@Uniwatcher: Thank you for your reasoned response. I agree that magnifying categories is in conflict with the intended weighting specified by USNWR. My objection is then limited to the introductory language of the analysis, and even at that only part of it, which you have refined neatly in your post. So please consider my objection to be trivial in relation to the rest of the work you have done, which I do find of interest.
@xiggi wrote: “The horror! The horror! Imagine the impact of an university requiring its divas to teach more classes and abandon its superior dedication to research and direct a few graduate students who inherit most of the teaching duties!”
Um, you do know what the average faculty teaching load at a public university in the United States is, yes? I fear that you’ve bought into the ideas that (1) faculty conducting quality research is entirely—or even largely—unrelated to faculty performing quality teaching, and (2) faculty teach far less than they actually do (even if we limit our sample to tenured folks).
I don’t entirely agree with @Uniwatcher’s positions on this thread, but at least they have the advantage of being grounded in something closer to the reality of the situation.
Know? Perhaps not, but a reasonable guess might be a tripartite 30 units workload per academic year, with a decreasing scale for seniority.
But speaking of guesses, chances are that Vedder is not really targeting the assistants or associates who deliver the bulk of the loads, but the next level of tenured professors.
Good teaching and good research should reinforce each other. Research increases knowledge so that teaching doesn’t get stale. Engaged undergraduate teaching exposes researchers to questions, so that specialized research doesn’t lose touch with common concerns. A good college ranking should account for both. The devil is in the details of how to do that fairly and accurately. A poll of expert opinions isn’t a bad idea, as long as it gathers opinions about schools and factors the responders are competent to address. It shouldn’t be necessary for a researcher like Sweitzer to do a statistical analysis of factors that drive the PA scores. They ought to be explicit in the assessment itself.
@xiggi, in the research universities that I am familiar with, tenured faculty teach as much or more than non-tenured tenure-track faculty and have more organizational duties (committees, etc.). I’m pretty certain that’s true elsewhere as well.
It would help to not be completely ignorant of the institution you’re attacking, you know.
@xiggi: So, in other words, no, you don’t know what the average teaching load is for tenured college faculty in the United States. (You also clearly don’t understand the difference between full professors and associate professors, and probably not between the associate and assistant ranks, either.)
Please educate yourself on that before you start taking sweeping swipes at the profession, okay? It’ll help your arguments come out a bit stronger in the end.
While there can be more variation within the sciences, typical load is 2-2 – which means 2 courses each term. A dept chair, director of graduate studies etc often gets a 1 course release, for a 2-1 schedule., depending on the number of grad students and majors, that could be a 1-1.
Seniority --being tenured faculty for more years, rarely has impact on teaching load – if anything, tenured faculty are supposed to pick up slack so their non-tenured colleagues can stay on track for tenure. Plus, schools are increasingly moving away from automatic research leave every 6-7 years to a competitive, application based process where faculty must demonstrate the worthiness of their proposed research.
It is an underpaid, under appreciated career. Academics choose it because they cannot imagine a different life, away from their passion, and not because it is “easy.”
Amazing!
Allow me to share that the latest two posts by Purple Titan and dfbdfb are remarkable and do speak more about them than they do about me! You took it upon to call me an ignorant because I did not !answer a question about the average teaching load of professors in the United States! Do YOU happen to be able to present such a figure that is both accurate and verifiable? Allow me to smile!
On the other hand, I would have few problems in defining the teaching loads at a couple of universities, including the one you might be teaching at this time! So much for not knowing nor understanding.
As far as the derisive statement about not knowing the differences between full professors and associates/assistants, I will let that one shine in its own crassness and leave it unanswered.
@xiggi: Cool. Prove me wrong, then—give us a clear explanation of what you do know.
@Midwestmomofboys: Sort of. 2-2 loads are pretty common at research-intensive institutions (which, admittedly, are the only schools that a lot of the traffic on College Confidential would lead one to believe exist), but at the majority of institutions in the US, standard teaching loads are 3-3 or higher (up to 5-5, though that’s relatively uncommon, usually at community colleges, and only in cases with no research expectations at all).
