"...Professors pretend to teach, students pretend to learn..."

[warblersrule]

<p>

@katliamom

Higher education wasn’t as good then - and isn’t as bad now as sakky and warbler86 want us to believe.

I’m working on my third degree and (counting cross-enrollment and study abroad) have attended five different universities. I plan to teach college when I’m done with my PhD. Obviously I don’t believe higher education is useless or irreparably damaged. I do, however, believe that it currently has significant flaws that demand to be addressed. </p>

<p>For example, take the recent study “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines” done by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley. Here’s what several scholars said about teaching and tenure in astronomy:

There’s no question. It’s publication first as far as tenure cases go. And I say this without having sat through a tenure case. I’m only recently tenured, so I guess I don’t know this for a dead fact, but I’m pretty sure that’s the expectation. Teaching quality isn’t that highly regarded. It’s certainly a bar you’ve got to get above, but I don’t think it largely informs the case—unless the performance is very poor.</p>

<p>In astronomy, research record is dominant. If you are absolutely hopeless at teaching, it will hurt, but it’s surprising how much tolerance there is to poor teaching in the US. In the promotion and hiring at Oxford, an exam question is given to the candidate. So we’re talking about an interview where somebody has to actually do and explain how they would teach an undergraduate a particular project. I haven’t seen that in the US at all.</p>

<p>In astronomy and astrophysics, at least in research-based universities, of course, research is what counts. We all pay lip service to teaching, and some people actually care about it, but, in reality, it’s the scientific achievements that really count.</p>

<p>To earn tenure and promotion, a scholar must demonstrate significant research productivity, adequate teaching skills at the undergraduate and graduate level, and some degree of usefulness to the specific institution and the outside world—although this can be moderate at that stage of the career.

It’s not just in the sciences. One scholar said the same about political science.

Tenure hasn’t changed much in terms of the overall requirement—at least my impression at a major research university. There is a tremendous amount of stress on being a good teacher, being a good citizen, and all those things, which everybody talks about, but when you get down to making decisions, I think the highest proportion of discussion goes to publication, contributions to scholarship. Everybody talks the language of really having to worry about the undergraduates, but I think, unfortunately we downplay teaching…It happens in major departments, in all sorts of places.

</p>