The Monkey Cage

Drawing from bureaucratic lit, it seems that research output is easier to measure than teaching output. Most everything I’ve read about how students rate professors makes me skeptical that ratings correlate much with student learning. One of the best predictors of end of semester evaluations is first day impression - which is about instructor appearance or enthusiasm, not ability to convey information. See also the struggles of high school in evaluating teachers - and the level of dissatisfaction with remedies like standardized tests.

I’m a little dubious of the claim that research skills act as a proxy for teaching ability. The correlation between the two is, in my experience, quite low. Moreover, it seems that liberal arts colleges put far greater effort into measuring teaching ability than do research universities. (Though, as a Williams alum, perhaps I’m biased.) Presumably the latter could improve teaching results by devoting greater concern to assessing teaching ability rather than to assessing research skills.

My best guess is that the focus on research stems from a slightly different principal-agent problem. Most of us go into academia because we enjoy research. Moreover, academics gain in standing when members of departments that are good at research. Therefore, departments tend to devote most of their energies towards research activities unless some external force prevents them from doing so.

If students really cared only about the quality of teaching as undergraduates, competition for students may hold universities to account and prevent them from devoting all their efforts towards research. But the value of an undergraduate education for the modal student lies in getting admitted to (and getting a degree from) a selective institution, rather than anything learned in the classroom.

Therefore, students tend to flock to schools with high admissions standards. This, in turn, relaxes any constraint on departments such that they are free to pursue more research.

Well as a professor at a state school that is beginning to push research, I would say that, here, it is mostly about money, not just for the school, but for economic development of the state. This is mostly a new requirement from the governor and legislature given through the board of regents. The school does like that if fill my summer thy get more than 10% of my salary back.

Secondarily, i think this is also an attempt to combat the perception that college professor’s are lazy because we get 3 months of “vacation” every year

Young scholars in the making do not decide to attend graduate school because they want to teach; once there, they are not trained to teach; after receiving their degrees, they are not hired on the basis of their ability to teach; if they find jobs, they are not compensated, promoted, or given tenure on the basis of their ability to teach; they do not advance in their professional communities based on their ability to teach; they receive no perks due to their ability to teach. Throughout their careers, they are taught to expect that the more status and recognition they receive, the less teaching will be required of them.

Bloix:
I agree with everything you said, BUT it doesn’t provide an explanation of why schools are increasingly incentivizing (sorry — terrible word, but you know what I mean) young scholars along these lines. Why is a run-of-the-mill school concerned about hiring faculty members who will publish occasionally in journals that virtually no one ever reads, rather than hiring those with the greatest teaching records or potential, especially in the social sciences and humanities? Why are they offering reduced teaching “loads” for “productive” faculty members (i.e., those who publish), especially in the social sciences and humanities? That’s the question I’m really posing. For some schools, the premium may be on highly “applied” reearch, as it presumbly is at the school where BillCinSD teaches; but I suspect that that’s the exception rather than the rule. So what’s really in it, not for the individual faculty member (especially one who is looking to move up in the profession), but for the school?

Bloix is absolutely spot-on.

Risk going into n=1 territory, but here goes. I took a scholarship to a honors program at a top 5 public university. Had a lot of bad classes with TAs (mainly) and profs who had little interest, inclination or enthusiasm for teaching. Only realized what I’d missed when I later took some classes at a second-tier small liberal arts school - at reduced tuition while my wife was doing her medical residency. At the public university, I only realize now, for the profs that took instructing seriously, it was like an external hobby they’d decided to commit themselves to. Like an engineer who’d decided to get into the kids’ soccer team they were coaching.

I’m currently pursuing an M.S. in a business discipline. My Ph.D. profs make about $140k, publish in theoretical research journals that no one reads and that have little utility to society, and mostly can’t teach worth a damn. The “instructors” with grad degrees, experience and (some) professional licenses took big salary hits to come teach yet make $50k. They teach more classes per term and are, with few exceptions, infinitely better at leading a classroom.

From my own experience, I know that I went into a Ph.D. political science program simply because I wanted to teach government and politics for a living but couldn’t stomach the thought of teaching high-schoolers. I thus needed a Ph.D. to teach at the college level. As an ABD student who has now received lots of training on research and precious little training on teaching, I still haven’t changed my mind. There are those of us out there who love to teach students and to get them excited about what we get so excited about. The research aspect is fun and all, but is mostly a means-to-an-end to permit us to do what we really love. Granted, we’re not the majority, but there are a lot of us out there. And I’ve definitely noticed that the quality of undergraduate instruction was far higher at the third-tier state school where I received my B.A. than at the higher-ranked research school where I’m getting my Ph.D. Research ability does not equal quality teaching ability.

I’m in the same boat as Ben. I think that Bloix’s comments are spot on if we are talking about R1s. However, not all PhD graduates are looking for the R1 experience. I’m ABD at a second tier school and I am purposefully looking for a liberal arts university on the smaller side. I love research and I plan to be an active researcher, however, it’s also important for me to be a great teacher as well. An ideal situation for me would be to end up at an institution in which teaching and research are equally emphasized for tenure.

The educational failure is the failure to stress basic principles and the logical development and the consequences. This affects research. For example, in my field, physics, a century after Einstein developed his theories people still say wrong things. A black hole is not a place where light cannot escape, but a place where the mass is so large that it takes forever to get there. Time on earth is slower than time at a satellite due to the mass of the earth; this time slowness is critical for GPS. The failure of good teaching is the failure to understand the principles, know what students think, and build from there. It is necessary to be active in research in order to fully appreciate the basic principles, but this activity does not have to be all-consuming. See “Teaching and Helping Students Think and Do Better” on amazon.

