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Study Shows Professors With Tenure Are Worse Teachers
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?'"
I haven't had mod points in over a year, but if I had 'em, you'd get 'em.
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.
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
My husband just turned in his tenure portfolio. While the usual "two publications, community service, blah blah" is all in there, his school weighs his student evaluations as a full third of the requirements for tenure. So any prof who neglects students at his school in order to focus on research is going to have a tougher time justifying the promotion.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
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.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
How about tenured professors have less reason to give a damn about their jobs, since they cannot be (easily) fired?
Dark Reflection
I don't think I can agree wit that. Many tenured professors do research, it's their life and they do it because they enjoy it. I work at research institute and we have tons of researchers that get forced into retirement that beg to come back and continue research. Emeritus, they come back and work for free, why bother hiring, training and paying new researchers when you can have extremely skilled and knowledgeable ones practically pay you for the privileged of doing what they've been doing for 40+ years.
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.
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.
I've actually repented of my flip comment based on someone else's reasonable explanation, so yes I do see what you're saying now. Thanks for not calling me a d-bag or something like that.
Dark Reflection
What a load of bullshit. Academic publishing - at least in the hard science - is not a record of lack of accomplishments. Look at some of the Planck papers for fucks sake. As for government work - explain the Apollo program. Explain how the UK NHS achieves similar health outcomes to the US at a third of the cost. Reality doesn't stack up to your rhetoric.
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* what conclusion was reached?
2) The statistical analysis because bad math sinks papers
3) The full conclusions- do 1 and 2 above actually support 3? Often, actually, no.
and of course somewhere down the line at the bottom of the barrel lay the abstract, living there with it's close cousins, Daily Mail headlines.
2) This guy's salary is in direct competition for college money with his own class of test subjects' salaries. Enough said.
So shall we?
1) Tenure is a function of time. Tenured profs can be expected to be older. Older people are a class of people known to perform differentially on a variety tasks.
Perhaps the author knew in advance what the age profile of the tenured faculty under study was. Perhaps drawing subjects from such an age profile would be more or less guaranteed to result in a skewed statistic, one where what is actually being measured is - simple aging.
huh.
2) Tenured professors are a select group who can be operationally defined as "those who have mastered the incentive system put to them by, oh by administrators like the co-author of this study ! "
What are those incentives and do they impact the performance of professors ? Do those incentives, for instance, condition the professor to dedicate a substandard amount of time and energy to his or her own research rather than to teaching freshmen? Especially with respect to non-tenured, "whew !, glad got this job !" type employees?
Do I even need to answer that question? Haven't we all seen it in action? Isn't the person who wrote this paper as acutely aware of this fact as anyone ?
If I were a professor at this guy's university, I'd be doing a very long slow burn right now. They incentivize me - directly, openly and consciously using words , in the case of my department at my alma mater with words like "don't waste your time preparing for your classes the only thing they care about is you getting your research funded".. I mean literally those are the words from the tenured professors to the non-tenured (but hopeful!) "assistants professors" in the department of my own alma mater.
Then those same people turn around and use the fact that I did exactly as required against me. Nicely done!
Sniff sniff.. smells like Management Technique #10,305 aka The Devils Fork -
EITHER
fire the employee for not doing as required
OR
fire the employee for doing as required.
It's amusing to see the university system rip its own asshole apart trying to keep itself alive, which is all this is. The tuition party is over, and they know it. Now reality is setting in and they're starting to cannibalize essential functions and relationships. I think that's called "panic".
You know what the single biggest money maker on campus is? The bookstore. I knew the person who ran ours (a very large university system). The numbers were fucking unbelievable. It's basically an acting subsidiary of the US Mint.
And you know what they've started to go after, in an attempt to save themselves? The bookstores. The cost of the books to students. That can't be good (for them, not you). and it is a very clear signal that behind the glossy brochures and sprawling sports complexes, administrators are actually shitting their collective pants, throwing anything over board that they can lift.
Of course, it's all for naught, since no man can lift himself and what's really sinking the university is a combination of the very many weddi
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.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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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