaching with their colleague in the office next door is laughable.
Weirdly, Schofield ultimately agrees at the end, undoing his argument, when he recommends that faculty who can’t fire centers staff just ignore them. If not listening is so easily done, where’s the threat?
Further, the lite binary sketched out in “Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong” manages to miss other campus other units. I was surprised to not see the library make an appearance, especially for a humanist author. Libraries play all kinds of teaching roles, from teaching information literacy and library use to supporting students in their research. Educational technology departments also go missing here, even though they perform so many key teaching and learning functions, from teaching faculty and staff to use software to supporting classroom tech, running multiple educational applications to researching the implications of new digital tools and issues, just to name a few. I’m not sure what Schofield would make of other centers, such as those dedicated to quantitative literacy (surely of some interest to a Liebniz scholar) or GIS. I can hazard some guesses about how the author might direct the ax, but that’s all I can do, given the material.
One more point. Making educational materials accessible (in terms of disabilities) is a major problem in terms of ethics, potential lawsuits, and federal policy. Right now teaching and learning centers, along with libraries and educational technologies, are often campus leaders in trying to get this important work done. Faculty alone have not done so, despite some good intentions. The problem is a hard one and clearly needs a collaborative approach to solve.
3 Listening further
Let me pause my critique here. When I read “Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong” I was furious. I shared the thing across social media and vented various complaints in all directions. Quite a few folks agreed with my howls of outrage. Unsurprisingly I found many instances of people issuing their own takedowns, notably on LinkedIn.
Then I received a lot of pushback from faculty online. I disagreed with nearly all, but instead of arguing with them I wanted to listen hard and take their critiques seriously.
(I haven’t gotten permission to share quotes, so will paraphrase here.)
Many who shared Schofield’s views spoke not just of their respective centers (none referred to national studies) but instead saw those staff as part of larger university systems they disagreed with. Like Schofield they saw centers as pressing for pedagogies focused on metrics, rubrics, standards, and learning outcomes – which these faculty disliked – and that those came from on high, either the generic “administration” or from specific senior figures (a dean, a vice president) and policies (accreditation efforts). These discussants didn’t share my view of centers staff as lonely, politically unprotected workers, but as elements of institutional mechanisms imposed from the very top. (None added the outside influence Schofield mentioned.)
Along these lines, a few interlocutors disagreed with me flat out on the power of centers. These faculty members reported enormous pressure to take center programs, to collaborate with center staff, and administrative threats if they did not.
Others echoed the article’s emphasis on faculty supporting faculty members. Several referred to steeping themselves in decades of teaching experience and wanting to work with others in a similar position. In contrast, they preferred to not work with centers staff whom they saw as having little to no such experience.
Several focused on the metrics argument, telling me what they valued in teaching went beyond those measurements. They feared centers-style teaching gutted their pedagogy.
Overall this pushback seemed to me tp describe another, related version of Schofield’s binary. On the one hand they saw themselves committed to teaching and wanting to learn from similar folks. That teaching is largely qualitative and psychological, a powerful intervention in students’ lives. On the other hand they saw centers as tools of oppressive administrations, integrated attacks on the abilities, nature, and identities of professors. Schofield didn’t use this language, but it feels like a labor argument about who gets to do what work under what conditions, and how we define a given academic profession.
I’ll stop here, as this post is nearly as long at the column it addresses. I’d really like to hear from you all, especially faculty members and centers staff.
To further stir the conversational pot, here are some more items to read on the topic. Professor Brandon Zicha agrees with Schofield. The Bates center’s director posted this reaction and invitation. Thomas Tobin offers, as always, good fodder for thought. Here’s Conatser’s full LinkedIn post. Amanda H issued this critique. Philip Dawson turns on the sarcasm.
(thanks to many fine folks for talking with me about this, including David Ebenbach, Maggie Debelius, Kevin Gannon, Tom Tobin, and the Remaking the University group)
There’s in implicit flaw in all of these arguments – that Teaching and Learning centers are an administrative function, outside of the faculty, and staffed by non-faculty. Many of the centers I have seen fall into the ‘David’ model you describe, and either have faculty as prt of their regulars, or partner extensively with faculty to create the conversations and improvements they aim to bring about. Often the role of the center is to take on the efforts of communicative coordination and management to create venues to bring the faculty together to engage in the efforts that Schofield says they should be engaging in. Centers can rally cross-disciplinary efforts and bring together those who have a multitude of experiences to share and build collaboratively. I am sorry that Schofield has had such a profoundly negative experience, but that doesn’t mean the model is broken.
Well said, Chad.
I suspect Schofield wouldn’t be very interested in cross-disciplinary work. In the article he insists on working with his department and criticizes an experience of connecting with others.
I was also irritated by the article. Chiefly, it was because of the dismissive attitude about non-faculty staff that you mentioned. At my college and at at least six T&L centers within driving distance, the center is directed by a faculty member or former faculty member.
My second beef was that Schofield was utterly dismissive about working with others, even faculty in other fields. He correctly pointed out that there are differences in what “writing” means to chemists and philosophers and political scientists, but he immediately saw those differences as insuperable obstacles that rightly ended the conversation, rather than as problems to work around. Why can’t faculty talk about the common problems of adapting general writing skills to the patterns of the discipline, working with struggling writers, and so on? I always have a lot to learn from my colleagues in other fields when we talk about teaching.
My third beef is kind of personal, but — he teaches at a liberal arts college! If there is any place where faculty should be open to consulting colleagues in other disciplines, or helping students to move from one type of writing or speaking to another, it is a liberal arts college. At my liberal arts college, he would be positively shunned for this attitude. (He might not have made it to tenure.) Frankly, if that’s what “liberal arts” means at Bates, I think rather less of the place.
