It's no secret that tenured professors cause problems in
universities.
Some choose to rest on their laurels, allowing their
productivity to dwindle.
Others develop tunnel vision about research,
inflicting misery on students who suffer through their classes.
Despite
these costs, tenure may be a necessary evil: it offers job security and
intellectual freedom in exchange for lower pay than other occupations
that require advanced degrees.
Instead
of abolishing tenure, what if we restructured it? The heart of the
problem is that we’ve combined two separate skill sets into a single
job. We ask researchers to teach, and teachers to do research, even
though these two capabilities have surprisingly little to do with each
other.
In a comprehensive analysis of data on more than half a million professors, the education experts John Hattie and Herbert Marsh
found that “the relationship between teaching and research is zero.”
In
all fields and all kinds of colleges, there was little connection
between research productivity and teaching ratings by students and
peers.
Currently,
research universities base tenure decisions primarily on research
productivity and quality. Teaching matters only after you have cleared
the research bar: it is a bonus to teach well.
In my field of organizational psychology, there is a rich body of evidence on designing jobs to promote motivation and productivity.
The design of the professor job violates one of the core principles: tasks should be grouped together based on the skill sets of the individuals who hold them. If we created three kinds of tenure rather than one, we might see net gains in both research and teaching.
A
research-only tenure track would be for professors who have the passion
and talent for discovering knowledge, but lack the motivation or
ability to teach well. This would allow them to do more groundbreaking
studies and produce more patents, while sparing students the sorrow of
shoddy courses.
Creating
more full-time research professorships could combat the decline of
research productivity post-tenure, as many productive professors see
their non-teaching time consumed by administrative responsibilities. If
research professors didn’t teach, administrative duties wouldn’t impede
their work.
A
teaching-only tenure track would be for professors who excel in
communicating knowledge. Granting tenure on the basis of exemplary
teaching would be a radical step for research universities but it might
improve student learning.
In a recent landmark study
at Northwestern, students learned more from professors who weren’t on
the tenure track. When students took their first course in a subject
with a professor who didn’t do research, they got significantly better
grades in their next class in that subject.
Currently,
universities pay adjunct instructors below the rate of tenure-track
faculty and give them short-term contracts.
If tenure were available for
teaching excellence, with pay and prestige comparable to tenure for
research, we could attract and retain more exceptional educators.
Replacing adjuncts with tenured teachers would cost more, but there are
ways to offset that, perhaps by funding more research with grants.
The
third tenure track would be for research and teaching. Professors who
succeed in both could maintain this dual role, whereas those who
struggle in research could eventually shift to the teaching track, and
vice versa.
Of
course, this model is not without challenges. Universities have clear
criteria for evaluating research productivity and impact, but typically
falter by assessing teaching quality solely through student ratings.
That said, Dr. Marsh and his colleagues find that student ratings are less biased than many people assume: contrary to popular belief, students rarely favor teachers who grade leniently - and give higher ratings to teachers who assign heavier workloads.
Still,
students can rate professors as great teachers even if they teach
information that is wrong. To support tenure on the basis of teaching
alone, we need new metrics for evaluating the quality of the knowledge
that teachers disseminate in the classroom.
For example, research
professors could provide updates on discoveries and vet the accuracy of
information taught, while teaching professors could curate questions
back from the classroom to help researchers pursue meaningful projects.
I
have watched skilled researchers burn out after failing in the
classroom and gifted teachers lose their positions because university
policies limited the number of courses that adjunct professors could
teach.
Dividing tenure tracks may be what economists call a Pareto
improvement: it benefits one group without hurting another. Let’s
reserve teaching for professors with the relevant passion and skill - and reward it. Sharing knowledge with students should be a privilege of
tenure, not an obligation.
Adam Grant is a professor of management and psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of “Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success.”
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