Is teaching undergraduates central to the mission…?

Great discussion–important evidence about the commitment to teaching is in the preparation of the graduate students who will go on to become faculty. Even at large publics where they earn their way as T.A.s. there is (or at least in my direct experience there was) almost no formal teacher training. Working as a T.A. provided a very modest income for graduate students (and fee relief) and lifted the burden of the teaching load for Faculty. That is all. I am not a particular fan of what passes for teacher training, but I suppose it can be well done–rather than not done at all. It is very difficult to raise the professional bar in a domain for which no one was prepared in the first place.

It may be worth noting that her anecdote is about a faculty at UPenn which is most definitely not a public school, and so I dont see how her experience at UPenn applies to that at a public university.

It’s worth acknowledging another basic issue that arises in connection with rewarding teaching at the tenure stage: it comes directly into conflict with the school’s institutional interest in increasing its own prestige. (I teach at a large public research university, though I don’t teach undergraduates.) Every time a school grants a spot on its tenured faculty to a great teacher whom it believes won’t publish work contributing to its scholarly reputation, it’s passing up an opportunity to try and maximize that reputation. In my experience, that’s a powerful driver, and it underlines your call for finding other pressure points on the institution.

#4 – “a truly execrable teacher”

It’s possible that the teacher was bad. Undergrad ability to evaluate teachers is limited.
On the other hand, the department would have no way of knowing that the teacher was bad, would it?

For what it’s worth, I know of at least three cases in the philosophy department at Penn where poor teaching evaluations played a role in negative retention decisions. (One of these was eventually reversed.) These were not the only factors, but a record of poor teaching evaluations was given significant weight.

chairman@10: If you are correct, then the undergraduate economic model should change. $x to attend a lecture, $y to attempt the examination for a course, and $z to obtain the credential (the degree). If the lecture is worthless, why pay for it? I believe that the model I describe is closer to the way German universities were run before WWII, at least the charge to take the exam existed. (According to one of my physics professors, Nobel laureate Felix Bloch, who was a wonderful teacher, by the way.)

The number of instructors most universities have that are both gifted lecturers and gifted researchers is (at least in my experience) pretty small – perhaps that is the cadre that should be reserved for tenure (though that is currently rarely the case). There is a much larger proportions that are excellent at one and merely comptetent at the other – that’s why Harry’s “Master Teacher” track, perhaps paired with a “Master Researcher” track (that would never teach, only publish…er wait, we already have that).

Whether teach undergraduates is central to the mission is somewhat an application of maybe a more fundamental mission which is to both seek knowledge (research) and to impart knowledge (teach), having either without the other eventually defeats both. Imparting knowledge happens at all levels of the university (admin, graduate, undergrad etc.)…seeking knowledge is usually focused on the graduate.

the problem is NOT that professors don’t care

That student evaluations aren’t usually that helpful in determining whether or not a professor has been a good instructor is a difficult problem. I mean, if the students say that teacher’s bad, and they didn’t do well in the class, how do you even begin to figure out whether the instructor was capable and performed at or above what’s expected?

I just went on RateMyProfessor trolling for some comments on a handful of my past professors (I’ve been out of university for four years now). Admittedly, the sample size is small, and probably very skewed. But it certainly aligns with my impression of what other students in the classes felt at the time, based on their comments to me, one another, and even out loud to the instructor.

Depending on the class, and why the student’s taking it, some prefer a more difficult teacher. They want to be challenged. But other students feel that the same professor is ‘unfair’ or difficult not by virtue of expecting more of the students but simply because they aren’t capable of delivering a coherent lecture or aligning what’s on the test with what student’s expect to be on the test.

I can remember one professor who I thought was absolutely dreadful. I hated his class. He was extremely well spoken, generally quite funny, and most of the students liked him considerably, not least of all because the graded work was light, and full of extra credit opportunities for anyone who deigned to miss his lectures or poor in subpar papers. They’ll say he was a great instructor because they knew what he expected of them, broke the content into really barebones outlines of concepts, and sprinkled anecdotes through out the class discussions about that time he chatted with such and such a celebrity when they were in town filming X. I was felt scammed.

Some people in the class were jocks, who took all of his classes because they were so swamped with other stuff his easy going manner and minimal requirements were a godsend. And I guarantee they ‘learned’ more from his sparknotes version of the course then they ever would have from scraping by with a C in a more difficult one. Other students who were grad school bound used the class time to do readings for others. Point being: with so many different people in the class for different reasons with different levels of background knowledge, different abilities, and different learning styles, how are you ever going to come up with standards that meaningfully inform a tenure committee on whether the candidate in question is a good teacher or not?

