Study Shows Professors With Tenure Are Worse Teachers 273
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "We all know the stereotype about tenured college professors: great researchers, lazy teachers. Now Jordan Weissmann writes in the Atlantic that a new study confirms the conventional knowlege that faculty who aren't on the tenure-track appear to do a better job at teaching freshmen undergraduates in their introductory courses than their tenured/tenure-track peers. 'Our results provide evidence that the rise of full-time designated teachers at U.S. colleges and universities may be less of a cause for alarm than some people think, and indeed, may actually be educationally beneficial.' Using the transcripts of Northwestern freshmen from 2001 through 2008, the research team focused on two factors: inspiration and preparation. The team began by asking if taking a class from a tenure or tenure-track professor in their first term later made students more likely to pursue additional courses in that field. That's the inspiration part. Next the researchers wanted to know if students who took their first course in a field from a tenure or tenure-track professor got better grades when they pursued more advanced coursework. That's the preparation part. Controlling for certain student characteristics, freshmen were actually about 7 percentage points more likely to take a second course in a given field if their first class was taught by an adjunct or non-tenure professor and they also tended to get higher grades in those future courses. The pattern held 'for all subjects, regardless of grading standards or the qualifications of the students the subjects attracted' from English to Engineering. The defining trend among college faculties during the past 20 years or so (40, if you really want to stretch back) has been the rise of the adjuncts. 'That said, there is something appealingly intuitive in these results,' concludes Weissmann. 'Professionals who are paid entirely to teach, in fact, make for better teachers. Makes sense, right?'"
Moo (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the difference really tenured or non-tenured? Or is it, younger or older.
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Is the difference really tenured or non-tenured? Or is it, younger or older.
Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach because teaching the youth was everyone's job. It would be like accusing an honest person of embezzlement.
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Way to miss the point. He meant younger or older professors. You see, chances are that the non-tenured professors are younger than the tenured professors. The fact that you require this explanation proves you were taught by a tenured professor.
Could the youthful exuberance of a younger professor make a difference? Can the smaller age variance make them more approachable? Could it be that the tenured professors are too busy banging the best looking chicks in class? Could it be that the students get older and
Re:Moo (Score:4, Insightful)
Can the smaller age variance make them more approachable?
I doubt the variance of the ages of "younger" professors has anything to do with it. Perhaps the smaller difference in age between student and teacher does.
This is one of those "d'oh" kinds of articles. Tenure was never intended to reward teaching, only research. Professors are judged on research, not teaching. Of COURSE teaching faculty will do a better job, in general, at teaching because that's what they are hired to do and what they are judged on. Especially at the freshman level courses that are done over and over again. And teaching faculty aren't distracted by worrying about their research.
That's not to say you cannot find excellent teachers in the ranks of the professors. You can find excellent teachers in any profession. They are excellent teachers not because of their position but despite it.
So, d'oh.
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WTF are you talking about? What does this have to do with "the cloud" and NSA? Try to stay on point, son.
Re:Moo (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that I think older people make bad professors, but certainly I could see them becoming more jaded over time. It's like giving someone a fork, we just assume it's intuitive and everyone will know how to use it, but give a fork to a two year old and watch them try to use it. Hilarity ensues.
I guess chopsticks would be a better analogy. The longer you've been using them the harder it is to understand why others just can't get it right. My dad always had that, "I'm hungry and have better things to do than explain the process, figure it out for yourself or starve." attitude. Which was kind of the same attitude I got from some of my profs in university.
Re:Moo (Score:5, Informative)
It's like giving someone a fork, we just assume it's intuitive and everyone will know how to use it, but give a fork to a two year old and watch them try to use it. Hilarity ensues.
That might be a factor but I think (speaking as a prof) that I get better at realizing what is intuitive and what is not as I teach because if I assume something is "obvious" and it is not then I'll have 10 students outside my office asking about it. However, something I do find hard to adjust to is the ever decreasing standards of high school education. Tenured faculty rarely have time to run remedial sessions to help less academic students cope with the ever widening gap. However sessional lecturers do not have research programs and service work to worry about to the same extent and, at least where I am, several do run such sessions to help less able students. So I am not surprised to learn that less able students showed the largest performance increase.
