As Stein describes it, teacherly authority emerges when someone seeking essential knowledge or skills finds someone with that expertise, and then forms a relationship: Recognizing the mastery of the teacher and the merit of the lessons, the pupil elevates the teacher to a position of authority and focuses on the knowledge, skills and even the values imparted. This dynamic can drive engagement and lead to transformative learning.
Of course, authority in education is often expressed in more instrumental terms: The professor and college are gatekeepers to a grade or credential that the student needs to get a ticket to a job. But what’s important to remember is that, in either case, authority is always conferred from below, even in transactional or coercive cases. People grant authority to get resources, to be safe, or, in the best cases, to learn something practical or enlightening — but they have to see value in what’s offered.
And that’s where higher education is stumbling at the moment: College has become an increasingly transactional experience, offered in an industrial model that has run its course. Questions about a college degree’s return on investment and the skills it confers are haunting the headlines — in part, perhaps, because students don’t see the personal relevance of the curriculum and don’t experience the phenomenon of teacherly authority and engagement.
“I’m experiencing it every day — students who view classroom attendance or participation or reading or deadlines as optional, that the classes are essentially box-checking exercises,” says Steven Mintz, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, columnist, and author. “This is incredibly widespread. There’s always going to be a handful of students in the class who seemingly are really engaged, but they are a shrinking minority.”
What’s gone is the “aura” that used to surround the whole experience, he says, along with the deference that students once offered professors, even if they also saw them as eggheads. “The whole relationship between faculty and students has been inverted, where grade inflation is a lot about faculty feeling they need to please students,” Mintz says — because if a professor’s teaching evaluations go down, that could be problematic. Even a friend at Harvard assigns about a quarter of the reading that he used to, knowing that the students won’t do more, Mintz says.
Many of the students coming to the University of Texas, he says, have never encountered an intellectual or a serious artist, or pondered the value of ideas or the life of the mind. “The obvious answer is, we need more small seminars with faculty members that are not simply discipline-specific, but deal with big intellectual or cultural or artistic issues,” Mintz says, but he adds that wouldn’t likely happen at UT, where the “baseline” is 40 students in a course. “The pressures are for enrollment, not for more seminars. I had 800 students this semester. Didn’t I do my job? I mean, couldn’t we have some small classes to balance that out? That’s generally not the way my institution’s thinking.”
Information everywhere
The emergence of generative AI has contributed to this crisis of authority. In the 20th century, the campus was a locus of knowledge, with its libraries and faculty rosters, says Tricia Bertram Gallant, the director of academic integrity at the University of California at San Diego and co-author of The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI. Higher education no longer has a corner on the knowledge market; data and facts are available from the internet, and competitors offer courses and content in shorter forms, sometimes with better pedagogy.
“We’re still teaching as if it’s the 20th century and the internet doesn’t exist — that we are still the holders of the authority of all information and knowledge in universities, and we’re not,” says Bertram Gallant. Given the abundance of information, colleges have staked their authority on their ability to dispense knowledge. “So really, our authority is in something that, honestly, we don’t have,” she says, because professors, for the most part, “were not trained how to teach, were not trained how to design valid assessments, were not trained how to best facilitate learning.”
Much of what they learned about teaching was grounded in the last century’s industrial model, says Bertram Gallant, which elevated the professor to a position of authority at the front of the classroom by default, but the ubiquity of information and the pace of change imperils that position.
“We’re the ‘sage on the stage,’” says Bertram Gallant. “They try to get their authority from that, or from their research gravitas, and that’s just not impressive to people anymore.” AI is quickly undermining that inward-facing marker of authority in research, too, with the presence of bot-created content and slop turning up in academic journals — not to mention student work, which is Bertram Gallant’s area of expertise. Late last month in The Atlantic, a professor from Ohio State University lamented the adoption of AI in higher education, noting that the trend would lead colleges to “self-lobotomize” and further erode their position of authority.
The power of ‘relative expertise’
This crisis of authority is not inevitable — and could be remedied by refocusing on the core mission of education, but higher ed’s approaches will have to change. For years, the authority of institutions rested on the assumption that a college degree offered some proof that a student had run a gauntlet of assignments large and small, which signaled a certain level of achievement. But what do grades really mean now, amid grade inflation and automated cheating tools? Much of the emerging discussion about apprenticeships, work-based learning, and competency-based education centers on bringing back legitimacy to the degree. Implied in that discussion is that the student demonstrating competency recognized her instructors’ teacherly authority by actually engaging with and absorbing material, rather than simply racking up “seat time.”
Kemi Jona, the vice provost for online education and digital innovation at the University of Virginia, says that a dose of teacherly authority can be found everywhere — in professors, but also in staff members or even other students. It’s called “relative expertise,” where someone knows somewhat more than you about a topic or skill, even if that person is not an expert. Knowing I was a judo player, Jona — who has a background in learning theory — used the example of the dojo: The white belts can learn things from the blue belts, who are learning things from the brown belts, with the black belts supervising it all. And aside from the belt colors, skills are demonstrated in terms of competency, every time a higher belt tosses a lower one.
“The idea of relative expertise is super powerful, and it’s also an important adult skill,” he says. If you have a problem at work, for example, you have to consider whom to consult for help. “That’s a really sophisticated skill set, because it means you have to have a model of what everybody around you knows, and what they don’t know. How do you make a decision about who you ask?”
Colleges could lean into this dynamic more, Jona said — but they should be wary of how AI could disrupt it. If Claude has all the answers, why bother asking a peer?
And if AI supplants the act of looking for information from peers, Jona says, that skill “will atrophy, and then we also lose all the social connections that come along with that advice-seeking.”
With her background in organizational leadership, Bertram Gallant sorts the problem into two categories: formal and informal authority. Formal authority exists in the form of accreditation, grades, and other institutional mechanisms that lend legitimacy.
But the teacher-student relationship rests on informal authority, based on respect and the perceived value of lessons. “If you don’t have that informal authority, where students trust what you’re doing is for their best interest, trust that what you’re doing makes sense,” she says, “then they’re going to be a bit more transactional.”
Higher education’s authority crisis, she says, is not simply about the expense of the degree, but about its impersonal and industrialized character. Even if tuition is expensive, a student might not see it as a transactional experience if they are connecting with peers, getting to know professors, and having meaningful interactions. Higher education will have to figure out how to encourage those human-to-human connections alongside the inevitable intrusion of AI.
If it’s just about content delivery, higher ed is doomed. “If I’m in a class, paying a lot of money, and I’m one of 599 students sitting there listening to a professor lecture at me, then that is going to make it transactional,” Bertram Gallant says. “Students do not need us for that anymore.”
Again, it comes back to re-establishing meaningful relationships with students. “Students can tell if we’re not present,” she says. “Thinking in terms of regaining our authority, what does it mean to show up? What does it mean to have social and cognitive presence with our students? And I’m not talking about just individual instructors in the course, but the entire university.”
Want to read more?
Even though The Edge is wrapping up, you can still read my work in The Chronicle, which you can get delivered straight to your inbox by subscribing. You can also check out the other work I have done for The Chronicle by digging through the archives or following me on LinkedIn. If you want a book-length treatment of the themes of student agency, sensemaking in education, and teacherly authority, check out Hacking College. And of course, feel free to reach out to me anytime at scott.carlson@chronicle.com with thoughts, ideas, and reactions. Thanks for reading!