I for one call bullshit on this “assessing teachers is hard”. My experience of university was that a good third of undergrad professors were simply bad teachers, in easily identifiable ways (like: lectures just by reading the course notes, creates exams with pathetically easy questions for high marks, changes final assessment 17 times during the course of the assessment week). This stuff just shouldn’t be happening, and the fact that it does makes the claim that “undergraduates are central to our mission” obvious nonsense; I don’t believe the academy is even trying to improve its teaching.

(This was at a UK university that was top-rated by the Times for my department, the years I was there.)

There’s always been a wierd dichotomy between the training that goes into the Ph.d and the training that goes into teaching. You can’t teach high school without having gone through courses about pedagogy, but the same universities that host Education departments evidently think that you can throw anybody in front of a higher education class and that they will instantly socratize.
This is the maddening thing about student evaluations. These should be designed to help people teach better, but they are not, to my knowledge, ever used that way.
Since the german model of the research university migrated to the U.S. in the 1870s, this split in the university mission has always been there. But it is addressed with less priority than, say, choosing the kind of coffee they’ll use in the faculty lounge.

JW Mason — It’s Harry, not Henry; easy mistake to make. I wasn’t dismissing the rest of the sector (I don’t think MM was either); I was just talking about the part of the sector that I am reasonably confident my analysis applies to (reasonably confident because I know it well, both by study and acquaintance). And I don’t really understand how you could interpret what I wrote as ‘rewarding and punishing’. What I was arguing for was the development of an infrastructure to support continuous improvement in instruction, which is pretty much entirely absent (as others on the thread have implied). (Of c9urse, because there are so many incentives to direct one’s energies and attentions elsewhere, and because tenure enables us to follow the incentives whatever they are, I do think that, in general, people need to be rewarded for doing what they ought to be doing.)

19: identifying the very worst teachers is, indeed, probably easy. But I’m interested in getting the vast majority of teachers to improve. What I need, to improve, is to be able to identify the people who do what I do better than I do it, and study what they do. If I were one of the very worst teachers, that would be easy enough. But most teachers are not among the very worst teachers. And what 17 says is right — quality of instruction is a matter of fit between style and student (so even the best teachers are bad for some students).

10. The test of quality is this: I have x minutes with the students. What can I/we do in that x minutes that will result in learning they couldn’t get any other way? If they can learn it (expecially if they really would learn it) without being in the room with me, I am wasting their time (and their, their parents’ and/or the government’s money). 19’s point about the lecturer who reads the coursenotes is the paradigm case of this. (And the bad effects of bad teaching are too easy not to notice. Last year a very very smart, but troubled and underconfident, kid told me about a class she was in during which the lecturer read the powerpoints, and the powerpoints WERE the textbook. If you are troubled and underconfident, being disengaged from the learning process is really bad for you, and I’m pretty convinced she’d have dropped out that semester if she’d not, also, been in an extremely demanding and engaging class with one of my (excellent) colleagues (and I claim credit, since I influenced her to take said, demanding, class — an interesting case where, I think, my colleague is a much better teacher *for that student* than I am; my contribution being that I recognized the fit between them).

It is much, much, easier to judge the quality of someone’s research than the quality of someone’s teaching. Research is a publicly visible activity—you can count the papers and the number of pages, and rank the journals by prestige. Other recognized experts can be easily identified, and then asked to review all the research someone has produced, and evaluate it.

Oh dear lord please no. The first two sentences here describe an evaluation process that has been poisonous in the natural sciences. Has it not affected the humanities as much? One perverse incentive is to spread your work across Minimum Publishable Units that collectively add up to too many pages for too little information. Because you’re going to be evaluated on article counts and page counts. A reader can also end up chasing basically a single line of research from a single group across several journals because it was diced up and impact factor shopped around. Sucks to be you if the story partially appears in journals your institution subscribes to and partially in others.

Another perverse incentive is to always seek surprising, high-impact results suitable for “prestige” journals, even if it means fooling yourself, your reviewers, and your readers. A substantial fraction of high-impact research turns out to be irreproducible later. It has trickled down to lower tier journals too. People are faking and fooling themselves even about mundane topics. Nobody can advance a career by publishing confirmation of the null hypothesis, even if it might save everyone else in the field a lot of wasted time. I basically trust the academic literature of science published before 1970, though people still made mistakes, but for literature after 1990 or so I read with much diminished expectations.

Maybe the last sentence I quoted allows you to rescue researcher evaluations so that the faculty is not polluted, only the literature. But the literature pollution is a serious problem. If this is what a good solution to researcher evaluation looks like, glimpsing the bad ones would probably turn me to stone.

Well, in my original draft I only had the final sentence you quoted, but I went back and added the sentences you objected to in a sardonic, ironic or maybe even sarcastic mood. Sorry for misleading!

Oh, and (everybody) please read Donald A Coffin at 22.

“These were not the only factors, but a record of poor teaching evaluations was given significant weight.”

