<p>
</p>
<p>I second this comment. Yes, ultimately it’s all individual; some tenured and tenure track faculty are outstanding teachers even at the introductory level, and some non-tenure-track instructors are terrible. But when you think about it, the results of this study shouldn’t be surprising. Tenure-track faculty at a research university like Northwestern are hired primarily on the basis of their scholarly potential, more so than on the basis of their teaching ability. They are expected to be (or to become) competent teachers. But at the end of the day, they’ll earn tenure (or not) on the basis of three criteria: research, teaching, and service. Everyone knows, however, that research is by far the most important of these. An outstanding scholar who is only an average (or sometimes even slightly below-average) teacher will often be granted tenure; an outstanding teacher who produces lackluster scholarship has virtually no chance. Of course, the ideal is the outstanding scholar who is also an outstanding teacher, but the reality is not everyone fits that description. </p>
<p>And even to the extent teaching is considered in the hiring and retention of tenured/tenure-track faculty (and it is, at every institution I’ve ever been associated with), it’s not necessarily success in teaching introductory undergrad courses that counts the most; the ability to teach advanced courses and graduate seminars on arcane topics in the faculty member’s own areas of scholarship and expertise may often be of equal or greater importance. So bottom line, tenured and tenure-track faculty at research universities are hired and retained on the basis of criteria that don’t systematically select for candidates with the greatest ability to teach introductory undergrad courses.</p>
<p>It’s an entirely different story with non-tenure-track instructors. They’re hired and retained strictly on the basis of their teaching ability, and more particularly their ability to teach introductory-level undergrad courses, since that’s what they’re typically hired to do. So if the university does a good job of hiring and evaluating these people and retaining the best of them, they should be, as a group, more effective teachers of introductory undergrad classes than tenured/tenure-track faculty as a group–though the two groups will span overlapping ranges of ability to teach such courses.</p>
<p>What I take away from this study is that Northwestern must be doing a good job of hiring, evaluating, and retaining non-tenure-track instructors. For that they deserve credit. But there’s no guarantee that same result obtains at other research universities. And the situation might be very different at LACs where teaching undergrads, including first- and second-year students in introductory courses, is a much more prominent part of the job description of tenured and tenure-track faculty, and presumably much more central to the criteria on which they’re hired and promoted.</p>