I think this is one reason why I've often argued--to little effect--that while we are absolutely right that scholarship improves teaching (indeed, that good teaching requires it), we're wrong about how we define "scholarship" in this context. For most professors, scholarship means the active production and dissemination of knowledge in the form of conference papers, journal articles, monographs and so on. I think what it ought to mean is something wider: active engagement with your discipline, with your specialized interests, with wider fields of interdisciplinary knowledge where that might simply mean "participating in roundtables and workshops", "reading actively in a structured way in your areas of interest", "constantly reworking your syllabi with new materials that you've sought out", "going to lots of talks and presentations", "doing peer review" and so on. I sometimes see people who produce and disseminate research who don't seem in that sense to be very scholarly--e.g., they're not curious about what's going on, they're not thinking more widely, they're not really tracking new work except as a kind of defensive strategy against peer review, and therefore what they're producing doesn't feed back into what they teach. (Or they turn what they teach into a mere appendage of the knowledge they're producing.) Universities need to support active engagement with knowledge, which takes time and opportunity and funding. But that should largely be in service to what we teach and how we teach.
I very much agree with this point. One of my favorite things about the faculty contract in the university system I'm in is that, for evaluation purposes, a lot of the things you listed *can* be counted as scholarship. (Or at least, that's how it gets interpreted at my university.) It put less pressure on a particular form of research, which allows more focus on teaching, and it makes it easier for the scholarship to take a shape that directly supports my teaching work.
While I left academia for industrial research after my PhD, I still regularly interact closely with my peers that remained. One thing that I always find interesting is that a lot of the most successful researchers have large groups with 10-20+ students and don't actually spend their time doing research. More often, they spend their time writing proposals and editing manuscripts. No doubt they have their finger on the technical pulse and their students' and post-doc's projects, but I wonder how much of their "research" time is actually "asking the government for money" time.
When I compare to colleagues at the national labs or in similar positions as myself, we spend closer to 70%+ of our time doing scientific work, while also not teaching. The trade-off, of course, is that we are beholden to business needs when determining what to study.
"As research funding has come to be a tool for coercing private universities into following a political agenda, it’s probably worth asking some questions about the overall logic of that setup."
Is this really a new development though? What is Title IX? What is Title VI?
Ultimately if your research is funded by taxpayers, it's very reasonable for taxpayers to have a say in what you research and how you go about it. Professors have gotten rather entitled in my opinion. Many of them aren't thinking very hard about how their research will benefit citizens. I had a discussion the other day with a prof here who was complaining about funding cuts. Despite all her highfalutin talk about the value of research, she was essentially unable to name a single valuable discovery which came out of her department over the past 20 years.
There's something very ironic about far-left professors who openly question the legitimacy and sovereignity of the United States as a country, while the United States federal government indirectly pays or subsidizes their salary (via research funding and/or student loans). The surprising thing is how this situation managed to persist for so long. If you're not aligned with their interests, don't be surprised if voters eventually figure that out! (And don't talk to me about "academic freedom" when it's applied selectively depending on the academic's ideology. https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/professor-mike-adams-suicide-still )
I got about 500 words into a comment here and decided to make it a post in my own Substack, in part so as not to hijack your thread and in part to give me space to expand on some of these thoughts and to take them in another direction. I realize dropping a link here might be MORE obnoxious than a massive comment, but:
I perceive that universities prioritize research in evaluation of tenure and tenure track STEM faculty because there is real inter-university competition that provides a usable measuring stick to apply to individual faculty members ; it is very difficult to land large and/or prestigious federal research funding, to publish papers in high impact factor journals , to win society or national academy level honors, etc , so universities try to use these metrics as measures of success that can be compared across universities. My observation is that measuring undergrad student learning and long term outcomes is more challenging overall, harder to attribute to any given faculty member, and harder to compare between universities, which means that the undergraduate learning experience can be taken for granted as universities plan their growth and evaluate faculty.
