http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...ower/2011/07/26/gIQAyfrvsI_story.html?hpid=z3
I hesitated to post this as I really don't have the energy for another long debate over the purpose of research universities, but this article really got my blood boiling.
I'll just post a few choice things about it that would destroy the purpose of research universities. And comment briefly on them.
All this focus on the monetary worth of professor's research totally flies in the face of the purpose of research universities. Their whole purpose is to generate knowledge in areas where there isn't clear profit incentive. The private industry takes care of any research and development where there is big money to be made (i.e. medicine, technology etc.). Sure, some of that is still done in universities. But the main purpose of a research university is that bright people can come and have a secure job to generate new knowledge in their field even if there isn't money in it. Professors earn the freedom to do such work through their teaching and sharing their knowledge with students.
Some research will involve landing grants to fund the research (i.e. work that requires labs, equipment or field work/travel, anything that needs to higher research assistants etc.) and some professors do pay their own salaries (or more than that) through the overhead the university takes out of research grants.
But there is plenty of important research that doesn't require any grant funding (and is difficult to get funding for). i.e. any work that's analyzing already collected data and so on. Or purely theoretical work which is creating new theories to later be tested through field research etc. All this stuff is crucial to moving fields forward, and it's absurd to punish people doing this work because they aren't landing grant money.
The teaching stuff hinted at above, I'll respond to below.
To the first, student evaluations are a terrible way to judge teaching performance. Why? Because all you have to do to get good evaluations is 1) make the class relatively easy; 2) not be boring; 3) be responsive to student e-mails, requests for meetings etc. While 2 and 3 are important, 1 is not and hurts education. I make my classes less intensive than I'd like as when I assign more reading, more writing etc. (which causes students to learn more from the course) they bitch about it on evaluations and say it was too much work. Where as I've never heard of a student complaint that a course was "too easy."
So in short, higher student evaluations often mean they're learning less than they could as profs have to dumb down classes to get decent evaluations from today's lazy ass students who are in school more to party and get a piece of paper they think will help them get a job, than they are to work hard and learn as much as they can.
That said, teaching is important, and there does need to be more focus on teaching performance in terms of pay, tenure and promotion etc. Student evaluations are just not the way to do it. Universities should have an evaluation unit where trained people go and observe class sessions etc. and combine those with student evaluations and use those in assessing teaching performance.
To the second, this is a double edged sword. Having part time instructors with real world experience can be a good thing, but much of the time they have no teaching experience and the classes end up being very dumbed down and anecdotal and don't really impart much of the empirical knowledge from the field in my experience. That's because the part timers often only have their practical experience to draw from ,and aren't experts on the research literature in the field. That said, there are some I've had/worked with who are outstanding in the classroom, and plenty of tenured professors who suck at teaching. Point being it's a person to person thing, not a case that part timers or tenure track profs are clearly better or worse in the class room.
The push to expand the use of them is purely financial, rather than any real perceived benefit to quality of education. A part time instructor tends to get around $3,500-4,000 per course where I've taught. So you can have them teach four courses a year (fall and spring) for around $15k, where as a tenure track research professor who has a 4 course a year teaching load will make $50-60k starting out as their 9-month salary (on a contract that typically defines their work load as 50% teaching-50% research).
That's where the push comes from--it's a $$$ game. And it's also a big part of the push for research profs to land grants. When we land grants one of the things we spend money on is "buying out" some of our courses to free up more time for research. Universities love this as they make a ton of money off it. A buy out is generally 12.5% of the prof's 9-month salary, which is significantly more (especially for older full professors with six figure salaries) than the $3,500 or so they'll pay a part time or grad student to teach the course in our place. They pocket the difference--some of it goes to the professor's department to help fund things like graduate assistantships, the rest goes to the university.
One last point I'll make here, is I do think it would be beneficial to have more specialized tenured positions. Right now the only option most places is a 2-2 teaching load position with a 50/50 research/teaching contract. Thus you get research super stars buying out all but one class a year (as you have to teach at least one a year most places) and not giving a rat's ass about the one course they teach. And, on the other hand, you get teaching stars not getting tenure because they don't publish enough or get enough grant dollars. That's just silly system. No reason you can't have current tenure track positions with the current criteria (with a better teaching evaluation system as noted above), a research-only tenure track position for the superstars who publish a ton and bring in a ton of grant money (and pay their own salaries more or less), and a teaching-only position for the teaching superstars where they teach 3 or 4 courses a semester instead of two and only get evaluated on that.
Having that kind of split would both improve research productivity by allowing the superstar scholars to spend all their time on publishing and going after grant money (and keeping them out of the classroom where they couldn't care less), and improve education by allowing those who just love to teach to focus all their energy on that.
That's the solution to the problems, not forcing all professors to chase money and be profitable to the university (which will worsen teaching as profs would have even more pressure on the research front than currently), or having even more classes taught by part timers and grad students who are cheaper. IIRC I read a while back that only 19% or so of classes at research universities are taught by tenure track faculty already, so if there's a decline in teaching performance I'd say that's the problem rather than it being that tenured faculty suck at teaching as many tend to argue.
This one is just typical conservative nonsense of wanting things to improve, but not wanting to pay for it. It's impossible to give a decent degree, taught by tenured experts in their field, for $10,000 for the whole four years. Especially when states are slashing budgets for higher educations and thus forcing universities to increase tuition.
If people want a cheap degree consisting of classes taught to them by grad students and practitioners with little or no research experience or teaching experience, they can go to community college or the lower tier public universities etc.