Re:Moo (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Moo (Score:5, Interesting)
I could see profs giving less of a damn about teaching since it's basically a necessary evil for them. They have to teach as part of their agreement in order to continue research, but time spent teaching is time spent away from doing what they want to be doing. Kind of like sitting in meetings is time away from coding and development for most of us. It's a pain in the arse and normally not beneficial to what we actually do, maybe even harmful (I can't count the number of times just sitting in a meeting ended up changing the direction of an unrelated project because someone not related to the project said, "wouldn't it be cool if...?", I'm sure we've all been there), but it has to be done to please the higher ups.
Re:Moo (Score:5, Interesting)
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Maybe the tenured professors remember their pre-tenure days of being beaten down in reviews by freshmen who thought they should get an easy A in their class. Wouldn't surprise me if they look at the intro classes and just say to themselves, "F 'em, if they don't want to work, I don't want them advancing in my field."
Re:Moo (Score:5, Informative)
No, because the findings also held for young professors on tenure track, whose positions are about as uncertain as you can get. This would seem to indicate that the issue is a focus on research vs teaching. You don't get tenure, or a Nobel Prize, for teaching.
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Even were it so, one has to ask how much quality teaching we get out of tenure versus adjunct over the entire career.
If we made everyone adjunct professors they would simply be disposed of by the market when their effectiveness goes below some point as they eventually burn out, where a tenured professor enjoying a greater level of security and possibly lower stress levels as a result may linger on still doing effective work, just not with the same success rate, and probably with side-benefits not measured b
Re:Moo (Score:5, Insightful)
Adjuncts are also handy for keeping your payroll costs down. Economist Richard Wolff [rdwolff.com] mentions this often in his lectures. [youtube.com] It's the same trend toward part-time work that shows up in a lot of industries lately.
My suspicious side notes that this study in TFA is rather convenient for academic administrators who might want to "enhance the institution's bottom line" by reducing the number of tenured faculty. But I'm sure there's no connection, and it would never be used like that. ;-)
Re:Moo (Score:5, Informative)
My suspicious side notes that this study in TFA is rather convenient for academic administrators who might want to "enhance the institution's bottom line" by reducing the number of tenured faculty. But I'm sure there's no connection, and it would never be used like that. ;-)
I also noticed this, and that the study was published by two administrators and a consultant. There did seem to be a slight amount of vested interest in the conclusions which were reached; I'm guessing they were just lucky the data came out that way? ;)
Re:Moo (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you have the economics confused. Tenured professors are bad teachers because they focus on research more than teaching. They focus on research more than teaching because that's what gets grants and prestige. If you are a prestigious research university, you will have plenty of students regardless of how good the instruction is.
Tenured faculty should be a source of profit, not a cost.
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Re:Moo (Score:5, Informative)
"faculty who aren't on the tenure-track appear to do a better job at teaching freshmen undergraduates in their introductory courses than their tenured/tenure-track peers"
Emphasis mine.
That should not be extrapolated into tenured professors being worse teachers overall. I'm pretty certain that for advanced studies, the opposite is true, if nothing else because the untenured teachers don't have the same chance to specialize.
Re:Moo (Score:5, Interesting)
That should not be extrapolated into tenured professors being worse teachers overall. I'm pretty certain that for advanced studies, the opposite is true, if nothing else because the untenured teachers don't have the same chance to specialize.
By advanced studies I assume you mean graduate classes correct? Because if you are implying that anything taught at the undergraduate level requires a level of specialization beyond what an adjunct can possess, I strongly disagree. I would venture to say that almost all graduate classes don't require that much specialization either. I went to a school at the bottom end of the top 50 nation-wide, and almost all of my graduate classes were a joke. The only real benefit was resume padding and the chance to become involved in research (where I learned a great deal).
Tenured professors will still be useful for their research. This is both because of the results of the research and for the opportunity they give students who assist with the research. But if their research is important at all then they are probably wasting their time teaching, and apparently doing a worse job than those who would have focused on teaching full time. I know my research advisor could have got much more done if she didn't have to prepare lectures all the time.
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I'm guessing something is going to change with education and research. As you pointed out, it hasn't made much sense for our researchers to be wasting time teaching for a while now. Additionally, there's a flood of PhDs coming. Online classes are coming as well, reducing the need for overqualified lecturers, and the education bubble is going to have to pop before too long.
