I promised that I was going to stop talking about higher ed, but I can't. I'm in the midst of writing an essay, and I need some input from all you over educated readers.
Some have suggested creating two tracks of professors: those who specialize in teaching and those who specialize in research. Both tracks would be equally compensated and rewarded. Those who teach would have fewer research expectations. Those who do research would have minimal teaching responsibilities.
This idea has been kicking around for a long time. Have any colleges actually acted on this? Why hasn't this plan ever been implemented?
Apt. 11d 
Both tracks would be equally compensated and rewarded.
From the elements of this tracked system that already exist, I think it is fairly clear that there is no way to establish that kind of equality without effective of nationalization of postsecondary education.
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Two tracks already exist: the tenure-track faculty with research AND teaching expectations, and the adjunct or contract faculty with only teaching expectations. They are not equally compensated.
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Isn’t it already in place — Isn’t that the distinction between a R1 and a teaching college (with many steps in between?)….
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Nope. Teaching colleges are transforming into places where research is expected. Even community college profs now have to show evidence of research in order to get tenure.
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Teaching colleges are expecting research because there is no other way to raise the status of your school/faculty. It probably won’t work in most fields because without graduate students and an infrastructure, doing good research isn’t cost effective for whoever gives grants.
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I’ve seen a number of places that are research intensive offer teaching-only positions. They’re NOT equally compensated but they are full-time. However, those are rare and will remain rare for a while, I’d expect.
Teaching is easy to divvy up in many disciplines on a course-by-course basis. If you want to build an institutional research reputation, you have to commit a few years of funding to reap the rewards.
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Honestly, I think it hasn’t been implemented because specializing in teaching/pedagogy and not research is greatly stigmatized within the academy. Any colleges who established themselves as teaching-track would immediately become less prestigious, I believe. We see this in attitudes towards K-12 teaching as non-professional work, but also in the recent articles about pedagogy in law school and how irrelevant law professors seem to think being a good teacher is.
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hey, jackie. Gotta any links to the law school/pedagogy articles?
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We sort of have that in the R1s even without adjuncts. Those who are reserch stars are often able to buy themselves out of teaching with their grants (my grad advisor never taught more than one class each term through this sort of mechanism). The problem is that those without grants are still expected to teach and publish.
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Any colleges who established themselves as teaching-track would immediately become less prestigious…
Small liberal arts colleges can get away with this if the kids are rich enough and the buildings old enough.
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Those who are reserch stars are often able to buy themselves out of teaching with their grants…
In medicine, and I’d assume other natural science areas, even senior faculty are soft-money hires. You get a grant or you don’t work there.
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Doesn’t UT-Austin have a dual line system?
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I see this in the Boston area. The smaller colleges have explicitly teaching-based tenure tracks, and I know the Brandeis has a teaching-only tenure track. They expect research on teaching pedagogy, but not the field of teaching. I believe University of Toronto also has a program. However, my background is science so I’m not sure how this works in the humanities.
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MH, I don’t think that’s even true anymore, sadly–Tenured Radical hasn’t written good stuff about this before, I believe.
Laura, I think I can dig some up soonish.
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Oh, don’t go out of your way, Jackie. I thought you had something handy. No worries. I can google.
So, in the attempt to avoid too much labor, do you think I can safely write that “the dual route to tenure may exist in a handful of schools on a small scale, but is not the norm” or something like that?
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I attended a private R1 for undergrad and my masters. There were teaching-only positions – but they were termed Lecturers, and were not tenured. (Some were held by very long-term faculty members, but no tenure). There were also some research faculty apppointments mostly in science and engineering, but there were grant-funded and thus also not tenured.
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Lecturers don’t count. No tenure, little prestige, less money. They are just one step up from an adjunct at most schools.
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“Lecturers don’t count. No tenure, little prestige, less money” well, okay, but everybody worshipped the ground Edith Stokey walked on. http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/edith-stokey-1923-2012/
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It’s funny that you posted this today because I spent all day interviewing candidates for promotion who were presenting to the promotion committee. The question of what constitutes a promotion to full professor kept coming up. One of the candidates who teaches in our doctoral program said that anyone who teaches doctoral students should herself be doing scholarly research. I agree.
What what about those of us who never teach doctoral students? That’s a bit of a dilemma. I work with (and I know this now having observed 10 faculty in the classroom and interviewed 22) a bunch of incredibly talented teachers. Many of these people have amazing connections to professionals in their fields and create amazing learning/working opportunities for our students.
And yet we spent a bit of today fretting over whether someone with a JD who was teaching business law and human resources classes in an MBA program had the appropriate terminal degree. And there is a new push from top admin for “scholarship” that few of my colleagues really want to do. What people want to do is *teach*.
