Profs interested in research instead of teaching

[snarlatron]

<p>Interesting read from today's Wall Street Journal on professor research vs. teaching.</p>

<p>Naomi</a> Schaefer Riley: Academia's Crisis of Irrelevance - WSJ.com</p>

<p>Another reason to be fully aware of the kind and quality of teaching at a given college before applying & choosing.</p>

<p>If WSJ only gives part of the article you might have to Google the title to be able to read the whole thing.</p>

[warblersrule]

<p>

@WSJ article

I argue that our system of higher education is focused too much on research and not enough on teaching. In fact, one 2005 study in the Journal of Higher Education suggests an inverse relationship between the amount of time spent in the classroom and a professor’s salary. It would seem that professors who spend their time writing are the ones most valued by our universities.

I doubt this comes as a surprise to anyone. It shouldn’t, at least. The three aspects of a professor’s job are research, teaching, and service. Research has long been considered very much the most important of the three at most universities, particularly top research institutions. </p>

<p>As a matter of fact, I recently read a very long, detailed, and interesting study by Berkeley that concluded exactly the same thing. Here’s a few interesting excerpts:

@Center for Studies in Higher Education

Although teaching, university service, and engagement with the academic community are required for faculty to gain tenure and promotion, scholars repeatedly mentioned that sustained publication and the ability to secure funding take precedence in top-tier research universities. As one senior professor at a public university described it, “Tenure is a three-legged stool: service, teaching, and research, and the latter leg of the stool is much thicker and stronger than the other two.” This rule-of-thumb is particularly emphasized for younger, pre-tenure scholars. Faculty are acutely aware that they should not spend excess time on teaching and service. According to one:</p>

<p>“Because of the nature of the science here, the fiercely competitive arenas that our faculty work in, they are among the least likely people to do work in terms of writing books or reviewing proposals or things of that sort. They are extremely clear-minded about where their energy should focus and that’s on being highly competitive in some of the most ferocious areas of current research.”

Tenure hasn’t changed much in terms of the overall requirement—at least my impression at a major research university. There is a tremendous amount of stress on being a good teacher, being a good citizen, and all those things, which everybody talks about, but when you get down to making decisions, I think the highest proportion of discussion goes to publication, contributions to scholarship. Everybody talks the language of really having to worry about the undergraduates, but I think, unfortunately we downplay teaching…It happens in major departments, in all sorts of places. On the other hand, that has to be modified by the fact that there just aren’t that many jobs in high-powered research institutions, and, therefore, lots and lots of our very good students go off to teach in places that have a greater stress on teaching. The confusion is that lots of places that are smaller, less prestigious, that really do want to focus on the students, have placed upon the jobs the same sets of pressures that go on at Harvard or Berkeley or the University of Chicago, in terms of publication. Publication still is a pressure placed upon people, even in places that are seriously pushing for teaching. So it’s a funny market out there. I think most of my colleagues teach people to replace us, but the jobs they get are really very different from the jobs that one would get at a fancy research university. So there’s a kind of disjunction between those various goals.

The tenure and promotion committee pay a certain degree of attention to the quality of your instructional skills and talents, the degree to which you’ve engaged in teaching: Did you go the extra mile and teach freshmen or devise a whole new course? Did you deliver a very, very large lecture course well? But really, this being a premier research institution, it’s that way for a reason. I’d say the bulk of the weight, despite all the lip service paid to teaching, is on research.

In astronomy, research record is dominant. If you are absolutely hopeless at teaching, it will hurt, but it’s surprising how much tolerance there is to poor teaching in the US. In the promotion and hiring at Oxford, an exam question is given to the candidate. So we’re talking about an interview where somebody has to actually do and explain how they would teach an undergraduate a particular project. I haven’t seen that in the US at all.</p>

<p>In astronomy and astrophysics, at least in research-based universities, of course, research is what counts. We all pay lip service to teaching, and some people actually care about it, but, in reality, it’s the scientific achievements that really count.

</p>

[snarlatron]

<p>Very interesting follow-up article. This stood out to me:</p>

<p>

The confusion is that lots of places that are smaller, less prestigious, that really do want to focus on the students, have placed upon the jobs the same sets of pressures that go on at Harvard or Berkeley or the University of Chicago, in terms of publication. Publication still is a pressure placed upon people, even in places that are seriously pushing for teaching.

</p>

<p>This is a shame, and something that I have heard of before as a troubling trend, that even at many LACs where profs do all of the teaching, they will not get tenure, no matter how much of a master teacher, if they don’t play the research game hard. I can’t imagine what is driving this since the student-focused schools rely on great teaching and students happy with their classroom experience for their very identities. Why sell your soul and lose a rep as a great place with happy dedicated faculty?</p>

[bernie12]

<p>This assumes that you can’t have good teaching and researchers. It may take more effort on the part of the institution (as it needs to be incentivized somehow beyond what it may be) to make some of the researchers good teachers, but somehow at Emory, many professors have managed this so it is possible. Having a researcher doesn’t automatically guarantee mediocre teaching at best, in fact many are very good. Dennis Liotta (“made” and sold the patent for the Emtriva Drug) is a very good teacher for example. The same could be said for many of the biology professors. Teaching quality overall, however, suffers much less in the social science and humanities than it does in the sciences and the social sciences/humanities also have a research culture (often, it’s the sciences that can use a makeover in pedagogy. The fact that they do research should not be an excuse).<br>
Too often opinions and studies seem to imply that good teaching and high quality research are mutually exclusive. It doesn’t have to be. I would say that we are far from perfect, but have done a good job of combining the two at a reasonable level (perhaps better than some peers). Admittedly, in the sciences (particularly chemistry), lecture track professorships have worked wonders for intro and sophomore level courses (much higher quality than at some peers), but most researchers teaching those courses actually tend to be quite good and certainly not particularly bad (there is maybe one exception per dept, but the good outweighs the bad)</p>

[barrons]

<p>At major R-1 U’s the teaching load is geared to leave time for both with 2 classes per term typical. There should be enough time for both and being good at one certainly does not preclude going both well. Also getting tenure is only 6 years out of a long career and the pressure is less.</p>