Ideall
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Additionally, tenure-track faculty may consider being assigned a freshman intro course a punishment (and, sometimes, it is). Sometimes, an upper-level class which the faculty member has put a lot of effort into preparing doesn't make some minimum enrollment, and they are assigned to an intro course with no time to prepare.
The study notes, but the media summaries rarely mention, that most of the gains were from lower-achieving students; the higher-achieving students saw no difference between the two classes
Re:Moo (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're onto something here. Senior faculty sometimes resent having to teach 101 classes. Tenure is important for academic freedom and to go against what the administration wants.
Re:Moo (Score:5, Insightful)
When I had sociology 101 it was taught, due to unusual circumstances, by the department chair. This was at a reasonably large university and, being a required freshman course, had large classrooms. I was not, however, a freshman. By that time I had two years behind me and was picking up the required courses at the university I had transferred to.
If you had surveyed the students they would have indicated the instruction was terrible. Not because it was, but because they were nearly all freshman. Straight from highschool with over rated opinions of their own intellectual capacity, no ethic for study or class participation, and no interest in the class. Although it was hampered by class size it was one of the better taught classes I've been in.
Yes, I realize you are emphasizing "freshman undergraduates" and "introductory courses", but the problem isn't (necessarily) that tenure track professors are less effective at teaching them but (more likely) that they push and expect more (something) from the students.
Students are an amazingly lazy lot*. At a third university (yeah, I moved around a bit) I took a medieval history course. It was flooded with students and it turns out that 1) there was either no class size limit or it was not enforced and 2) the prof had (deservedly or not) gained a reputation as being an "easy A". I had a genuine interest in the topic and, being new, had not heard of the rep until the first day of class. It was a "flash enrollment" situation -- apparently the class had been small up to that semester and he spent an undue amount of time trying to convince people to drop. When taking a survey of students concerning their professors the group bias needs to be taken into account.
I've known tenured professors who taught at various levels (introductory courses on up) who were absolutely *loved* by students because you got an A simply by being enrolled. Top approval ratings, voted for teaching excellence, etc. Conversely, another tenured professor, on the first day of class for a required course, bragged that he (and one other) prof accounted for something like 90% of the students taking it semester after semester and that 60% of those students didn't pass. It was a point of pride with him. Without knowing more about the situation, student evaluation of professors is basically meaningless.
What it boils down to is that some professors are gas bags who just like to hear themselves talk. Some are there for the pay check. Others are just there for the research and resent having any class load at all. In other words, they vary.
About the one valid generalization that can be made of tenured vs non-tenure track vs non-tenured tenure track is that non-tenure track tend to try harder and care more about student approval; non-tenured tenure track tend to try to meet tenure requirements and care more about student approval. In other words, tenured faculty (as a generalization) tend to be less concerned with student approval. They've also been doing it long enough to have learned that students want contradictory things (e.g., there was too much classroom discussion vs there was not enough).
* I'm using this as a generalization of undergraduates in general. Graduate students are, in my experience, more motivated than nearly any undergraduate. But the motivation levels of undergraduate students varies a lot ranging from the "I can't be bothered to show up for class" freshman to the rare "I will exceed the expectations for all assignments". Students suffer from a range of maladies, such as believing they can pass a class without doing any assigned work or reading.
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Tenured is a bad plan in terms of Human Resources, and productivity.
Every job has an aspect to it that isn't fun, and people would prefer not to do it if they don't want to. What keeps people doing these sucky parts of their jobs, is the fact that they could get promoted, or at least not fired for doing them.
Now if you have Tenured where you would only get fired if you really try to, means your job is secured, not matter what. So if there is the sucky part of your job, you just don't do it, or do it well.
Re:Moo (Score:4, Insightful)
It is fashionable to blast the tenure process, but faculty that get fired are not going to go work at the local gas station (or even at some software company) and come back as great faculty ever again. And people generally get tenured about the time they are dealing with families, and are least-likely to tolerate long-distance moves, which is important considering how distant universities are from each other. So you start instituting the destruction of the tenure process, and you'll destroy universities ... in the US, that is the perhaps the only part of the educational process that is actually good.
Re:Moo (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but nobody in this thread is addressing the root reasons for tenure. Tenure exists to allow professors to have true academic freedom and freedom of speech. Otherwise major donors could influence the choice of who to fund and who to fire based on the political, religious (or other) views of individual professors.
