<p>No, it doesn’t at all. Our hiring criteria at my present institution are very clear: scholarship, teaching, and service (both to the university and to the broader community the university serves) are ranked equally as criteria in all faculty hiring and promotion decisions. If we’re doing a lateral hire, we’re looking for candidates who are outstanding in all three. All I said was that the easiest of these to judge is scholarship—that, as I said, is pretty much a matter of public record, as scholarship is published, it’s there in black-and-white to be judged on its own merits, we can do citation checks to see how much and where a particular piece or the author’s overall body of work has been cited, we can get expert internal and external evaluations of the quality and scholarly impact of the work. etc. That’s the easy part, and the part we spend the least time with. The hard part, and the part that causes real angst among my colleagues, is in evaluating a lateral candidate’s teaching. Of course, we request their student teaching evaluations and pore over them in great detail, but they may not be all that informative, and they vary widely in content from institution to institution. We typically invite the candidate to come and give a lecture, but there’s only so much you can tell from one lecture and there’s a tendency to place too much weight on style and charisma which may not translate into effective teaching (though it often does correlate with positive student evaluations because many students prefer the entertainment value of the classroom over the content). My institution value teaching a great deal. We struggle mightily with how to evaluate it. That we find it difficult to evaluate is, to my mind, an indication that we take it seriously—not, as you wrongly suggest, that we devalue it.</p>
<p>hawkette, lemme guess, you graduated from an LAC and/or small research school ala Brown? or…you are just angry about your experiences at a big research school that you perceived was “all that” but turned out to be nada?</p>
<p>Listen, I don’t know how old you are or whatever, but times have changed. Schools that may have valued graduate education a lot more so than undergraduate education in 1995 are quickly closing that gap. If you want evidence, I’ll be happy to give it to you, but it’s stupid to go off of the intangibles that the 1995 Undergrad Teaching Excellence survey is based off of.</p>
<p>bc,
Maybe I misinterpreted your # 34 comments as I took the emphasis to be on what an evaluator can do and a dismissal of what you feel an evaluator can’t do. However, I’m not agreeing that this can’t be evaluated and I definitely believe that there are institutional differences in the value that evaluators will assign to teaching responsibilities vis-a-vis research responsibilities. My preference is that it be a bigger priority for institutions and a bigger factor for students as they make their college selections. Nothing stinks worse than spending $30-50k a year and getting a crummy product in the classroom. </p>
<p>hope2,
I’d be interested to read any information that you have and can post about the evolution of graduate/undergraduate education since 1995. </p>
<p>As for the USNWR survey, please know that it is but one of many sources that I have read over the past few years in developing my sense of which colleges are most sensitive to the needs and interests of undergraduates.</p>
<p>bclintonk is absolutely correct, there’s absolutely no way to say “this school teaches undergrads better”. Anyone can go on ratemyprofessor.com, there’s bad reviews for all of these schools in every department. </p>
<p>To me this is a marketing strategy that a lot of small schools like to use. It makes sense, small schools sell smallness nd big schools sell bigness as well.</p>