<p>Where is teaching quality NOT hit-or-miss?</p>
<p>And you can swing way too far in the other direction. I was at a function recently with a bunch of Swarthmore alumni in their early 50s, and a senior member of its faculty. They were all taking about how great a particular young faculty member they remembered was, and asking why he had left Swarthmore. The senior guy explained that although the younger teacher had been, in the senior person’s opinion, the best scholar their department had had during his 40 years at Swarthmore, the younger prof had gotten some poor teaching evaluations, and hadn’t been granted tenure because of that. (Note that all the alumni I was speaking with thought this person had been a very good teacher.)</p>
<p>I have a lot of trouble with that. I would much rather have a great scholar who was not necessarily a great teacher all the time than a great teacher who was a mediocre scholar.</p>