Here's Wikipedia;
Without job security, the scholarly community as a whole might favor "safe" lines of inquiry. The intent of tenure is to allow original ideas to be more likely to arise, by giving scholars the intellectual autonomy to investigate the problems and solutions about which they are most passionate, and to report their honest conclusions.
Re:Moo (Score:5, Interesting)
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That mechanism has already failed. Modern scientific research is so expensive that even tenured professors have to carter to the whims of funding agencies (NSF, NIH, etc.) in order to continue working. Intellectually autonomy doesn't keep the rat colony alive, pay the electric bill for servers or purchase chemical reagents.
I'm glad somebody said this. Though I'm sure it's always served both roles, another thought about modern tenure (in my opinion as a young academic) is that it's much less about guaranteeing academic freedom, and much more about managing hiring in the face of an ever growing crowd of PhDs. A department might hire a few adjuncts to teach and put 4 or 5 good researchers on the the tenure track, with what seems like a full expectation of granting tenure to one (or zero, if they feel like rolling the dice again)
Re:Moo (Score:4, Insightful)
The university system was set up to preserve and expand knowledge. The tenure system works well in that regard. Most tenured professors keep doing research, and keep graduating PhDs. Witness the number of retired (Professor Emeritus) professors that are still active in their fields.
Once you realize that universities were never meant to teach large numbers of undergraduate students, then the problems start becoming obvious. What does research and tenure have to do with undergraduate teaching? If you are lucky, in the fourth year you might start to get current knowledge in most engineering programs. Everything taught before that has been known since the 1950's (and often much earlier like the 1700's). As such, current research has almost nothing to do with the undergraduate program. Even current employment trends, on the whole, have nothing to do with the curriculum of the undergraduate program at most universities. (Witness the large number of liberal-arts majors and the correspondingly small number of associated liberal-arts jobs.)
The explosion that is about to happen is that:
a) students want to pay for something that gets them a job,
b) universities were never originally structured for job training, and
c) the universities have no funding formula to pay for the practical facilities for practical job training. This means that students graduate without practical skills, and this makes them unemployable.
We are heading to a world where we have many highly-educated, unemployed, indebted and poor former university students.
Re:Moo (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be better if Universities, get out of the Educating Kids for Jobs market, but strict educational research path.
We need to get Organizations to recognize non-College degrees as valuable education for their work. And save your College education degree for career paths in research and education.
The Undergrad classes, should be taught not in a University setting but in a Schooling setting outside of research. Not Dumb it down, but teach it with the expectation that people will use it to go to work in industry.
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No, it is non-experienced vs experienced. Most people who go into teaching do so to garner satisfaction believing they will be helping and loving the selfless feeling. They start their career full of exuberance then begin to realize that it just isn't what they had thought it was. Disillusioned, they cling to the career resentful of the administration and red tape when they should be moving on to a different career.
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How dare students expect to be properly taught by people they are paying to teach them?
You didn't actually challenge my assertion that a PhD doesn't confer an ability to teach, rather you merely acknowledged that the teachers suck and then claim that students are entitled for expecting to get any kind of value out of their expensive tuition dollars. If in your world the only thing a degree confers is an ability to acquire knowledge independently, then all a university is is a massively overpriced testing fa
No way! (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder why a person with in a unremovable job would put low effort on classes...
Seriously this is news?
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"tenure-track" means they don''t have tenure YET. The outcome is unexpected as you'd expect effort to get to the tenured position.
Re:No way! (Score:5, Informative)
To get tenure, you need to publish. You can be the best teacher in the world, but that won't get you tenure. So this is an expected result: Tenure-track professors are focusing on what they need to get tenure, i.e. research and publishing. Since they have less time and effort focused on teaching, the results there are less positive.
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but they would... since that is when the try to give the introduction that will get the guys to stick with it.
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This. Notice that one of the authors of the study is the president of Northwestern?
Alternative Metrics (Score:5, Informative)
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As a tenured faculty member, I can attest to the fact that tenure/tenure-track faculty at many research schools are evaluated (raise/promotion/tenure) on metrics different from adjuncts and instructors. Devoting sufficient time and effort to teaching can be counter productive for your career. For many disciplines, external funding and publications are the primary criteria for evaluation. Ultimately, energies in teaching are focused on graduate students - who support those activities. Add in service (committees, societies and the like) and it's often an issue of limited time.
