BY BILL BERGMAN

Recently, I participated in an experiment that had several first-year seminar (FYS) instructors attend each other’s classes. It was an effort to see if we could improve our teaching techniques by observing colleagues. My first visit was to a FYS class in physics.

Surprisingly, this ninety-minute first-year science class not only taught me more effective pedagogy, but it also opened my eyes to the challenges facing higher education.

Even though I had been teaching marketing at the university for more than fifteen years, I had never set foot in the science building that was less than a ten-minute walk from the business school. When I eventually found the physics lab where the class was being held, the instructor sat me next to a couple of first-year students who were working on velocity-transformation equations. The instructor asked me to help them solve the equations.

Within seconds, the realities of academic isolation hit me smack in the face. While I had been spending a decade and a half trying to better understand the evolution of marketing and its effect on modern-day consumers, I lacked the skills necessary to compete with eighteen-year-olds who were easily solving space-and-time equations. It was refreshing to tackle a physics problem that had a right and wrong answer. This was very different from my world where experience and judgement were necessary to comprehend the nuanced issues that surround brand-positioning problems and consumer behavior.

Higher education encourages students to take courses in multiple subject areas, but it discourages professors from venturing too far beyond their areas of specialization. Professors are rewarded with tenure and prestigious academic chairs when they research and publish in journals that reach like-minded readers who share a passion for their disciplines. They rarely get attention or added compensation for collaborating with colleagues from other disciplines.

When academics are forced to work together on issues related to the university, it is obvious that they are not especially skilled at solving problems collectively. They become territorial. Corporate America would consider the university workforce of professors a classic example of company silos—where employees start pursuing departmental goals instead of company goals.

Universities are challenging places to manage. So, it’s likely that improving communications between departmental silos is a low priority. But the solution may be easier than the usual process that involves creating new committees that have endless meetings in which little gets accomplished.

If my experience in the physics lab was any example, territorial protection becomes less relevant when faculty members see colleagues facing similar challenges with teaching students. Even though we have expertise in entirely different subjects, we share a common vocation in helping students learn.

It is hard to believe how much I learned in a short, ninety-minute FYS physics class. I discovered how a ten-meter-long pole fits inside of an eight-meter-long- barn, how “time dilation” makes me a fraction of a second younger in a ninety-mile drive from Richmond to Washington, DC, and what might happen when spinning black holes collide in space. Most importantly, I learned that when higher education faculty observe each other in the classroom, silo walls created by budget needs, faculty teaching lines, and curriculum requirements disappear.

Bill Bergman is a Robins Teaching Fellow and instructor of marketing at the University of Richmond Robins School of Business. He serves as chair of the faculty senate First-Year Seminar Committee.