I don’t want to be overly cynical but here’s the deal: had the same person received excellent evaluations, they would probably still have denied but the evaluations wouldn’t have been mentioned. Conversely, had the decision been positive, the same poor evaluations simply wouldn’t have been mentioned. Committees have a lot of freedom to cherry-pick (not to mention fudge) the facts they cite in justification of decisions that may or may not have been reached based on objective criteria. In a case I know of, an assistant professor had just received an “outstanding mentor” award from her university. When she was denied tenure a few months later, the award wasn’t mentioned at all but she was now claimed to have neglected her grad students.

Btw it should be mentioned that teaching evaluations are known to be biased against women, foreigners, and tough graders.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/12/09/gender_bias_in_student_evaluations_professors_of_online_courses_who_present.html

I teach at a large public research university, and I think that Megan is under-counting the ways that a department supports undergraduate teaching as core to their mission. In my department there’s an undergraduate program director, an undergraduate curriculum committee, an accreditation director, and half a dozen ad hoc committees formed every academic year for the purpose of assessing our undergraduate core courses. A lot of what we do isn’t aimed solely at improving the quality of individual teachers and the courses they teach (peer assessment, etc.); it’s about the bigger curriculum picture. We’re collecting data, making tweaks, seeing what happens. It’s incremental, but that’s inevitable, because as has been observed above, evaluation is incredibly expensive.

Oh, the money quote:
“many colleges and universities have ceased to treat the instruction of college courses as a profession worth supporting with a living wage.”

I think a lot of this depends on the sort of school you’re at. While Madison is a public school, it’s still a big R1 institution (like Penn). The situation is different at a place like my employer (Slippery Rock — a lower-tier public school). I recently got tenure at SRU, and it was very clear through the whole process that teaching was the most important factor. My research output is pathetic by the standards of my grad school classmates at more prestigious institutions, but SRU felt it was just fine for their purposes.

The process still suffers from the problems cited in the post with effectively measuring teaching performance — in particular, there seems to be excessive weight put on student evaluations because they’re nice and quantitative — but there’s still clear follow-through on the intent to weigh teaching much more heavily than research in tenure and promotion decisions.

I think an expressed normative commitment that things really should be a certain way, with no plan to make them that way, and no intention to leave if things don’t change *is* a “polite fiction”. I don’t question Harry’s sincere desire but do very much doubt its centrality in his normative landscape. I’m sorry that this is somewhat impolite but that is intrinsic to questioning polite fictions.

I feel like I’m missing something here. Aren’t points 1-3 addressed by the existence of undergraduate colleges that are widely known for the quality of their undergraduate teaching? What do they do? Sure, they are not trying to achieve (all) the same things that public flagships are, but the question sets (many of) those other things aside and simply asks how one would “recalibrate the importance of teaching in tenure decisions”. I propose one possible answer: send a delegation to (say) Carleton College and whatever they are doing in their tenure process, do more of that. I’m not saying they have solved the problem; I am saying they seem to have made more progress on it than the answers given here acknowledge.

While the situation is not exactly the same in here in Australia, the tensions between research and teaching are certainly similar in composition. And certainly, the teaching of undergraduates being central to universities’ survival is different to it being central to their mission.

Having worked for some years in student administration and as a non-tenured academic, I find Megan McArdle’s comments how university administration is focused on the experience of students outside the classroom interesting (and somewhat accurate). I’m not convinced that this is the way things should be. What if ‘education’ is construed very broadly to include anything a student learns from, or that influences the kind of graduate they become? That could and should put what happens outside the classroom in a different light.

I am not sure that teaching is central to the mission of universities (whatever the tier) any more. The top tier don’t necessarily have to work on teaching – students are there for the network they can utilize.

State universities (flagship on down to lowest tier) have been defunded by legislators intent of damaging (destroying) the higher ed promise. No money for raises for a half-decade or more – in any market – means top talent will likely leave.

But the most important indicator of the value of teaching is in the salaries paid for the teaching aspect of university work. Contingent faculty – the ones who are paid to teach, not to research – make peanuts compared to tenure-track faculty. The fee for teaching one course at my (lower-tier) public institution is something like $2500 for the semester. That’s not even $150 a week. That’s $50 a credit hour per week, maybe – but look at the hours that go into three-credit hour course – the class prep, the grading, the discussions outside of class with a floundering student. Is it even minimum wage? WalMart probably pays better – and higher ed should be embarrassed.

According to AAUP (http://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts), more than 50% of all faculty hold part-time appointments. For those teachers, there is NO professional development; there is NO money for conferences; there is NO money for training. And there are far too many tenured faculty who won’t even give contingent faculty the time of day, let alone guidance on becoming a better teacher.