This is true for most professions. I worked a helpdesk before I was promoted to a programmer. We used to complain that programmers never answered their pages (yes, I'm that old). Then when I became a programmer, I realized that the word, "support" was never used in my yearly reviews. Kind of explained the whole attitude programmers had.
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Re:Alternative Metrics (Score:5, Insightful)
Good summary, speaking as another tenured faculty member. There are a number of things which are not addressed in the study which complicate any analysis:
The first two points result in a biased sample- tenured faculty teaching intro classes may well be dominated by "dead wood" faculty who have to teach more because they are no longer as productive in research, and are more likely to teach intro courses. I have been in departments where one strategy to get unproductive faculty to retire is to assign them to large intro lectures for non-majors. That is not a recipe for learning success and may be sufficient to bias the results downward as seen in the study. It appears there is just one institution in the study (Northwestern, a private university in the American midwest) and if that is a common practice there, that makes the whole thing pretty moot.
Another point is that it does take a while for junior faculty to find their teaching footing, particularly in the large lecture-theater classes. Often, small changes in administrative or organizational methods have a big impact on how happy the students are or how much time they put into the class. With greater instructional experience, particularly in large lectures, it is not surprising that a seasoned adjunct instructor may do better by these metrics that a hotshot excited untenured researcher, no matter how enthusiastic the latter is.
Isn't thsi what we always knew (Score:5, Informative)
Candidates at Universities get the opportunity to work with people who are pioneering their fields. They are often brilliant, will nurture talent when they see it, but can be a bit eccentric and will respond to something like "I can't remember how to do integration by parts" with a reference to a textbook or by passing them on to a more able student.
This works well for the brightest, and reasonably well for the average - but it has long been known that those of less ability (who are still bright by average population standards) would do better in a technical college. Here they would be taught by dedicated teachers, who would do little or no research.
Is the solution to make Universities more like technical colleges? Well, maybe now they are looking at taking closer to 50% of all kids instead of the 10% that hey did decades ago then it is. We should not forget that even if we need to add tuition staff then to turn out new scientific pioneers we still need the research professors, even though they may not be the best teachers for all students.
Yes, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to talk about correlation/causation, but there's typically some significant demographic differences between profs with and without tenure.
My experience is that tenure-track profs were a heck of a lot younger, meshed well with the students, hadn't spent the last 20 years teaching the course, and were more likely to put in more time and effort on the material. Tenured profs also tend to have a lot of things sucking their time (obviously researchers, but department heads and/or deans are worse), so they dump a lot more on the TA's and are pretty tight for office hours.
I'd be curious to see how things break down when they account for demographic differences. If that's even feasible.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems fairly obvious. Younger faculty relate better to young students. But such a caveat doesn't fit well with a sensationalist press release/headline.
Its a pretty shitty aspect of western culture (don't know if other cultures experience it or not) that there is mass resentment of other people having any kind of job security. There is the notion that "other people" are all feckless, lazy slobs who must be whipped to work harder by constantly being threatened with redundancy and poverty.
The worse the economy gets, the stronger this feeling. Whip the Others harder, get the economy going. Leave me and people I know alone - we are hardworking families - kick those Others into working longer hours for lower wages; the fuckers are getting off too lightly. Problem is, this is just a feeling. Actual research into motivation finds that an environment of fear, or even promise of big rewards, does not generate productivity in anything other than menial tasks. Unsurprisingly, most people work better if they aren't constantly stressed.
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there is mass resentment of other people having any kind of job security.
I think it is our acceptance of envy. You see it when people talk about unions and public servants, and you see it in the 99% crowd as well. It's a shame because there are legitimate gripes in there, but they get overshadowed by the blind hatred (which IMHO often starts with envy).
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This is how the Democrat Party wins elections.
The Republicans feed off of this, too - only they direct their ire at the unions and public employees. I'd say Republicans are more likely to make comments about "ivory tower" academics as well. I'm registered Republican, and I find myself rolling my eyes at much of the literature that comes my way from GOP candidates.
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So why stay registered? It seems to me that it sends a pretty clear message that, as much as you roll your eyes, your vote is secured, thus your opinion can be safely ignored. Unregister and make them earn your vote.
Depends on the field (Score:2)
There are a lot of fields where the adjuncts are retired or semi-retired practitioners.
