Faculty - Teaching Ability

<p>I heard that because new faculty our busy competing against others to earn their jobs with research, papers, etc., that many show a drop in teaching ability or care for students. Is this in any way true? To what extent?</p>

<p>I’d say that it’s generally not true, but that Harvard policy doesn’t do much to encourage good teaching. </p>

<p>Harvard doesn’t promote its faculty based on teaching, period. All that matters for tenure, promotion, etc. is research ability. So in that sense, the institution itself isn’t ensuring high-quality teaching - especially because, as you said, many professors need to spend their time on their research, particularly those who don’t yet have tenure. </p>

<p>However, I’d argue that, for whatever reason, there are still a lot of professors that take their teaching very seriously. I’m not sure how it’s decided who teaches what, but by and large it seems that profs are very interested in and dedicated to what they’re teaching. There are obvious exceptions to this, but it’s pretty rare, particularly in higher-level courses. I had a professor this semester who is particularly accomplished in his field, but who took the time to learn the name, year, house, and concentration of everyone in our class, who personally graded all of our problem sets and exams within two days (one within 12 hours!), and was generally just totally amazing. So it definitely depends. </p>

<p>There’s also a pretty sizable contingency of non-research teaching staff who can just focus on being good teachers. So not everyone who’ll be teaching you is splitting their time between teaching and research. </p>

<p>In sum: there are some sucky teachers, but they’re few and far between, and it’s my feeling that they don’t suck because they’re spending too much time on research - they just suck.</p>

<p>See: [Teaching</a> Without Tenure: The Lecturer’s Role in a Harvard Education | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/12/5/tenure-faculty-lecturers/]Teaching”>Teaching Without Tenure: The Lecturer's Role in a Harvard Education | News | The Harvard Crimson)</p>

<p>“Harvard also has a financial incentive to rely on non-ladder faculty, whose salaries are significantly less than those of ladder faculty.Through the use of non-ladder faculty, the FAS is able to deploy its resources and instructors to their best comparative advantage.”</p>