I hesitated to post this as I really don't have the energy for another long debate over the purpose of research universities, but this article really got my blood boiling.
I'll just post a few choice things about it that would destroy the purpose of research universities. And comment briefly on them.
All this focus on the monetary worth of professor's research totally flies in the face of the purpose of research universities. Their whole purpose is to generate knowledge in areas where there isn't clear profit incentive. The private industry takes care of any research and development where there is big money to be made (i.e. medicine, technology etc.). Sure, some of that is still done in universities. But the main purpose of a research university is that bright people can come and have a secure job to generate new knowledge in their field even if there isn't money in it. Professors earn the freedom to do such work through their teaching and sharing their knowledge with students.
Some research will involve landing grants to fund the research (i.e. work that requires labs, equipment or field work/travel, anything that needs to higher research assistants etc.) and some professors do pay their own salaries (or more than that) through the overhead the university takes out of research grants.
But there is plenty of important research that doesn't require any grant funding (and is difficult to get funding for). i.e. any work that's analyzing already collected data and so on. Or purely theoretical work which is creating new theories to later be tested through field research etc. All this stuff is crucial to moving fields forward, and it's absurd to punish people doing this work because they aren't landing grant money.
The teaching stuff hinted at above, I'll respond to below.
To the first, student evaluations are a terrible way to judge teaching performance. Why? Because all you have to do to get good evaluations is 1) make the class relatively easy; 2) not be boring; 3) be responsive to student e-mails, requests for meetings etc. While 2 and 3 are important, 1 is not and hurts education. I make my classes less intensive than I'd like as when I assign more reading, more writing etc. (which causes students to learn more from the course) they bitch about it on evaluations and say it was too much work. Where as I've never heard of a student complaint that a course was "too easy."
So in short, higher student evaluations often mean they're learning less than they could as profs have to dumb down classes to get decent evaluations from today's lazy ass students who are in school more to party and get a piece of paper they think will help them get a job, than they are to work hard and learn as much as they can.
That said, teaching is important, and there does need to be more focus on teaching performance in terms of pay, tenure and promotion etc. Student evaluations are just not the way to do it. Universities should have an evaluation unit where trained people go and observe class sessions etc. and combine those with student evaluations and use those in assessing teaching performance.
To the second, this is a double edged sword. Having part time instructors with real world experience can be a good thing, but much of the time they have no teaching experience and the classes end up being very dumbed down and anecdotal and don't really impart much of the empirical knowledge from the field in my experience. That's because the part timers often only have their practical experience to draw from ,and aren't experts on the research literature in the field. That said, there are some I've had/worked with who are outstanding in the classroom, and plenty of tenured professors who suck at teaching. Point being it's a person to person thing, not a case that part timers or tenure track profs are clearly better or worse in the class room.
The push to expand the use of them is purely financial, rather than any real perceived benefit to quality of education. A part time instructor tends to get around $3,500-4,000 per course where I've taught. So you can have them teach four courses a year (fall and spring) for around $15k, where as a tenure track research professor who has a 4 course a year teaching load will make $50-60k starting out as their 9-month salary (on a contract that typically defines their work load as 50% teaching-50% research).
That's where the push comes from--it's a $$$ game. And it's also a big part of the push for research profs to land grants. When we land grants one of the things we spend money on is "buying out" some of our courses to free up more time for research. Universities love this as they make a ton of money off it. A buy out is generally 12.5% of the prof's 9-month salary, which is significantly more (especially for older full professors with six figure salaries) than the $3,500 or so they'll pay a part time or grad student to teach the course in our place. They pocket the difference--some of it goes to the professor's department to help fund things like graduate assistantships, the rest goes to the university.
One last point I'll make here, is I do think it would be beneficial to have more specialized tenured positions. Right now the only option most places is a 2-2 teaching load position with a 50/50 research/teaching contract. Thus you get research super stars buying out all but one class a year (as you have to teach at least one a year most places) and not giving a rat's ass about the one course they teach. And, on the other hand, you get teaching stars not getting tenure because they don't publish enough or get enough grant dollars. That's just silly system. No reason you can't have current tenure track positions with the current criteria (with a better teaching evaluation system as noted above), a research-only tenure track position for the superstars who publish a ton and bring in a ton of grant money (and pay their own salaries more or less), and a teaching-only position for the teaching superstars where they teach 3 or 4 courses a semester instead of two and only get evaluated on that.
Having that kind of split would both improve research productivity by allowing the superstar scholars to spend all their time on publishing and going after grant money (and keeping them out of the classroom where they couldn't care less), and improve education by allowing those who just love to teach to focus all their energy on that.
That's the solution to the problems, not forcing all professors to chase money and be profitable to the university (which will worsen teaching as profs would have even more pressure on the research front than currently), or having even more classes taught by part timers and grad students who are cheaper. IIRC I read a while back that only 19% or so of classes at research universities are taught by tenure track faculty already, so if there's a decline in teaching performance I'd say that's the problem rather than it being that tenured faculty suck at teaching as many tend to argue.
This one is just typical conservative nonsense of wanting things to improve, but not wanting to pay for it. It's impossible to give a decent degree, taught by tenured experts in their field, for $10,000 for the whole four years. Especially when states are slashing budgets for higher educations and thus forcing universities to increase tuition.
If people want a cheap degree consisting of classes taught to them by grad students and practitioners with little or no research experience or teaching experience, they can go to community college or the lower tier public universities etc.
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ing bob.