When I was in civil engineering, my concrete professor was middle aged, but was still working part time. (I have no idea if he was scouting for talent for his company or not). The adjunct who taught environmental engineering (mostly water treatment) was younger, but actually working in the field. My dad taught law school after he retired 20+ years in the military, and he wasn't tenure track. (which is why he was okay
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Northwestern actually has a cadre of professional instructors, non-tenure-track, but not adjunct, either: These faculty are hired on a three- to five-year contract, with some benefits, and have no duties besides teaching. If they do that well, they can usually expect to have their contracts renewed. For many who love teaching and have less of an interest in (or, perhaps, little flair for) research, it's not a bad gig. Adjuncts, on the other hand, are the press gang of academia, paid by the credit hour, with
Awful professor story (Score:3)
I kid you not. I had a teacher in college who would spend all his classes talking about his friends in the Senior Olympics (this was a Sociology of Religion class, but he did the same in all his classes). Then he would periodically give a test that had nothing to do with the book or anything he said in class (i.e., no Senior Olympics questions). Everyone would fail, and he would grade on a curve. I scored the highest raw test grade in the class for the semester with a 46 (only thanks to a pretty good general knowledge).
Of course he had tenure, and of course everyone knew about his antics. A few years later he fell over dead while training for the Senior Olympics (again, I couldn't make this shit up if I tried). He would not be missed.
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Quick solution to that. Don't take "sociology of religion". I'm willing to bet your physics, maths and engineering professors don't dick around like that.
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Are you kidding? That's where you got into the REAL autistics and nutballs! Only the psychology profs were worse than them.
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I'm willing to bet your physics, maths and engineering professors don't dick around like that.
Nope, the physics professor I had spent the first day talking Sikhism [wikipedia.org] and the Harmandir Sahib (the Golden Temple) [wikipedia.org] and it would come up from time to time after that, although he did some more time actually talking about physics. Sadly, he had a very thick accent so you really had to pay attention to figure out what he was saying to determine if it was even relevant.
Re:Awful professor story (Score:4, Interesting)
Interest in Teaching Related to tenure? (Score:3)
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From what I have observed, the younger teachers who were on tenure track in universities were always more focused on getting research grants because that is what helped them get tenure.
That sounds like you agree with the premise; they're not focused on teaching, but on getting grants.
That said there was one tenured professor who was an okay teacher but left the teacher survey on the last day of classes, on our desks, on the way out muttering "Write whatever you want, nothing can happen to me.
And that is why it's shocking that anyone is shocked by this study.
A very good reason (Score:2)
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At the university I went to there was a professor who was known to be excellent at research but a crappy teacher. He taught an advanced calculus course in the same way a hardcore uber-geek might teach "introduction to computers" to a bunch of barely-computer-literate old folks...he was trying to teach us the right way with a good understanding of all the principles behind the calculations, but it was going over most of our heads, as the course's pass rate showed.
This went on until a rich guy's daughter took
Gotta be some kind of compensation. (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be nice if we could have careful training of each of our precious growing minds, for years and years, at the lowest possible cost, by people who did nothing but deeply care for the interests of who these people were going to be... but having teaching (and research) being one of the lowest quality-of-life jobs, with very low relative pay does mean something.
The best way we end up compensating for that, historically, is offering other forms of quality of life - more time to prepare outside of teaching, more job security, and some other limited benefits. Take away these things, and you fully transform the role into a job for masochists.
The cost dynamics never made sense to me - it really wouldn't cost that comparatively much to make teaching a desirably paid position, and the research positions that go along with them. Instead, what we get are colleges charging historically absurd cost increases every year to have, well, better sports teams, I can only guess.
I guess if this trend continues, we'll just move to compensating them with coupons to Subway, then rail at how so many of them get 20% off for how 'little' they do.
Ryan Fenton
Re:Gotta be some kind of compensation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the cost is enormous.
Do you know why NBA players get so much money? Because there are less than 500 players and there are no less than 20 million fans. Not only that, but by playing a single game, they can provide entertainment to all of them with no more effort than if there were just a single fan. With a ratio of 40,000:1 and the ability to connect with all of them simultaneously it's easy to get good pay.
In any given classroom there are 20-40 students (more for cattle classes, fewer for jr/sr classses). Any more and the personal connection which makes teaching such an interactive endeavor is reduced. 30:1 isn't a great ratio for increasing compensation.