With many of these contingent faculty positions, the teacher does not know what course he/she is teaching until close to the start of the semester. The contract teacher generally has no control over the textbooks ordered for the class. It is IMPOSSIBLE to be a great teacher under such conditions. And yet contingent faculty teach the majority of coursework offered in higher ed. Hard to see how higher ed values teaching, when too many of the teachers are underpaid and not at all supported by the institution.

Harry–I realized right as I touched “submit” I wrote a “k” instead of a “c” for Singer’s name. I wouldn’t mention it except I thought of one more thing.

I mentioned this to you years ago but I have the complete minutes for your department’s meetings concerning the teaching of the Introduction to Philosophy course roughly from 1952 to 1963, given to me by a retired member of my department who got them from Singer, who served on the committee for that entire period. (They’re interesting in part because they list some interesting new assistant professors assigned to the committee–some guy named Dretske, for example.) They reveal that Madison professors then were deeply concerned about undergraduate teaching, and used at least crude statistics to assess (for example) changing students’ views and making them more reflectively critical. Some of the mimeos are barely readable, but I’ve used copying enhancements to save almost all of them. At any rate it is an interesting time-slice of the Madison department that shows a long-term commitment to analyzing and trying to improve undergraduate instruction.

When I was in graduate school those few non-tenured faculty who were known to be good teachers of undergraduates were almost automatically presumed (certainly by other graduate students, and apparently by some tenured faculty) to be bad at research. It was thought that anybody who put anything more than minimal effort into teaching was doing so to make up for their lack of scholarly aptitude, or they were prioritising the wrong things.

All the incentives were for untenured faculty to be bad at teaching and to be seen to be bad at teaching.

The worst backhanded compliment that could be made of any faculty member, tenuted or untenured was “he/she is a good teacher”.

I think that the difficulty of assessing another’s teaching capability is overblown. Just as you can trust certain experts to assess one’s research portfolio in a tenure case, so you can have experts on pedagogy assess one’s teaching. If we are talking about a large research university, the university should have said experts on staff in some capacity already. The lack of creative solutions to this question is indicative of a lack of interest in pursuing them.

Bloix — right, I linked to that post in the OP.

Tabasco — not my experience, at the very least in my department, which takes considerable pride in the quality of its teaching (about which it doesn’t know a lot!). But I’ve heard it elsewhere.

MSM — I don’t disagree. Though use of adjuncts varies by institution (we don’t use many, at least in L&S). The ‘master teacher’ proposal has appeal partly because it helps solve the adjunct problem — it provides stability, and reasonably pay, and emphasizes professional development in teaching. There is a cost problem in HE, especially since HE has started to be more inclusive of students who come from non-traditional backgrounds and has started to take seriously that, having admitted someone, an institution has an obligation to support them actually graduating. That’s expensive.

Alan — who was the Dretske guy, anyway? More seriously, there is something quite unnerving about UW Madison seeing itself as the expert on undergraduate education and doing quality assurance at what were presumably considered satellite campuses. But its also fascinating. Maybe we should resume the relationship, though on a more realistic basis (learning among peers).

Peer-visits. No. We do what we are required to do – all visiting is supervisory, which is a problem (ie, tenured faculty visiting untenured, profs visiting TAs) and we don’t have shared protocols. Anything else is informal and ad hoc. I want to see what can be done about this.

mdc — I’d say that, as in k-12, student:teacher ratio is at best a very weak proxy for teaching *quality* but, as you say, probably better for *institutional commitment*. But that’s partly because practices aren’t so great anywhere!

Bloix at 7: “Undergrad ability to evaluate teachers is limited.”

Bloix at 52: OMG, look at what these undergraduates say about their teacher!

It took Bloix six months to change his tune on how seriously university administrators take education in the classroom. Now it takes him a single comments thread to change his tune on how seriously he takes student evaluations.

Which should tell you something about how seriously we should take Bloix.

MSM, your comment suggests another plausible proxy for institutional commitment to teaching at four-year programs: proportion of adjuncts. (These are inversely related, I mean.)

One of the very best graduate instructors I’ve supervised worked with
Professor Salaita at Va Tech when getting her masters. Her research area is pedagogy. She says he’s a superb teacher. She’s Jewish.

I’ll take that over a motivated reading of Rate my Professor any day.

It may be worth repeating the comment (no. 13) that I made on that earlier post, that nobody appeared to pick up on:-

“Which stresses undergraduate teaching as its main priority” should never be part of any university’s mission at all; that would make it a mere institution of higher education, somewhat like the idea of the polytechnic. However, universities as we have them today are institutions of learning, with origins in mediaeval gangs of roaming scholars who found patrons and put down roots; their association with education is incidental, not essential, and derives from two things, the need to bring on new scholars so that their core function could endure, and the need to find a practical source of revenue that could be based on their strengths. Confusing their working to live with their living for that work is understandable, particularly since that is what their sponsors (e.g. governments) want from them, but putting the cart before the horse that way risks losing the very thing that supplying education was buying for them – the ability to be scholars, transmitting earlier learning and discovering new learning through research; in a word, scholarship. Without that, I would never have been able to use a Washington (state, not city) university’s corpus of material on Madagascar as provided to specialist journals and books.