If there was more focus on inter-university competition in terms of undergraduate teaching (funding? External awards for outstanding educators or departments? Standardized tests for graduating students?) I wonder if this could shift the incentives
I’m surprised that aptitude for teaching and research are conspicuously missing from the conversation. They are meaningfully different skills that faculty possess to vastly different degrees. While I agree with the sentiment that the institutions should put more emphasis on teaching, that need not manifest in every faculty member doing more teaching. It should probably be more outcomes based so the better teachers teach more and the better researchers do more research.
I pointed out on a comment at SB that figuring out what to teach can suggest ideas to reserch.
But I also think it is OK for interested outsiders like the government, like donors, to offer money for research and that implies less time for teaching. So I disgree that research is _only_ for the benefit of students (even future students who may learn what was previouly researched).
Re: the dunking, I don't know how much teaching faculty do at Harvard, but given what's written here and in the Crimson article, it seems possible that faculty are going to have to teach *more* sections of lower level undergrad courses that grad students are currently supporting. I don't think you need a tenured professor to teach, say, Newtonian mechanics. A grad student can teach that equally as well, and that teaching experience is part of their development anyway. So if you have a grad student available to teach it, I don't see why you wouldn't. I expect that Harvard has faculty teaching some classes, but due to a lack of grad students, they're going to have to teach more classes and at a lower level.
> None of the professors who I’m friends with hate teaching or look down on it or secretly despise their students.
I abandoned my pursuit of an Econ PhD when the director of the graduate program told us, to our faces, that the purpose of the program was to turn out researchers who could get positions at prestigious institutions where they would publish prestigious research, and that if we were more interested in teaching we would receive no support.
"The vast amount of published research never gets read by anyone, and has negligible direct impact on human welfare" That seems rather bleak. When I was doing research, I read pretty much all of the papers coming from the other folks directly in my field, and then a collection of authors tangential to my field. And then cited them when I wrote a paper.
It's maybe a bit of an overstatement, but not by all that much-- there are stats out there on citation rates for published papers, and they're really bleak.
I think this is one reason why I've often argued--to little effect--that while we are absolutely right that scholarship improves teaching (indeed, that good teaching requires it), we're wrong about how we define "scholarship" in this context. For most professors, scholarship means the active production and dissemination of knowledge in the form of conference papers, journal articles, monographs and so on. I think what it ought to mean is something wider: active engagement with your discipline, with your specialized interests, with wider fields of interdisciplinary knowledge where that might simply mean "participating in roundtables and workshops", "reading actively in a structured way in your areas of interest", "constantly reworking your syllabi with new materials that you've sought out", "going to lots of talks and presentations", "doing peer review" and so on. I sometimes see people who produce and disseminate research who don't seem in that sense to be very scholarly--e.g., they're not curious about what's going on, they're not thinking more widely, they're not really tracking new work except as a kind of defensive strategy against peer review, and therefore what they're producing doesn't feed back into what they teach. (Or they turn what they teach into a mere appendage of the knowledge they're producing.) Universities need to support active engagement with knowledge, which takes time and opportunity and funding. But that should largely be in service to what we teach and how we teach.
I very much agree with this point. One of my favorite things about the faculty contract in the university system I'm in is that, for evaluation purposes, a lot of the things you listed *can* be counted as scholarship. (Or at least, that's how it gets interpreted at my university.) It put less pressure on a particular form of research, which allows more focus on teaching, and it makes it easier for the scholarship to take a shape that directly supports my teaching work.
While I left academia for industrial research after my PhD, I still regularly interact closely with my peers that remained. One thing that I always find interesting is that a lot of the most successful researchers have large groups with 10-20+ students and don't actually spend their time doing research. More often, they spend their time writing proposals and editing manuscripts. No doubt they have their finger on the technical pulse and their students' and post-doc's projects, but I wonder how much of their "research" time is actually "asking the government for money" time.
When I compare to colleagues at the national labs or in similar positions as myself, we spend closer to 70%+ of our time doing scientific work, while also not teaching. The trade-off, of course, is that we are beholden to business needs when determining what to study.
"As research funding has come to be a tool for coercing private universities into following a political agenda, it’s probably worth asking some questions about the overall logic of that setup."