If every NBA fan kicks in an extra $25, you can raise a player's salary by a million dollars a year. If every student kicks in an extra $25, you could raise a teachers salary by $750 - not quite the bump you're looking for to make it a highly desirable pay scale.
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The cost dynamics never made sense to me - it really wouldn't cost that comparatively much to make teaching a desirably paid position, and the research positions that go along with them. Instead, what we get are colleges charging historically absurd cost increases every year to have, well, better sports teams, I can only guess.
Most of the growth is in the number of administrators. Who don't teach at all.
Re:Gotta be some kind of compensation. (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the growth is in the number of administrators. Who don't teach at all.
Nuts. There was supposed to be a link there [aei.org].
Inspiration...or ease? (Score:5, Informative)
The other issue is that many tenured faculty have been around for a while and find it increasingly hard to deal with students whose education at high school is getting increasingly worse. It would be interesting to see if the effect is still there at higher level courses where the ever decreasing academic standards and discipline of schools is less of a factor. Non-tenured faculty tend to be younger and so the gap in academic standards between their high school years and now is less so they likely have a better picture of what the incoming students do, or rather, do not know.
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Having been to both highschool and university. I find it ironic that anyone at university would be complaining about the educational value of highschool. If you ignore some of the horrendous data points, like large swaths of the US, Highschool is pretty good.
Having attended the best university in my country, Waterloo, I can say with absolute certainty that university education is complete crap. They take your money, and need to give some small percentage who stick with it a diploma after 3 or 5 years. They
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Having been to both highschool and university. I find it ironic that anyone at university would be complaining about the educational value of highschool.
Try teaching a science class to students who don't understand proportionality, can't convert from feet to meters, and don't know what a logarithm is.
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Having attended the best university in my country, Waterloo, I can say with absolute certainty that university education is complete crap.
Part of the problem may be that you mistakenly believe that your institution is the best in the country. Waterloo rounds out the bottom of the top ten in most listings.
I agree though that many, if not most undergraduate programs have become rather underwhelming.
Hard work is the best teacher (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't rely on every instructor that you have in school to be the best. And to make things even more complicated, just because a bunch of other students consider an instructor to be good, does not mean that his/her teaching style will be good for you. For example, I learned the most when I had teachers that kept lectures to a minimum but designed very thoughtful and enlightening homework assignments, problem sets, etc. while other students preferred instructors who explained everything plainly while providing minimal assignments (this prevents you from thinking critically on your own).
If you want to get the maximum mileage out of your college experience, learn how to use the resources around you, whether they be textbooks, the internet, other students, and junior instructors. If you walk in expecting all your instructors to do the majority of the work in teaching you, then you're doomed from the start.
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One of the "best" instructors I had in college was a professor who was absolutely worthless. He'd spend the entire class scribbling equations on the blackboard, rarely turn around to address the class and never allow an interruption, either for a question or to point out where he'd fucked something up 10 minutes ago. So anyone that wanted to get anything out of the class (a 400 level requirement for my major) had to take the textbook home and figure it all out for themselves.
Thoughts (Score:3)
"After all, you don't get tenure by dazzling 18-year-olds with PowerPoints. "
I don't know about the study, but the article is garbage.
The professor's job is not to entertain students, it's to teach them. Sometimes, students don't like the teachers who force them to work hard and learn the material.
That's why we have tenure.
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Sometimes, students don't like the teachers who force them to work hard and learn the material. That's why we have tenure.
Um no, it's not.
University faculty have tenure because donors to universities would sometimes force the university to fire faculty who took up controversial topics in the wrong direction.
Yet another research that confirms common sense (Score:3)
Some schools are aware of this (Score:5, Interesting)
After that catastrophe ... (Score:2)
Of an educational study last week (on /.), I am glad to see at least someone knows the rudiments of conducting a decent study.
Prof vs non-Prof (Score:2)
I have no idea which of my profs were tenured, But I do know which were not professors and which simply graduate students, or business professionals.
In my experience, almost universally, professors suck at teaching.
I've been both (Score:5, Informative)
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duh (Score:3)
As if getting Tenure had anything to do with how good a teacher you were...
Selection Bias, re. Requirements for Tenure (Score:2)
As has been mentioned already, such universities typically reward tenure on the basis of *research* emphasis, not teaching, so the results are hardly surprising.