I find it difficult to compose a good comment on this issue, because it feels to me that it’s a Gordian Knot that contains many strands. So perhaps I can beg for more posts to cover some of these strands in discussion. Or maybe a series, like the book club things, only for HE – since it’s something many of us are interested in?

Strands that come to my mind:

– Resources – in particular lectures vs smaller classes, but also realities about “digital generation” students used to a multimedia world, but no meaningful resources provided to make the learning experience that way.
– Syllabuses – as an adjunct I’m currently struggling with a really out of date assigned textbook and syllabus. Crucially, the syllabus is incoherent and it really affects the quality of the education.
– Student expectations – obviously this links to the accreditation issue, but also to Howard Gardner’s latest about the “app generation,” there’s a definite shift against exploration, ISTM.
– Student information management – frankly, this generation aren’t generally good at reading (be it paper books or e-books) and they aren’t impressive at Googling either. There’s a skills gap which is undermining the educational model. Again, as an adjunct teaching isolated classes, this is big issue which is beyond my power to truly do much about. I think there are other skills gaps we could name
– You can’t teach a class the old way if the students are coming up with different skills… we’ve so long taught skills through the content that as the student relationship with content (but also everyone’s relationship with content) changes, it queers the skill acquisition and assessment. (Obviously more in non-numerical subjects.)
– Adjunctification is coming to research too. Especially in non-lab subjects. This is a huge looming issue.

It’s easy enough in context to figure out what an “R!” institution means, but could somebody please explain the rest of the code, perhaps with examples?

I think in the buyer’s market for academics universities could do more than pay lip service to teaching in hiring or tenure decisions. I was once assured by a Stanford dean that, in fact, it wasn’t enough to be a leading researcher, you also had to be an outstanding teacher. However, I think many of the peers making tenure decisions think that level of expectations is unfair. Since teaching and research are both full time jobs, compromises must be made and corners cut. And it is easier to cut corners in the classroom when you’re dealing with students than in the public and cutthroat world of research conferences and peer reviewed articles. Which becomes self-reinforcing, I think most colleagues (not all!) wind up deriving less personal satisfaction from teaching. I don’t think most are so cynical that they look down on colleagues with reputations as star instructors, its just that frequently there are two pools of people with different priorities. Also, most academics associate with one another mostly via research, and probably derive most of their personal sense of accomplishment and their status via research. So any institution could in theory mandate a higher priority for teaching, its not so much the intrinsic difficulty in evaluating teaching (where there’s a will there’s a way) as the cultural resistance it would face. The idea of separating teaching and research tracts is going to be difficult because faculty who value research will expect the teaching track to have higher teaching loads and/or lower compensation.

R1 (“Research 1” ) is a term that used to be used in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education to describe universities that did extensive research and graduated a lot of PhDs. R2’s were research institutions that had fewer doctorates/less grant money. M1’s and M2’s were masters-granting schools, and B1 and B2 were colleges.

US News picked up these categories up for its rankings, and studies of institutions of higher ed used them as a research tool.

Carnegie gave up these categories because it didn’t want to be seen as ranking schools by quality, but people still use R1 to mean a major research university and R2 to mean more of a teaching institution. As I understand it, there are informal conventions that faculty use – what publication expectations and teaching loads are at an R1 vs an R2 university. Kind of like what it’s like to play a varsity sport at a Div I school vs a Div II school.

Carnegie now uses the terms National Universities, National Liberal Arts Colleges, Regional Universities and Regional Colleges. The University of Wisconsin is a National University. Slippery Rock (see #35) is a Regional University.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_I_university

My institution has gone to mandatory, written peer reviews of teaching as part of all promotion reviews, to tenure/associate and to full. Peer reviews involve a quick perusal of the syllabus and an in-class visit announced in advance to the review-ee. Peer reviewers are senior colleagues in the review-ee’s department. There’s no training, or even any attempt to identify peer reviewers who are themselves good teachers.

Not surprisingly, all of our faculty members are way, way above average teachers. In fact, most are the best teacher in the department.

“I was once assured by a Stanford dean that, in fact, it wasn’t enough to be a leading researcher, you also had to be an outstanding teacher.”

Yeah sure. “All our professors are leaders in their research field and outstanding teachers.” Google the term “excellence in teaching and research” and you will find proof that University administrators (at least in North America) are almost universally innumerate.

Hey, TM – how can you spot the best ag school professors? Easy – they’re all outstanding in their field.

