In the 20th century, American professors built an incredibly powerful edifice for themselves and shored it up with sturdy walls of tenure.
In one way that’s good. It means they are free to research and publish in the most controversial areas, able to go where the evidence leads them, and be confident that their colleagues will support them if attacked from outside.
In another way it’s not so good. Tenure, which frees them to think anything, also enables the less energetic and scrupulous among them to think almost nothing. Every university lugs along its share of unproductive faculty members whose last publication immediately preceded the grant of tenure, 10, 20, or 30 years earlier. This is a case where the norms of professionalism may inhibit, rather than enhance, the achievement of excellence.
What’s worse, there are no faculty norms related to teaching. Many professors spend much of their lives teaching students, yet we live with the bizarre anomaly that they are never taught how to do it. The lucky ones may get a few days of preparation and some “tips for teaching” before becoming TA’s for the first time, in graduate school. After that they’re on their own, sinking or swimming each in his or her own way.
Lack of training, plus the widespread awareness that the rewards of academic life most often go to the scholars, not the teachers, makes teaching very much the poor relation. Students suffer accordingly.
Patrick Allitt is a professor of American history at Emory University.
Experts explore the quality and assessment of higher education.
9 Responses to Faculty Norms Inhibit Excellence
tuxthepenguin - August 29, 2010 at 7:02 pm
“Many professors spend much of their lives teaching students, yet we live with the bizarre anomaly that they are never taught how to do it.”This implies that someone exists who can teach them how to do it. I’ve read everything I could get my hands on about college teaching. The vast majority of it didn’t work. Everything is specific to the university, field, subfield, and individual students that semester. There are no universal principles of teaching.”Every university lugs along its share of unproductive faculty members whose last publication immediately preceded the grant of tenure, 10, 20, or 30 years earlier.”Those same faculty don’t get raises, they teach much higher loads, and get stuck with undesirable service assignments at my university. Firing someone is not the only way to deal with unproductive faculty, if productivity means publications.
lost_angeleno - August 29, 2010 at 8:49 pm
Haven’t I read all this before?Oh, yes, in about every third issue of the Chron.
busyslinky - August 30, 2010 at 7:01 am
Yep, it’s that time of month again. We are getting worse every day. Seems like we are in a continuous crisis of faculty feeding off the hard earned money of the American middle class. Well, back in my day…faculty were faculty and schools produced educated young white men ready to lead America into the future.
dwilliams5 - August 30, 2010 at 8:56 am
The more I contend with this more I have come to believe that real learning happens when the personal relationships between faculty and students are strong. The students who learn the most from me are the one’s that sit in my office and visit about class, life, etc. That was true when I was student, too. The students who learn the most from what the university offers are the ones that go to class, sit in all their profs offices…basically those who show up and care learn. The same goes for good teaching. Profs who can’t be bothered by undergrads while they pursue their “flaccid” research aren’t really teaching undergraduates. Those who have a bevy of undergraduates learning how to do research by participating in the profs cool research project and have weekly research project meetings learn quite a bit. It’s active tutelage.I’ve used lots of techniques, and they’ve mostly helped me do one of two positive things: 1) focus a lot more on being intentional about scaffolding assignments so that students understand what I intend for them to learn and accomplish and 2) focusing on engaging students more relationally…seeing them all as real people not as the object “student.” The second is the most beneficial. The downside of experimenting with techniques is that at early and intermediate stages it’s commonly a search for magic beans that don’t exist, ie. “if I use X assignment learning will flourish in all my classes.”
dqualters - August 30, 2010 at 9:53 am
Yes, there are people who can help faculty in their teaching. They are called Teaching Center personnel. Universities who take their teaching seriously have centers where faculty come together with professionals in education (yes education is a discipline not a trade)who can help faculty members understand what constitutes learning. Teaching is Contextual – and every discipline has its specialized techniques BUT good teaching can be taught. There is an ART and a SCIENCE to teaching and working together with teaching centers faulty can understand the science behind the art.There are also many ways to measure good teaching, but the key is many ways. One way (i.e. student evaluations) does not do justice to either the faculty or the students in promoting a serious look at teaching.Until higher education looks at faculty development as a community of practice (Wenger) we will continue to put people in the classroom unprepared and feeling alone. As Lee Shulman said years ago – teaching is community property not private property and we need to approach it that way.
