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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.
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.