After a couple minutes to cool down a bit, I do hope that you understand, @xiggi, that even if it wasn’t your intention, you’ve been posting generalizations that are pretty insulting to college faculty everywhere. I probably reacted more strongly than I should have, but you did make some sweeping claims without any evidence beyond your own assertion, and it’d be good to hear what your bases for the claims were.
@dft – I understand you, like I, are defending the workload of the professor against the stereotypical “life of leisure.” At the same time, my response was narrowly focused on research schools, since the focus is a deeper understanding of quality of research universities.
@Midwestmomofboys: Got it.
And, of course, a 2-2 (or especially a 1-1) teaching-load professor at an R1 institution has an insane load of research expectations—but most people don’t see the direct benefits from that even when it directly benefits them. My profession really needs better PR instincts, you know?
The catalyst for this part of the thread traces back, I think, to the validity or lack thereof regarding the sharp criticisms of public research universities and their allegedly pampered faculty by Richard Vedder and the CCAP. This, in turn, spun off from a discussion about rankings, including the one by Forbes, which Vedder is behind. And…originally, the discussion was about alternative rankings to those by US News and whether the use of peer assessment (aka academic reputation) should be a part of any rankings.
- Vedder is an ideologue, and if a few of his criticisms of research faculty are valid, I suggest that in the main he is using the faculty as scapegoats to further his libertarian agenda. Like others who have joined this thread, I have three academicians in my family, including one who has taught at a top 35 national university, another who teaches at a liberal arts college, and another who has taught in both state universities and liberal arts colleges. Yes, this is anecdotal, but based on years of associations with all of these persons, I can say that their work is far from easy, especially given the dual demands of teaching and research.
- The Forbes rankings, even more than those by US News, almost certainly give too much weight to financial resources, especially when the outputs of those resources are also used as metrics. Forbes claims to be output oriented, but then uses too many economic outputs in their rankings.
- xiggi is probably right that the surveys used by US News to assess academic reputation leave much to be desired. Yet I believe that there are ways this could be improved, such as focusing on membership in national academies and winning significant awards (Washington Monthly), objective data about publications, and then some form of survey that would not the basis for the entire metric but only account for about a third or fourth of it.
Here is our fresh comparison of the 18 most selective private universities and the 18 most selective public honors programs. The overlapping data we have covers mean SAT’s and grad rates. It may be a surprise to see how selective some of the honors programs are.
http://publicuniversityhonors.com/college-value-public-honors-vs-private-elites/
@Uniwatcher I’m curious as to whether you would consider the College of Creative Studies at UCSB an “honors” program or if there are programs at other universities you know of that are similar to it.
@Ynotgo: I would. I would also consider New College of Florida to be an “honors” public LAC because it’s one of the few (maybe only one?) public LAC who’s alumni achievements match those of some highly-rated private LACs (W&M’s is similar to some other smaller private unis and LACs).
The key thing (in my mind) is finding good potentially cost-effective options. As other examples, while CS@UIUC and Ross@UMich (& Haas and McIntire) aren’t “honors”, their resources, student body characteristics, and grad placement are akin to those of highly-rated privates in those fields.
@ynotgo, yes, I am familiar with and intrigued by the Creative Studies program at UCSB. I have had difficulty obtaining data from UCSB, but I do plan to do at least a profile of the Creative Studies program, probably in the near future.
PT, PhD production is among the alumni achievements you consider, right? On that score, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology is another small, public institution that does well (although it’s a technical institute, not a LAC.) Colorado School of Mines also is among the top 50 per capita producers of S&T doctorates.
We have recently published two articles that look at academic reputation in a somewhat different way. One shows the public universities with the highest rated academic departments across 15 major disciplines; the other compares the overall departmental rankings for private elites and publics across the same 15 disciplines. http://publicuniversityhonors.com/400-2/
http://publicuniversityhonors.com/rankings-academic-departments-private-elites-vs-publics/
Those rankings have two significant issues, though: (1) They assume each department counts the same across all universities, and (2) they unquestioningly accept the underlying assumptions of the rankings you’ve gathered into your metaranking.