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Wendy, your school has a doctoral program? Isn’t it a largely vocational sort of school?
Yes, some faculty just want to teach. I’ll leave it at that right now.
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My R1 has Lecturer positions with benefits. They are classed into the same job group with people like me who do only research. We receive the same benefits as faculty.
I envision a two-track system where the teaching track is lower paid but still at a professional level and receives full faculty benefits. The research track is high-risk, high-reward: if you keep the grants coming then you can justify a higher salary.
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Laura, yes. 🙂 It’s an interesting place. The doctoral program is very small. We also have an MBA and an M.Ed.
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Med schools sometimes have a research or teaching track for clinical professors. But those folks are generating their salary by seeing patients. The two tracks are for how they will be evaluated for tenure.
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You do understand that that is just wrong, Wendy.
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One of my relatives is technically tenure track, but if her research money were to dry up and blow away, so would the job. So, it’s a somewhat different sense of “tenured.”
So I suppose you could have a situation in the big grant fields where you have:
1. researchers who can be fired if their funding isn’t good enough
2. teaching specialists.
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Laura, I sense a joke I’m not getting. Unless you think I’m saying there’s a doctorate in the vocation for which we are best known, which would be wrong, I guess? But the doctorate is in Education.
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John Sexton of NYU wanted to do this (along with opening branch campuses in every country on earth and building ultragigantic buildings all over Manhattan). Essentially the problem is:
1) everybody suspects that the ‘teaching track’ is code for ‘people who do all the work and get half the pay’
2) we don’t really have a good idea of how to measure whether somebody’s a great teacher. IMHO, I don’t know that we have good ideas about research either, in that we tend to measure that in terms of quantity, not quality. But measuring teaching isn’t any easier in higher ed than it is in K-12. Most metrics you might invent tend to be something that some fairly mediocre or poor teachers can work or exploit, and certain kinds of great teaching don’t necessarily measure well.
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“Isn’t it already in place — Isn’t that the distinction between a R1 and a teaching college (with many steps in between?)….”
“Nope. Teaching colleges are transforming into places where research is expected. Even community college profs now have to show evidence of research in order to get tenure.”
Sure, there are research expectations for many professors at teaching colleges, but the point remains that institutions vary immensely in the extent to which they require faculty to succeed in research or teaching for tenure. In other words, I do think that this sort of multi-track system exists in the field of higher education as a whole. The question, then, for me is if the multiple tracks should exist within institutions rather than in the field as a whole. I’m not sure I think that teaching-focused institutions need to diversify to include more research-oriented faculty members, although I can see the argument for why research-oriented institutions could benefit from having more (or just more equitably-paid?) teaching-oriented faculty.
FYI, I think many major Canadian universities have the sort of system you’re talking about.
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“FYI, I think many major Canadian universities have the sort of system you’re talking about.”
Do British universities also do something similar?
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We have teaching and research staff here, but the differences are minimal. I am a lecturer or teaching staff, but as you can see below research is officially a bigger part of my job than teaching. At the lecturer/research fellow level the difference amounts to the following. Lecturers are evaluated on research output 50%, teaching 40%, and service 10%. While research fellows are evaluated on research output 65%, teaching 25%, and service 10%. So lecturers who are the teaching track are still expected to devote 50% of their work to research versus only 40% to teaching. As you move up the ranks, teaching makes up less and less. For the next rank teaching staff have a 60% research and 30% teaching breakdown versus 70% research and 20% teaching for research fellows. Finally, for the last promotion teaching staff are expected to devote 70% to research and only 15% to teaching, not much different than the 75% and 10% breakdown of research staff.
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FYI, I think many major Canadian universities have the sort of system you’re talking about.
There aren’t many major Canadian universities for most meanings of “many” and “major”.
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Some have suggested creating two tracks of professors: those who specialize in teaching and those who specialize in research.
I think this needs to be unpacked some. When I was in college, I studied philosophy and ended up taking a Minor in it (although at the time I was intending to double major).
In the Intro and General classes I took, “teaching” meant imparting to the student “What did Hegel believe?” “Why was it important?” “How did it emerge from Kant’s teachings?” “In what important ways was it different from Kant?” There was a lot of unpacking dense text.
As I moved into upper level classes, and class sizes shrunk from 100 to 25 to 12, with half undergrad and half grad students, there was still some of that (especially in the more technical “formal logic” areas), but more and more of the teaching was not “What did Hegel believe?” but rather “How does one become a philosopher?” Essentially, teaching how to philosophize and prepare essays and works worthy of publication. In a way, teaching how to research. Good teaching became, in a way, good mentoring. It wasn’t “I never really understood Kant’s categorical imperative until Professor X explained it. He’s a great teacher!” It was a completely different thing. And I don’t think a professor who “only teaches” would really be able to do it. Because the more advanced you get, the more “teaching” and “researching” becomes the same thing.