Having said all that, there is one piece of the essay that is important and worth considering, and it’s the part where he discusses the way that T&L centers can become instruments of value capture. I don’t think T&L centers are especially likely to serve this function (though for all I know Schofield is correct that that’s the reality at Bates), but any part of the institution that can create metrics that are valued by administration and faculty is subject to this sort of problem. And yes, I said “by faculty”: if those metrics are valued as part of the promotion and tenure process, then it’s because faculty are embracing them too, accepting them as an inoffensive way of evaluating teaching and professional development, rather than finding and using other, better ways of identifying teaching excellence. That’s a problem that requires faculty (and staff and administrators too, but Schofield is clearly writing for faculty) to recognize the dangers and to work towards better solutions.
I agree with your beefs, sibyl. The rejection of interdisciplinary work really stood for me as well, esp. at a liberal arts school. Heck, I wonder how he fares with the deep divide in philosophy between continental and Anglo-American worlds.
Good point about faculty capture of metrics. Schofield is tenured; did he already play that game?
Paul Schofield’s recent Chronicle critique of teaching and learning centers (CTLs) claims these hubs too often peddle reductive “best practices” that erode discipline-specific expertise, echoing Peter Ramus’s 16th-century assembly-line pedagogy. Ramus fragmented holistic wisdom into binary flowcharts, making teaching scalable but soulless—a ghost now haunting CTLs’ generic rubrics and debunked learning styles. Schofield rightly calls this “value capture,” where non-experts interpose between faculty and students, diluting the macro-ethical depth pre-Ramist guilds once nurtured.
Yet amid CTL turbulence—faculty pushback, AI disruptions, DEI debates—chaos might unexpectedly recapture some of that lost integrity Non-linear ways, like project-based flux pedagogy could foster relational, embodied formation over Ramist linearity, creating “third spaces” of human-centered adaptation. Some centers even nod to critical pedagogy’s praxis, but evidence suggests they tame messiness into workshops, widening contradictions rather than synthesizing them.
Bryan Alexander pushes back hard, branding Schofield’s piece a “terrible article” born of personal gripes, not systemic threats. He defends CTLs as vital faculty communities adapting to remote teaching and tech shifts without coercive power. Alexander’s right on pragmatic utility: these centers offer peer learning that administrations rarely match. But follow the money—closures like UT-Austin’s May 2026 CTL shutdown reveal the real stakes.
UT-Austin’s provost shuttered the 52-year CTL for “organizational changes,” merging it into colleges amid federal research cuts exceeding $240 million. Faculty howled over lost autonomy, and no savings materialized; resources were simply repurposed. This fits recent patterns: withheld K-12 funds and grant cancellations funnel budgets to admin priorities or EdTech vendors, not peer support.
But here is where the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) stands exposed. CTL staff—credentialed pedagogy PhDs—serve as buffers, translating neoliberal metrics into “development” while shielding leaders from friction by framing admin priorities (e.g., DEI quotas, AI rubrics) as voluntary “best practices.” They’re Ramus’s heirs: PMC intermediaries entrenching reductionism under evidence-based cover. Closures don’t dismantle this; they consolidate it, syphoning funds to private equity-backed platforms amid enrollment drops.
Alexander’s CTL defense, however valid, inadvertently shields PMC entrenchment. Turbulence promised pre-Ramist renewal, but neoliberal engines ultimately drive the process: every “efficiency” widens gaps between faculty wisdom and technocratic control. Schofield names the symptom; the cure demands bypassing PMC hubs entirely—restoring guild-like, discipline-led inquiry before funds vanish into contractor black holes.
(Hello Glen’s AI!)
I guess I’m working a divide within the PMC in this post.
I, too, was disappointed by Schofield’s article. The “Us vs. Them”, mentality of it really painted an odd picture. If that’s what working at his institution is actually like, I am glad I don’t work there. I suspect, however, that his views are not widely shared there, and that the teaching & learning center at this institution is actually quite helpful to a broad group of tenured, tenure-track, non tenutre-track, and adjunct faculty.
I am a full Professor twice-over now. Many years ago, I served as Executive Director of our our Center for Faculty Excellence at my previous university. In addition to offering various 1:1 instructional design appointments with faculty and my staff, and having a host of in-person and online seminars on different aspects of teaching, we also ran 10-12 faculty learning communities (FLCs). Each FLC was focused on specific themes, like Research & Teaching, Experiential Learning, Service Learning, etc. I ran one for several years titled Active Learning & the Transition to Digital. Each FLC was faculty-led. Faculty interested in participated would have to apply for them. Space was limited. Not everyone was accepted. In the end, each FLC had 6-9 faculty coming from a wide variety of disciplines. I always described them as a bunch of people who wouldn’t normally play poker together (largely because they wouldn’t know the others existed).
Throughout the months these FLCs met, we had great, interdisciplinary discussions. Faculty would learn tips, tricks, and strategies from each other. Many collaborated on research papers together, for peer-reviewed conferences and journals focused on teaching & learning. Many would go on and share these with colleagues in their own disciplines. It was engaging and informative.
I could go on about this for a few thousand more words if needed, but I think you get the idea. Centers for teaching & learning can foster incredibly rich, valuable experiences for faculty. They can serves as one of many ways folks can up their teaching game — along with having conversations with their departmental colleagues. It’s not an either/or thing. It’s both/and.
Professor Cesarini, your CFE sounds terrific. What a fine partnership between faculty and center!