I submit that these results will fail to generalize when so-called "teaching colleges" -- those whose primary means of performance review for
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Even bad profs will teach you a valuable lesson. (Score:2)
no rewards (Score:2)
Tenured or not, universities have plenty of ways to reward and punish faculty. Tenured faculty aren't rewarded for good teaching, they are rewarded for bringing in money, serving in visible positions outside the universities, and generating buzz and publications. So that's where they spend their time and effort.
teaching is not the job of many professors (Score:3)
While teaching is used in evaluating some professors, the best universities and the best professors get the large majority of their funding and fame from research.
If you're bringing in $1M+ a year in grants and contract research, no university is going to care a bit about your teaching prowess or lack thereof. If you're not able to do that, welcome to the non-tenure track world.
Graduate education in science and engineering doesn't include pedagogy. If teaching mattered, it would.
Flawed study -- grade inflation (Score:2)
That's why they need tenure (Score:2)
So that they can't be fired for being unresponsive to students.
I've known about this for decades (Score:3)
Tenure evaluations focus on research that brings in money. The people who can do research well and are lousy at teaching are preferred over people who can do teaching well and are lousy at research. The latter group does not bring in the cash. The latter group rarely gets tenure. If you have a Ph.D you are expected to do more research than teaching.
Age, response to reward system other factors (Score:2, Interesting)
Let me take a crack at decimating this "made to order results" "scientific" paper.
First some notes:
The actual paper is hiding safely away from the world behind a paywall . Where is Aaron Schwartz when you need him to help you take on the depredations of university administrators?... oh yeah, that's right. :
We can only read the abstract, so it's hard to critique because of course the most interesting - and indictable - parts of a paper are
1) the methods.. because if the methods are invalid, who *cares* wha
Let's look at the two groups. (Score:3)
Tenured or tenure-track faculty: Paid reasonably well, have some job security, but had to fight seventeen other applicants to the death in a gladiatorial arena just to be considered for the position. Understand that tenure makes their job completely safe, but reality means that they're always one spilled martini away from being out on the street again.
Untenured instructors: Generally sessionals, hired for a few months at a time, who need to beg for their own job back at the end of every semester. Rarely given the opportunity to teach the same class twice in a row, often prevented from working more than two or three years at the same school (to encourage them to apply for permanent positions which don't exist, naturally) and would make better money serving coffee to students than teaching them. Sometimes have difficulty refraining from asking "Would you like fries with that?" when handing out assignments or exams.
Really, it's a wonder any of these people have time for teaching at all. We're not that far away from handing students a list of textbooks to buy at the beginning of the year and then sending them to an empty classroom and asking them to teach one another.
Matches my experience (Score:3)
In college I had some wonderful teachers and some terrible teachers. The wonderful teachers covered the whole spectrum in position, from graduate students to tenured professors. But every single one of the terrible teachers was a tenured professor.
The way academia works is just messed up, at least in large research universities. You become a professor because you want to do research. You get hired based mainly on your research skills. But once you get hired, you're expected to spend lots of time teaching, even if you don't like doing it and aren't good at it. This makes no sense. Hire researchers who like doing research and are good at it. Hire teachers who like teaching and are good at it. If someone happens to like doing both and be good at both, that's fine. But if they only want to do one, that should be fine too.
Re:Hmmm, Perplexing... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot more difference than that. They're comparing people who are paid to teach with people who are paid to research in their effectiveness at teaching. If you perceive your job is X, why would you spend a lot of effort on Y? The point that they only compared introductory courses is also relevant. The untenured professors did better in introductory courses. Advanced courses were not compared, so it may be that tenured professors are overall better at teaching advanced and graduate students. Maybe a university needs both to give the best education across the students' course of study.
Re:Hmmm, Perplexing... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually, the GP is correct: Tenured professors generally didn't get there by being good teachers. Most involve heavy research and the ability to get and maintain grants for that research - neither of which makes for a good teacher. If you throw a bunch of people into a room who want to be professors, some will want to teach (a good selector, but not perfect, for good teaching), some will want to research. All will be required to teach classes. If the ones that do lots of research end up with tenure more fr
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It IS science. This is applied sociology.
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A surprising number of 4-year colleges want to get on the big grant chuckwagon.
FTFY
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Now that he's gone, and the troll that was stalking and mimicking him has gone, we seem to miss them...
Either that, or this is his way of being remembered!