So, a decision to have a “teaching only” position may, in effect, require a division between teachers in “Intro” and “Advanced” classes. And if the “Teachers” aren’t researching, but the “Researchers” still have to teach and train the advanced students to be the next set of Researchers, I don’t see how they can be equal tracks.
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There is some overlap between teaching and research. But there are some people who want to spend 10% of their time doing research and 90% doing teaching. And others want to spend 90% of their time doing research and 10% of their time teaching. Teaching those huge intro classes is just as important, maybe more important, than teaching advanced small classes. Both types of faculty are needed equally at colleges and should be equally rewarded. Right now, they are not.
And, yes, Liesl, I do think that research universities would benefit from having faculty that is rewarded for actually teaching their students. Knowing how the sausage is made, I would never, ever, ever send my child to a R1 college.
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Both my wife and I went to R1 universities as undergraduates. The trick is to get into an honors program. You get a fair number of classes taught by senior faculty in relatively small settings.
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“It wasn’t “I never really understood Kant’s categorical imperative until Professor X explained it. He’s a great teacher!” It was a completely different thing. And I don’t think a professor who “only teaches” would really be able to do it. Because the more advanced you get, the more “teaching” and “researching” becomes the same thing.”
Right. People with little research program of their own are predictably very bad at supervising dissertations.
One issue that colleges would do well to bear in mind is that students do come back, 50 years later with rosy memories of wonderful Professor So-and-so and his lecture on the categorical imperative, wanting to endow named chairs. It’s the teachers that inspire that.
Also, being a good Intro teacher is a special talent that not everybody possesses. There are plenty of people who are inspiring and brilliant in the 12-25 student classroom but whose 200 person classes feel pretty flat. (And consider the economics of that–the good big-class lecturer generates tremendous revenue compared to their salary.)
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But as a future customer of undergraduate education for my son, I don’t care about professors who can supervise dissertations or excel at upper level classes. I want professors who can breathe life into Intro to Shakespeare and Intro to Comparative Politics.
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Compensation is tricky: the full-time researcher is likely supporting a staff of other PhDs and students. This comes with personnel and financial management responsibilities. (How well these are done is a different story). It doesn’t necessarily come with tenure.
The full-time teacher needs tenure for the academic freedom. This is a fair trade-off for salary.
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I went to an Ivy and had a pretty good amount of exposure to good teachers/great scholars who breathed life into their subjects, and I wasn’t in an honors program (though I ended up doing an honors thesis, I guess). When I was there, I took intro courses with people like Ted Lowi and Walter LaFeber. OK, so I fell asleep in LaFeber’s course and stopped going, but in my defense, it was a snowy winter, and the sheer effort of getting uphill to Baker undid me, and I’d sit in the back and warm up and fall asleep. I had pretty good relationships with a few faculty like Skip Gates and Michael Kammen. My pre-med housemate Jeanne was madly in love with Gordon Teskey, now at Harvard, and carried around her Riverside Shakespeare with reverence. On the other hand, Benedict Anderson was my very first faculty adviser, and he sucked. I think he must have had an imagined community with me.
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I just meant that I took calculus with a full professor in a class of only twenty, not that you’d know the names of my teachers if you were going to graduate school.
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I was thinking more of Laura’s point that you don’t get anything from tenured full profs at R1s. I didn’t find that to be the case. I know it seemed like I was name-dropping, but I also think there’s a false idea that a lot of big-name research-y profs can’t teach, and I think a lot of them can. Some can’t. Some don’t care enough to. But maybe it was because it was the olden days back when I was an undergrad, but a lot of profs back then pretty much shared a love for conveying the information they had learned and the perspectives they had on history and literature (my majors once I switched out of the government major).
I think we might consider why the situation is different now. And I wonder if the problem is, dare I say, an emphasis on accountability. You get tenure if you do X, Y and Z, because the rules say you have to. And then there is a race to be better than the other school and have even more rules. And then there are the rules about university service, and the pressures to teach all the college students who don’t really want to be well-educated; they just want a credential. And maybe there’s more competition because now women like me and Laura were trying to become professors, so the standards had to be higher.
If you ask me, profs today are expected to do a hell of a lot more work than profs did back in the 80s, and at the same time we’re told we’re lazy jerks.
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I wasn’t thinking that an Ivy school that is an R1 should be considered as an R1 as opposed to an Ivy.
