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[drnobody]

Job posting at a well-ranked state school which prides itself on research has a "100% instructional" position which is TT. I don't have enough experience in this to know how that would look. I would imagine a 4/4 teaching load and tenure determined by service, evals, etc., but little (if any) research expectation or support? If this were Podunk U with no reputation I wouldn't think much of it, but since it is a regional leader and advertises its Carnegie classification, I just wonder if anyone else has input or maybe is at a school like this. Of all my apps, it's the first posting like this I've seen. It actually sounds ideal for me--best of both worlds (I'm a strong teacher but love the large public uni environment), but I've been known to make illogical assumptions. Otherwise, I know the school well, love the location and am crossing all my fingers and toes that I get called.

[anisogamy]

Hm.  I've seen an ad for a lecturer position with "potential security of employment" and zero research expectations at a big state school, but the ad seemed to take great pains to say that the potential security of employment was not tenure (although it offered the same protections).  I've never heard of a tenure-track 100% instructional position within a department where others do research.  I'm not entirely sure how I'd interpret that, myself.

[marigolds]

Maybe they are trying out Cary Wolfe's ideas about alternate teaching-track tenured positions. If so, I applaud them.

[msparticularity]

Interesting--in education, we often see clinical positions with long-term contracts (rolling five-year, for example), but a TT for a teaching-only slot is quite unusual!

[leobloom]

Finally some fancy-pants profs with a stable inflow of cash from grants have found the solution (and advanced it to their dean) for the dispute between their propensity towards research and the departmental students who need good teaching.

[drnobody]

I'm encouraged by these responses even though it doesn't seem to be familiar to people. It is a place I would very much love to be. And MsP., it's education. Looks like I'll cross my fingers, toes AND hair.

[biologist_]

I know a tenured faculty member at an RU/VH who has a position that is defined as 10% research, some service and the rest teaching.  Others in the same department do much more research.  He is in an applied science sort of department.

[janewales]

My research-oriented university has a tenurable "instructor" stream: teaching load is higher than on the tenure track, and assessment for tenure is based on teaching and service. The rank had become moribund, apart from a few language and lab instructors, but it's being revived: my own humanities department recently converted a long-term adjunct to one of these positions.

The university has just added the prospect of promotion to Professor of Teaching as the top of this rank; the expectation for the promotion to this rank would include major teaching initiatives like program design and innovation, and/ or what's called "scholarship of teaching."

[idspike]

Positions like this have been showing up more frequently in my field (a natural science) in the last two years, though they aren't exactly common yet. 

I think they are a good idea, but if I were applying for one, I would pay careful attention to the tenure requirements -- what they were, whether they had been thought out seriously, and whether the department seemed really committed to the idea.  You don't want to get to tenure review and find out that some people secretly think that no one should be tenured who doesn't have the usual number of traditional publications.  (I've heard a couple of stories of this sort, though not related to this specific type of job description.)

I would also look carefully at the department and university culture.  In some places this might be a great job; in other places one could wind up a second-class citizen.  For example, at some schools the nice raises only go to big-name researchers, whereas at others they are more equitably distributed.  (Everyone at state schools with big cuts may now laugh bitterly at the thought of raises.) 

[indirectquote]

My research-oriented U also has a teaching-only stream like the one at Janewales's place, but positions open up pretty rarely. The (very very few) teaching-only faculty in my department only teach undergrad courses, and rarely teach the upper-level ones.

Janewales, aren't you in Canada too? Maybe teaching stream is more common here.

[drnobody]

This is very interesting. I definitely don't mind only teaching undergrads--and actually in my field it's the most likely position for me anyway. I enjoy some research but am definitely a teaching-scholar, not vice versa. What a dream. I am excited, even if this doesn't work for me, that there may be other opportunities. Thanks for all this valuable feedback.

[janewales]

My research-oriented U also has a teaching-only stream like the one at Janewales's place, but positions open up pretty rarely. The (very very few) teaching-only faculty in my department only teach undergrad courses, and rarely teach the upper-level ones.

Janewales, aren't you in Canada too? Maybe teaching stream is more common here.

Yes, I am. At my place, the instructor stream seems to have gone through various phases. When I first started (a long time ago), many departments that had significant service teaching (think English composition, introductory language, introductory lab science, math for majors in other things) had a few instructors.

The stream began to shrink as the university became more overtly research-oriented; the existing instructors kept their jobs, but no new instructors were hired-- and some of the instructors published their way out of that stream, and onto the tenure track (the framework agreement allowed for that possibility; I had two colleagues in my own department who did it). It's perhaps worth mentioning that many of the instructors were women, often spouses of male faculty, who had been hired to these positions in the 60s and 70s.

Eventually, the teaching load for professorial faculty had to be reduced because of the increasing pressure of research, and so someone had to pick up the extra teaching. As at other places, sessionals filled the gap. At first, they were on rotating contracts; that is, they had to leave after a fixed number of years. Then they joined the faculty bargaining unit, and gained some rights of reappointment, though the positions remained soft money.

And now, as of last year I think, the tenurable instructor stream seems to be on the verge of revival. My sense is that it's a way of dealing with the growing dependency on sessional instructors; tenure-stream instructors are more expensive than piecemeal sessional instructors, but still less expensive than the tenure-stream professoriate. I've seen only a few appointments thus far, and they've been conversions of existing long-term sessionals, so I don't know yet how significant this move will be.

I wonder if Canada is doing more of this because all of our universities are public, and it's important to be able to tell the public that teaching is being done by people with the proper support and resources?

[fayefaye]

Maybe they are trying out Cary Wolfe's ideas about alternate teaching-track tenured positions. If so, I applaud them.

I know of one place (in USA), RU/H that just hired a TT "teaching only" position. The department has separate teaching faculty who are tenure track. I don't know exactly how their situation works, but they do go up for tenure.