THE ODOR OF BOTANY 491 



that the real progress is sHght enough to fail to justify an attitude of com- 

 placency or self-adulation on our part. 



One of the features of that introductory paragraph which annoyed me at 

 first reading is its implication that the alleged odor is exclusively a product 

 of botanists and their obtuseness. While we must assume a considerable part 

 of the responsibility for the odor, we must in all fairness refuse to accept total 

 responsibility. Certainly, some university administrators and administrative 

 attitudes must share a portion of the blame, if blame there be. The plain fact 

 is that the teaching of introductory botany (and of other lower-division 

 undergraduate courses as well) is quite commonly regarded, at least in many 

 larger universities, as a second-rate activity, one scarcely worthy of the 

 full-time devotion of a facultyman. Reflections of this attitude are seen in the 

 too-prevalent beliefs that a professor has arrived when he has sloughed off 

 the chore of teaching lower-division students, that a facultyman who wants 

 to devote his efforts largely to the teaching of such students is not quite 

 bright, and that the teaching of introductory courses is scarcely to be re- 

 garded as an intellectually respectable or scholarly activity. These attitudes 

 are more tangibly reflected in the commonly higher salary scales of research 

 professors and of graduate professors as compared with those of facultymen 

 who are primarily teachers of undergraduates. Thus, an important incentive 

 to improved teaching is often lacking, particularly in some of our larger 

 universities. An examination of the academic origins of American botanists 

 indicates that a disproportionately large number came from small liberal-arts 

 colleges, which, probably through their greater emphasis upon the value of 

 inspired undergraduate teaching, succeeded in enkindling in that dispropor- 

 tionately large number of young people a passion for plants and for botany. 



This too-prevalent attitude of academic administrators toward the im- 

 portance of teaching undergraduates is reflected also in the common practice 

 in many universities of using low-cost semi-slave labor to give instruction to 

 undergraduates, that is, the employment of part-time graduate assistants for 

 such teaching. In many large universities, all the teaching of laboratory work 

 in introductory science courses is performed by such part-time assistants. 

 And in freshman rhetoric, certainly the single most important undergraduate 

 college course in these days of life-adjustment frolicking in high schools, 

 all or most of the teaching in many universities is done by graduate assistants. 

 I hasten to add that teaching by graduate assistants is not invariably and 

 per se bad, but it does have two strikes against it: first, it is inexperienced 

 teaching, done by persons who lack the background and breadth of knowl- 

 edge requisite to illumined instruction, and, second, it is a subordinate activity 

 of these assistants, whose major concern naturally is the completion of 

 graduate courses, graduate research, and graduate theses. When teaching 

 is an incidental or secondary job, it is almost never really superb teaching. 

 I am aware, of course, that graduate assistants may obtain valuable experi- 



