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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?'"
Is the difference really tenured or non-tenured? Or is it, younger or older.
Have you read my journal today?
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.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
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.
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.
Log in or piss off.
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.
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
Except you, and the people publishing this article, have ignored any other contributing factors (like faculty being closer in age to their students for instance.) You jump straight to the conclusion that you like, which is a misanthropic view that everybody apart from yourself (and people you like) are lazy, no-good idiots who need to be booted in the arse constantly in order to do any work. Your problem is that this is simply not true. Human motivation is more complex than that, and people do not in the general case do better jobs if you constantly threaten them - regardless of how that might give you some kind of perverse satisfaction.
Speaking as a tenured faculty member the conclusion that people employed entirely for their teaching with zero other consideration makes sense...but that does not make it correct and the evidence is rather circumstantial. For a start while having a sessional may cause more students to continue in a particular program is this because they are inspired or is it because they make the material seem simpler (perhaps partly because they may be better teachers but also because they will not complicate matters by introducing their own cutting edge research)? For many students, the perceived ease of a course is a large factor in their decision to take it.
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.
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.
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.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
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.
I've been both a non-tenure-track (NTT); I am now on a tenure-track (TT) professor; and I will soon be a tenured professor. I've been in the position of evaluating non-tenure-track instructors. (First off, a correct on the terms of art: very seldom is a NTT faculty member titled "professor.") In my experience, yes, NTT faculty are much better teachers. From working as an NTT faculty member, working with NTT faculty, and having them as close friends, I can say that there are three reasons that NTT faculty are better teachers. 1) They are younger and consequently fresher and have fewer family obligations. They are typically single. When coupled, they don't yet have or don't plan to have kids. 2) They are under constant threat of losing their jobs, so they work very, very hard--much harder than should be expected of people working for, often, about $35k/year, sometimes more, but generally not over $40k/yr. 3) NTT faculty are teachers only. They are not distracted by research obligations nor by substantial obligations to develop/run the program. ALL THAT SAID, I don't think hiring lots of NTT faculty is a good thing, at least as it is done now. Such faculty are treated as disposable, paid just enough to keep them around a few years, and worked hard enough that they will burn out pretty soon anyway. That may be good for the students (as long as that student is planning on pursuing graduate work that will lead to one of these dead-end jobs), but it's not ethical. Granted, to some, those salaries I listed sound pretty good, but keep in mind that level of pay is not enough to support a family and it is often further reduced by the need to repay the costs of graduate education. The answer may well be to admit fewer graduate students, produce fewer doctorates. But, a lot of the quality I saw in the instruction of NTT faculty was the result of very strong educations; many of those faculty were electing to pursue significant and demanding research projects on their own dime/time. So the undergraduates (and the employing institutions) are often effectively getting the benefits of a young professor without actually paying for a young professor. That may sound good, until you're the person in a similar situation.
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.
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.