It would have been more meaningful if he had used the example of the person who gained tenure 20+ yrs ago who is no longer teaching or engaged in productive/published research yet who still makes six figures. To take the example of the community college instructor, who makes the least and does the most work, is simply disingenuous.
It's hard to generalize about this. At the state university I'm most familiar with, tenure was based almost wholly on research, so there's a definite temptation to concentrate on that to the detriment of teaching. Then once one had tenure, the incentive was salary increases (if there was money), which were based partly on class evaluations but more heavily on research. So even setting aside any tenured faculty who didn't work very hard at anything, the deck was stacked against teaching. I won't even go into the fact that research in some liberal arts fields is mostly a waste of resources.
5 comments:
That Op-Ed was a complete joke to anybody who's ever done any college teaching. Farley was spot-on.
It would have been more meaningful if he had used the example of the person who gained tenure 20+ yrs ago who is no longer teaching or engaged in productive/published research yet who still makes six figures. To take the example of the community college instructor, who makes the least and does the most work, is simply disingenuous.
This one belongs in the woodshed
I have nothing to add to Farley's rebuttal. People who think "12 hour load" = 12 hours work are not even worth taking seriously.
It's hard to generalize about this. At the state university I'm most familiar with, tenure was based almost wholly on research, so there's a definite temptation to concentrate on that to the detriment of teaching. Then once one had tenure, the incentive was salary increases (if there was money), which were based partly on class evaluations but more heavily on research. So even setting aside any tenured faculty who didn't work very hard at anything, the deck was stacked against teaching. I won't even go into the fact that research in some liberal arts fields is mostly a waste of resources.
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