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Our administration has proposed a dual track system during contract negotiations, but it has never flown. I think many junior faculty are supportive of the idea – in part because they’re busting their butt doing research to get tenure while quite a few of their senior peers aren’t research active (our institution was traditionally a teaching school but were trying to move up the rankings – utterly stupid IMO – so the expectations were different for people who are now full). I don’t know if this junior – senior divide about the dual track system is unique to our institution, but I can see it being widespread. If senior faculty are less research active, then such a system would mean more work for them as under the current system, they’re doing the same amount of teaching, but less research.
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This is related and depressing:
http://news.yahoo.com/cancer-science-many-discoveries-dont-hold-174216262.html
“A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer — a high proportion of them from university labs — are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.
During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications — papers in top journals, from reputable labs — for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.
Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.”
“On Tuesday, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences heard testimony that the number of scientific papers that had to be retracted increased more than tenfold over the last decade; the number of journal articles published rose only 44 percent.”
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I’m with Wendy – at Berkeley I got really splendid lectures from Koshland, Calvin, Diamond, Cason, etc. Many of these shining stars were super lecturers. Now, classes of several hundred, nobody had me over for brunch, that’s for sure. I did form relationships with some of the professors in my major, and that was good. I don’t think I suffered for being at an R1. And the quality of the late-night dorm debates was high.
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You’re missing a third prong of faculty appointment: Extension. My husband has a tenure-track research/extension split. (In his first 2 years, he has also begun advising 2 graduate students and hosted an international graduate student in his lab, plus provided advice to the summer student workers in his lab and served on numerous committees he keeps getting appointed to, plus the journals he reviews articles for, etc.) He’s had no end of frustration dealing with conflicting messages from his administration vis a vis what counts towards tenure and what the administration says it wants. In practice, it seems that grant dollars trump all.
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What does extension mean, KT?
Shannon, yes. Seen that situation a lot.
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Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_extension
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I am getting a kick out of reading the international terms for Extension. I shall have to accuse my husband of “vulgarisation.”
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So is there evidence for the argument for the 90% and 10% divide on research and teaching? Or is this a media canard?
And why no love for lecturers? CUNY has full-time lecturer lines that pay real money, as do many R1’s.
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Why not make them full professors with tenure and all the benefits that research professors get?
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“Why not make them full professors with tenure and all the benefits that research professors get? ”
Because they’re doing different jobs. In theory, professors are all doing the same job, some teaching and some research, with balances varying among fields and universities.
If you make two tracks, you’re defining two jobs, and once you define two jobs, then the benefits and salary associated with the two jobs will be different, based on demand and supply (which in turn, one assumes, depends on the availability of the talent, the difficulty and dangers of the job, the desirability of the job, and the measureability of the value of the job).
It could be that economic calculations of those values should produce higher paid teachers v researchers (if, say, the majority of the salary is generated by tuition and the students care about the teacher who is teaching them). The current methods confabulate the economic value provided by different jobs at the university, but if the teaching job is split off, the teachers will face the same issues as K-12 teachers, that it’s difficult to calculate the economic value of teaching.
I think that research shouldn’t be paid for with tuition dollars, or at least, very little of it should, and that, in turn should mean that non-funded research has to be done at institutions that have non-tuition based support, like endowments, or on an individual’s own time, which means on top of a teaching load. I think if professors want students to pay tuition to support their research they’re going to have to make a much stronger case of why the research helps the student. On the other hand, if students are going to college primarily for the prestige value (of, say, saying that Kahnemann taught you psychology), perhaps they’re willing to pay the premium for Kahnemann’s research).
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Thinking about the problem of high tuition, I was interested to see this article in the Economist (from a year ago) discussing the problem of higher education in England, where all colleges cost similar amounts. From their (free market Economist)perspective, the cost structure in America is a huge improvement.
http://www.economist.com/node/18586968
Harvard University, which consistently tops the league tables on cost, charges $38,000 a year for tuition (albeit with generous scholarships) whereas the University of Houston charges local students $8,500, for example.
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If you figure out who is calling in the bomb threats at our school, you can get $50,000. That’s enough to pay for most of your B.A. tuition (if in-state) or a great deal of research.
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There is some overlap between teaching and research. But there are some people who want to spend 10% of their time doing research and 90% doing teaching. And others want to spend 90% of their time doing research and 10% of their time teaching. Teaching those huge intro classes is just as important, maybe more important, than teaching advanced small classes. Both types of faculty are needed equally at colleges and should be equally rewarded. Right now, they are not.
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There is some overlap between teaching and research. But there are some people who want to spend 10% of their time doing research and 90% doing teaching. And others want to spend 90% of their time doing research and 10% of their time teaching. Teaching those huge intro classes is just as important, maybe more important, than teaching advanced small classes. Both types of faculty are needed equally at colleges and should be equally rewarded. Right now, they are not.
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