Section 2.1 Traditional culture focused upon research.
¶The negative attitude toward educational issues apparently held by the leaders of the American Physical Society (APS) also was characteristic of the OSU physics department when the future department chair joined it as an assistant professor. In an interview about his later role as department chair during the formation of the Paradigms in Physics program, he reminisced:
This had been a very conservative department in terms of its approach to teaching...so as a junior faculty member I had had the experience a number of times of coming to a faculty meeting with some great idea...that I had read about in the AJP (American Journal of Physics) and (the question), can we do some of this? The answer was “no, too much trouble, it's not going to do any good, everybody's happy with their teaching.”
The message being delivered was to focus upon building one's research program, not on enhancing student learning.