Sorry Harry, but at R1 institutions while “undergraduate education is central to the mission of the institution” it’s typically not central to the mission of the ambitious faculty. This is not true at top tier colleges. At a top tier undergrad institution. the professors teach the labs and use undergrads in the labs and there not grad student led discussions because there are no grad students. They teach more courses. And while they have to publish, the requirements are much lower and the quality and quantity of their publications typically reflect those lower requirements relative to R1. The faculty know they have to be engaged teachers because the administration, including department chairs, have bought in. Student feedback matters more to the administration. At R1 schools, both the department and university ranking is tied to research. In addition, R1 faculty mobility and salary are tied to research. While the resources to improve teaching are not often available, tenure depends on publishing and it’s unclear how much these resources would be actually be used. And yes, faculty in the department know who the better teachers are. They’re often the ones teaching the 500 student sections at big state schools. The admin doesn’t want 500 people complaining.

And btw, UofW is notorious for students having to take and an extra semester to finish their degree because they can’t get into required classes for their major. Doesn’t seem to match the mission statement.

Can’t a lot of teaching evaluations be done by peers, particularly by teachers of advanced classes and their impressions on how well-prepared their students are in the subjects covered in prerequisite courses?

I suspect that this is easier to do in STEM areas, Languages, and other technical fields with strong prerequisite paths, but there should be at least something to this in at least most fields.

Or are one’s teaching peers infected with too much logrolling, infighting, and loyalty codes of mutual noncriticism to be trustworthy in such judgment?

Jeff R — that can work, I guess. But only if you have good information about attrition rates. A stylized example — most people who start Medical School are well prepared in organic chemistry. A medicine professor, noticing her students were well prepared in Org Chem, who concluded that organic chemistry was well taught at the schools from which her students came, would be quite deluded. Of course, that’s artificial because the institution selects out those who didn’t do well in Org Chem. But, more generally, on average, the students who did badly are less likely to take the higher level course.

T — that’s fine!

Harry @51 “There is a cost problem in HE, especially since HE has started to be more inclusive of students who come from non-traditional backgrounds and has started to take seriously that, having admitted someone, an institution has an obligation to support them actually graduating. That’s expensive.”

There is a cost problem in HE – and it’s the cost born by the student to actually ATTEND the university. According to Forbes:

“Since 1985, the overall consumer price index has risen 115% while the college education inflation rate has risen nearly 500%. According to Gordon Wadsworth, author of The College Trap, ‘…if the cost of college tuition was $10,000 in 1986, it would now cost the same student over $21,500 if education had increased as much as the average inflation rate but instead education is $59,800 or over 2 ½ times the inflation rate.'” http://onforb.es/1btHS83

So costs to students have increased far in excess of the inflation rage. In response, higher ed trims HE operating costs by decreasing reliance on tenured/tenure-track faculty. HALF of the people teaching in HE are not on the tenure-track. So the idea that colleges are investing in teaching seems disconnected from where they’re actually investing their money (it’s not in teachers if half of the teaching comes from contingent faculty.)

Follow the money – higher ed is NOT investing in teaching – which is very sad for students who graduate with a nice chunk of debt.

To Metatone @ 61 “Syllabuses – as an adjunct I’m currently struggling with a really out of date assigned textbook and syllabus. Crucially, the syllabus is incoherent and it really affects the quality of the education.”

Do you have no control over the syllabus? Yikes!

I am contingent and I have no control over textbooks – in several courses, I’ve gotten the textbook just prior to the start of class – and in one instance, a week after it started. Hard to really plan a semester when the textbook is not available until the start of the term (or later – and yes, I ask for the book as soon as I know I’m teaching a class.) I teach one course designed by a tenure-track professor – I follow the readings and major assignments, but completely rewrote the syllabus and changed the order of things around. The course director seems okay with that, though, academic freedom and all…

#79 –
“Mediocre teachers actually teach. Mediocre researchers don’t do much research.”

Actually, there are boatloads of worse-than-mediocre published research.

“While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication… In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006….

The avalanche of ignored research has a profoundly damaging effect on the enterprise as a whole. Not only does the uncited work itself require years of field and library or laboratory research. It also requires colleagues to read it and provide feedback, as well as reviewers to evaluate it formally for publication. Then, once it is published, it joins the multitudes of other, related publications that researchers must read and evaluate for relevance to their own work. Reviewer time and energy requirements multiply by the year. The impact strikes at the heart of academe.”

http://chronicle.com/article/We-Must-Stop-the-Avalanche-of/65890/

My wife, who is an epidemiologist, complains bitterly about the amount of crappy work that is published in her field – articles whose statistical analysis is so poor that all you can be sure of is that the conclusions are not reliable.