22067030 - August 30, 2010 at 10:47 am
As I recall, tenure was sold to protect teachers. Teachers were being disciplined or dismissed for teaching evolution and for teaching leftish economics.The ugly truth is that university administrators and boards rarely fired researchers for their research — they rarely CARED (unless they got angry letters from Alan Dershowitz) — although they did fire researchers who made statements to the press a la LSU.Tenure for researchers has become part of a hiring package, and nothing more. Especially when instructors go without tenure and adjuncts get no protection at all.I’m sure that administrators and boards would be delighted with the popularly advanced reform, to do away with tenure altogether. But there is the alternative, that tenure is for teachers. I can hear the administrators and board members screaming now. But one major reason for the decline in college teaching is that so many of our colleagues teach with a knife at their back…
jeff1 - August 30, 2010 at 11:47 am
Do faculty norms inhibit excellence? So far I see no support or lack of support for this question . . . only distracting comments. This is a good question . . . not the forum to address it . . . but it is a good question.
jmalmstrom - August 30, 2010 at 11:55 am
“Yes, there are people who can help faculty in their teaching. They are called Teaching Center personnel. Universities who take their teaching seriously have centers where faculty come together with professionals in education (yes education is a discipline not a trade)who can help faculty members understand what constitutes learning. Teaching is Contextual – and every discipline has its specialized techniques BUT good teaching can be taught. There is an ART and a SCIENCE to teaching and working together with teaching centers faulty can understand the science behind the art.”And I trust the people in our Teaching Center just slightly less than I trust some of our college administrators. They have read neither deeply nor broadly about the process of education – instead they impose whatever is the latest fad that comes in their glossy magazines which tend to print non-scholarly articles. Nope, I don’t darken the door of that office.
19682010 - August 30, 2010 at 3:42 pm
I find the “tenure is the cause of bad teaching and/or low research productivity” argument perplexing. There are many carrots and sticks Deans have available to use — even with tenured faculty. Unless a collective bargaining agreement mandates otherwise, cost of living adjustments don’t have to be across the board. Deans could rate faculty — based on the peer review and student evaluations of their teaching, and based on their research output and service to their college. Those who perform “poorly” get no cost of living increase. Those who perform “well” get a COLA only. And those who excel get a COLA + Merit increase. Deans can also withold funds for conference travel, summer stipends, etc. to tenured faculty who don’t perform. Carrots can also be provided in a variety of ways — e.g., preferential parking spots (on urban campuses), first choice of room to teach in and time to teach at, etc.)My hypothesis (not a conclusion — just a hypothesis) is that Deans of faculty rarely employ the carrots and sticks that are available to them to provide incentives for work effort and disincentives for retirement in place.My second hypothesis is one cause of unproductiveness may be related to the fact that Deans of faculty (who come up from the faculty ranks) may have little training in the discipline of Managing People — and thus don’t do a good job of managing their faculty. I suspect that Deans who don’t really understand how to employ moderate management tools (carrots and sticks referred to above) — won’t be any more successful should they also have the power to fire faculty (if tenure were eliminated). Third — how many of the problems in higher ed actually have to do with unproductive, tenured faculty? Tenured faculty are actually a much smaller percent of the overall faculty workforce than they used to be (a minority in fact). Moreover, all the information I have seen on the “lazy, tenured professor” is annecdotal. Certainly, some faculty retire in place at some point after receiving tenure — but what percentage? One percent? Ten percent? Fifty percent? Where’s the data???My last point relates to the theme of this series in the Chronicle — the lack of metrics.