I think Bloix is right about the individual’s incentive, and maybe that helps us get at the school’s incentives. The job market is fairly bad, so even lower-tier schools can hire professors from very prestigious graduate programs. From here, I’m speculating, but it seems reasonable to me that once those people arrive, they look prestigious within their departments and thus have disproportionate clout; having been trained to want to be researchers, they use that clout to emphasize research in the department, sometimes with tangible benefits to themselves. That emphasis also helps them improve the reputation of their departments among their peers, and improve the prospects of their grad-school bound students. But I don’t know that profs from more prestigious grad programs value research or peer prestige more.

So what’s really in it, not for the individual faculty member (especially one who is looking to move up in the profession), but for the school?

In terms of the typical undergraduates’ experience, basically nothing. Being an active researcher helps a professor keep up with the field and be involved in it: that’s very useful to the few students who end up wanting to go to grad school in poli sci, but does practically nothing for the many students who don’t. Incidentally, this leads to my own view of whether a research university or a liberal arts college is better for a particular student: research universities tend to be better for the top few students in any particular area, but liberal arts colleges are better for most students.

From my perch at a good, not great, liberal arts college is that the “push” has actually come from our need to attract bright young colleagues, who clearly prefer a different balance between research and teaching than we saw in the old “publish or stay” days. To the extent that expectations have risen, this has been driven by faculty themselves, and not by an administration that sees more faculty publication in political science as a ticket to national greatness.

Lee:

In what ways are schools increasing the pressure on faculty to publish? Are tenure reviews requiring more? Or is there another way? I believe you that it’s increasing, but I’m just wondering what the mechanism is for the school to force it on faculty if they don’t want it (new faculty as well as tenured).

I got my BA at Union College, which I loved and now I work at a mid level research university, so I thought I would add my two cents. First, as an undergrad there was no correlation between publishing and teaching. The single best teacher never published. Having said that, I use that line “research helps my teaching” all the time.

Second, how much is just supply and demand? It is so hard to get any academic job that teaching schools get now ask faculty to publish. My guess is you have to be good in both to get tenure at at quality teaching institution. Since market conditions allow this, why wouldn’t colleges and departments ask for it?

Doug:

In hiring decisions. In retention and promotion decisions. In annual raises. In communications from those on high. In setting teaching “loads.”

Bob:

On your second point: Yes, colleges and departments at second- and third-tier institutions_can_, to some extent anyway, have it both ways if they wish to do so. But I’m asking why they should do so. Why not hire and reward someone who is very likely to be a superior teacher and is unlikely to do research?

I’m with Ben. I went to grad school because I wanted to teach. I publish because I have to in order to get tenure (hopefully), but my interest is mostly in teaching.

What are typical research standards, or how are they measured? I assume number of publications is part of it, but that seems crude. Of course, pushing publication numbers should (has?) create lots of weaker journals.

Regarding the lack of teacher training for PhDs: It could be that if schools began to emphasize such training this would create more interest in the profession overall in issues related to teaching. This would make it more likely that people would identify with, reward and even publish in that area (e.g., more attention to innovations in teaching or research about teaching). Currently, I’m not sure many colleges are sure how to discuss teaching beyond classroom management and basic delivery, or identifying those faculty that are popular with and supportive of undergrads (e.g., those that take on some mentoring roles or develop an innovative class). It seems that faculty that produce high quality teaching materials (which could be especially interesting now with multimedia) would only be recognized if their peers knew what they were looking at and recognized it as such.

Doug

My experience is that many schools ranked below about 20 or 25 apply fairly crude “counting” standards for tenure. I even know of top 20 schools that have fairly strict formulas (X number of APSR, AJPS, JOP; Y number in the next tier; etc).

It’s hard for me not to separate this from Lee’s musings a few months ago about the problems that journal editors face. When you have junior scholars pressured to publish 3-4 or more articles annually, and they know that few if any of their colleagues will actually read them, it incentivizes sending out as much as possible as fast as possible, if only to get the reviews back.

As far as I can tell, tenure decisions at most R1s are determined almost solely by research output. While many bemoan our inability to reward other contributions to the mission of an academic institution, I’ve seen little leadership from Deans and Presidents to change the formula.

For my money, the “why” question is better answered by avoiding the rationalist model of looking for incentives that institutions and their leadership might or might not follow, and turning instead to the shifting social meanings of education in the United States over the past two decades. Part of the story probably involves No Child Left Behind and the general culture of assessment and accountability that it institutionalized; part of the story probably involves the application of the logic of the business world to the evaluation of just about every other sphere of American life, something we can date back to Ben Franklin and his advice about the prudent use of time but proximately derives, I would bet, from the prominence of venture capital speculation in the late 1980s and 1990s. Everyone wants metrics, and as “a” said at the top of this thread, it’s easier to measure research output than high-quality teaching. Add to that mix the general culture wars that deprived the educational sector of its traditional moorings and put all of us on the defensive in terms of proving our worth, and voila: the push for focusing on the things that we can easily count.

The fact that this is all a classic case of the Drunkard’s Search fallacy seems to have eluded many, especially in higher education. Just because this is where the light is does not mean that this is where you dropped your keys.

But speaking for myself I am much less interested in the “why” question and much more interested in the “what” questions, like “what does this do to our profession?” and “what is our rationale for demanding such large tuition payments from students and their parents?” Those are questions about our identities as academics, I would say. And it just so happen that a colleague and I have been having a conversation about this very topic over here.