Is this really a new development though? What is Title IX? What is Title VI?
Ultimately if your research is funded by taxpayers, it's very reasonable for taxpayers to have a say in what you research and how you go about it. Professors have gotten rather entitled in my opinion. Many of them aren't thinking very hard about how their research will benefit citizens. I had a discussion the other day with a prof here who was complaining about funding cuts. Despite all her highfalutin talk about the value of research, she was essentially unable to name a single valuable discovery which came out of her department over the past 20 years.
There's something very ironic about far-left professors who openly question the legitimacy and sovereignity of the United States as a country, while the United States federal government indirectly pays or subsidizes their salary (via research funding and/or student loans). The surprising thing is how this situation managed to persist for so long. If you're not aligned with their interests, don't be surprised if voters eventually figure that out! (And don't talk to me about "academic freedom" when it's applied selectively depending on the academic's ideology. https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/professor-mike-adams-suicide-still )
I got about 500 words into a comment here and decided to make it a post in my own Substack, in part so as not to hijack your thread and in part to give me space to expand on some of these thoughts and to take them in another direction. I realize dropping a link here might be MORE obnoxious than a massive comment, but:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dcat/p/research-teaching-and-workload-just?r=7jfs5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I perceive that universities prioritize research in evaluation of tenure and tenure track STEM faculty because there is real inter-university competition that provides a usable measuring stick to apply to individual faculty members ; it is very difficult to land large and/or prestigious federal research funding, to publish papers in high impact factor journals , to win society or national academy level honors, etc , so universities try to use these metrics as measures of success that can be compared across universities. My observation is that measuring undergrad student learning and long term outcomes is more challenging overall, harder to attribute to any given faculty member, and harder to compare between universities, which means that the undergraduate learning experience can be taken for granted as universities plan their growth and evaluate faculty.
If there was more focus on inter-university competition in terms of undergraduate teaching (funding? External awards for outstanding educators or departments? Standardized tests for graduating students?) I wonder if this could shift the incentives
I’m surprised that aptitude for teaching and research are conspicuously missing from the conversation. They are meaningfully different skills that faculty possess to vastly different degrees. While I agree with the sentiment that the institutions should put more emphasis on teaching, that need not manifest in every faculty member doing more teaching. It should probably be more outcomes based so the better teachers teach more and the better researchers do more research.
I pointed out on a comment at SB that figuring out what to teach can suggest ideas to reserch.
But I also think it is OK for interested outsiders like the government, like donors, to offer money for research and that implies less time for teaching. So I disgree that research is _only_ for the benefit of students (even future students who may learn what was previouly researched).
Re: the dunking, I don't know how much teaching faculty do at Harvard, but given what's written here and in the Crimson article, it seems possible that faculty are going to have to teach *more* sections of lower level undergrad courses that grad students are currently supporting. I don't think you need a tenured professor to teach, say, Newtonian mechanics. A grad student can teach that equally as well, and that teaching experience is part of their development anyway. So if you have a grad student available to teach it, I don't see why you wouldn't. I expect that Harvard has faculty teaching some classes, but due to a lack of grad students, they're going to have to teach more classes and at a lower level.
Maybe the humanities are different, though.
Quoting the quote of Yglesias:
> None of the professors who I’m friends with hate teaching or look down on it or secretly despise their students.
I abandoned my pursuit of an Econ PhD when the director of the graduate program told us, to our faces, that the purpose of the program was to turn out researchers who could get positions at prestigious institutions where they would publish prestigious research, and that if we were more interested in teaching we would receive no support.
Well, clearly they're not someone Yglesias is friends with...
"The vast amount of published research never gets read by anyone, and has negligible direct impact on human welfare" That seems rather bleak. When I was doing research, I read pretty much all of the papers coming from the other folks directly in my field, and then a collection of authors tangential to my field. And then cited them when I wrote a paper.
It's maybe a bit of an overstatement, but not by all that much-- there are stats out there on citation rates for published papers, and they're really bleak.
Interesting read. I generally agree with it. I wonder how much your own undergraduate experience informs your views on this?