To add to the cost analysis: it’s not often noted that technological advances for the most part only add costs to the low productivity (but probably maximally productive) education business. IT budgets, administrative recording mandates, special offices in admissions and development to handle “social”– these things haven’t made it possible to educate any more student per revenue dollar, and they’ve added to spending tremendously. In the distant future, spending on instruction will take up a vanishingly small proportion of college costs.

Harry@78: Isn’t a fairly high attrition rate part of being a good teacher in those lower-level classes? Not every student starts out in the program they’re going to get the most out of; better they figure that out as soon as possible and waste as little of their own and their professors’ time as possible, no?

2slugs: Doesn’t really explain why some of the most expensive schools are undergraduate-only programs.

Also, it’s sort of interesting to me that there are no courses in Latin, Greek, or Newton at my highly-rated local community college. There is one Shakespeare class, but none in which King Lear, or Richard the Second, or As You Like It, or the sonnets (for example) are studied. Just sayin!

Jeff — yes… but, what I am saying is that the professor in the subsequent class cannot infer anything about the quality of the previous teacher from the fact that the students who made it to *her* class are well-prepared. Maybe the attrition was the result of good teaching, maybe it was the result of lousy teaching, maybe it was the result of something the teacher had no control over; and maybe the students entered the previous professor’s class well prepared anyway.

There is nothing particular special about jobs where the performance is hard to evaluate. Teaching is just one among many. Just because there are evaluation systems in many other fields where it is also hard does not mean those work. Management evaluation comes to mind as a particular sad joke.

Main Street Muse @ 80

Yep, tuition is up much faster than the CPI overall. But…at least at publics, a significant factor in that is the decline in state support. I taught in the Indiana University system from 1987 to 2012 (and then retired). At one point, using data from the late 1960s through the late 1990s, I discovered that per-student-credit hour spending, both across the university and on a campus-by-campus basis, had risen at almost exactly the same rate as the CPI (actually 0.2% per year faster, as I recall). But state support (which approached 70% of total spending on IU’s campuses in the 1960s) had risen at only half the CPI rate of inflation. By the 1990s, state support was less than 1/3 of total spending, and it is now around 25%.

So something had to give. Others have mentioned that technology cycles have gotten shorter, and the costs associated with being reasonably current in information technology. And one can look at delivery of education as an issue (although a lot of the efforts to increase the use of video, and then computers, as delivery mechanisms have not worked as well as people had hoped, and have not been particularly cost-effective, as yet, either).

It’s hard to figure out how to keep tuition increases at the CPI rate of inflation in the environment in which we’ve been operating, especially at publics.

On the other hand, I attended DePauw University from 1965 to 1969. Tuition and fees my first year (1965-66) were $1400 for the year. Tuition and fees now are about $42,500. The CPI is now about 7.5 times what it was in 1965. so had tuition at DePauw increased in line with CPI inflation, it would currently be about $10,500 per year. So, what happened there?

First, the faculty increased [from about 160 FT (and almost no PT) to about 220 FT (and still almost no PT)], while the student body shrank slightly (from about 2,400 to about 2,200)]. Average class sized fell significantly. Second, DePauw has upgraded its science labs consistently and at significant on-going expense (about 10%-15% of a typical graduating class has gone on the med school). Third, IT. Fourth, expanded off-campus (including overseas) programs (which are often subsidized by the university. Fifth, a significant effort to diversity the student body (99% white when I attended, much less than that now), which has led to expanded financial aid. (Or the “sticker price” is not the “average effective price.)

And that’s at an institution that values and tries to reward teaching…

Bloix at comment 60, I suspect you are also muddling the empirical versus normative aspect, and that you are still reading what I wrote from the perspective of what universities deliver.

“The modern university, particularly post-Sputnik, is not primarily an institution for the training of scholars” is empirically true, but it is not what a university ought to be for. And contrasting “primarily an institution for the training of scholars” with the educating of undergraduates is like arguing about whether cows are for milk or meat, when those are only the farmer’s purposes for cows; if anything, cows are for cows. I never suggested that universities were there to train scholars at all, I merely pointed out that that was also one of the things incidental to their surviving, just as educating undergraduates for money was – they are both things that are inextricable but not of the essence, i.e. those are not things that make universities what they are (or should be).

To repeat, universities ought to be about scholarship. If they are not, there is no point in scholars going into them, no matter whether they are viable educational institutions that successfully deliver educated graduates: the scholars would do better – for the purposes of scholarship – to seek other expedients, since those universities unworthy of the name would erode and frustrate that very thing more and more over time. It is a “failure of substratum”. Granted, these days there are ever fewer scholars with private means like Runciman, and there are ever fewer patrons to ask to endow scholarship, but there is no point in scholars settling for something they don’t want just because they can’t have what they do want. Better that they work on defence contracts for half the year to subsidise their true calling than work a whole year teaching with nothing over. And if that support for scholars is not to be had anywhere in this world, why, they should give up on their calling and turn to drink or worse sooner than be led on by false hope.

Harry (@92): it’s been the case at the University of Iowa for a couple of years now, and is even more important with impending changes in the division of state funding for the 3 regents’ universities.

Derek — yes, I’ve thought about that. I think (hope) that the calculation actually works differently. I’m not proposing a wholesale shift of resources, time and energy (for the reasons you give, and also because it couldn’t happen in a reasonable time-frame): but the insertion of some serious on-the-job training and continuous professional development. I’ll try to elaborate more on this later, but for the moment, the only thing I worry about, which I didn’t worry about until people brought it up in the thread, is actual discrimination against high quality teachers by people who assume that good teachers can’t be good researchers. I have never encountered that first hand (nowadays I wouldn’t anyway, because nobody would say something quite that stupid in my presence: but earlier in my working life people might have done). One thing — I have some anecdotal evidence that universities and colleges in which faculty teach a lot have a preference for hiring people whom they have evidence will be competent teachers, and a good continuous professional development program helps enhance a dossier.

Derek — so, in our particular situation, there’s not a huge dilemma. Our graduate students end up teaching so much more than anyone they are competing with in the job market, that they have a built in advantage. And because we require them to teach so much it really is in their interests to invest a bit of time to get good at it because it really does, probably, over the course of 6 or 7 years, pay off (they’re better teachers, and because they are better it is easier and less anxiety provoking when they are trying to do other things like write a dissertation and get a job). I think this is one reason, in fact, that our placement rate is so much better than that of departments that rank above us (but only one reason: we also have remarkably good students, and a brilliant placement officer).

This bring out something, though, that I might have said earlier, if I’d been willing to expose my slightly pollyanna-ish beliefs — I actually think that we do beginning tenure track faculty a disservice by not investing more in mentoring and continuous professional development in their teaching. For a lot of them, especially if they have not had the extensive teaching experience our graduate students have had, the first 2-3 years of teaching are extremely anxious, and more systematic mentoring and support (separated completely from evaluation) would be good both for their students, and for their careers, because floundering as a teacher for a few years detracts from time energy and attention you can give to research. (Eg, better teaching results in less time spent with students who are complaining about their grade). In other words, I do think there might be win-win solutions (not saying I know what they are, just that we shouldn’t rule them out).

where economics was tertiary and ethics was primary

102 and 103: I would put it more strongly than Harry. Time spent on learning how to teach is time saved, not time lost, for anybody whose job (or part of whose job) it is to teach. What is amazing is that most Universities (to my knowledge) don’t offer even elementary instruction in techniques such as classroom organization, assessment design, teaching tools, how to deal with students and so on. Like any profession, teaching involves using tools that have to be learned (not that that is all of it but it’s part of it). College teaching is really unique in that respect that its practitioners are forced to learn everything on the job without even having been shown the tools they need for doing their job. Of course what most in that situation resort to is their own experience as students. They either copy or try to improve on the techniques they have observed in their own instructors (with somewhat predictable success).

I have to agree with some other commenters – what stands out is really the extent to which institutions are not doing even the most obvious things to help their teaching faculty, such as explaining them the nuts and bolts of the job before letting them start teaching, and doing peer classroom observations. I also wonder what would happen if more students and parents knew about this state of affairs.

“College teaching is really unique in that respect” – unique among professions.

Came across this today. Seems relevant to the question of mission:
https://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-teaching-class/

(via http://amptoons.com/blog/2015/02/25/from-guernica-the-teaching-class-by-rachel-riederer/)

110, my point was that if teaching is part of your job, it is in your interest to learn how to teach efficiently (and should also be in the interest of the institution to help you teach efficiently). That is not the same as teach well but I suspect that given time constraints, being efficient is a necessary condition for being a good teacher. If you want to be a carpenter, you need to learn how to use the tools of carpentry. That is not enough to be a good carpenter but is almost certainly a prerequisite.

To Harry – please don’t quit your job!

Wow, 116 comments. I’m late to the party.

As a science Ph.D. candidate at a prestigious R1 school 20 years ago I was given mentoring in teaching well, support and encouragement to develop that. It wasn’t mandated beyond some “basic training” but it was available and taken seriously. I had a great department. They really tried to help us develop in all kinds of ways.

As a professor, I’ve always wished that classroom visits went beyond the “seniors or chairs observing the juniors” model. Heck, as a starting assistant professor, I wanted to sit in on other teacher’s classes and felt I gained a LOT from that. So even though it was sometimes awkward, I’d ask on my own to sit in on their classes. And as a senior professor now, nobody ever watches me and if they did I would get useful feedback and maybe a kick in the pants. So that part of the original post (better and more continuous peer review) sounds great to me.

“frame on the assumption that the grad students receiving teacher training will get an academic job”

Well teaching is already part of their job. In most cases.