| IX. Change Faculty Reward Systems Research universities must commit themselves to the highest standards in teaching as well as research and create faculty reward structures that validate that commitment. In 1895, the first president of the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, asked each new faculty member to agree in writing that advancements in rank and salary would be governed chiefly by research productivity. His stipulation, novel in its time, would raise few eyebrows in most research universities a century later. They might claim otherwise, but research universities consider "success" and "research productivity" to be virtually synonymous terms. The typical department in a research university will assert that it does place a high value on effective teaching at the baccalaureate level. It will be able to cite faculty members among its ranks who take conspicuous pride in their reputations as successful teachers; it may be able to point to student evaluations that give consistently high ratings to many of its members. At the same time, however, discussions concerning tenure and promotion are likely to focus almost entirely on research or creative productivity. The department head when making salary recommendations may look almost exclusively at the grants or publication record. The junior faculty member who seems to give disproportionate time and attention to freshman/sophomore courses may well be counseled toward more "productive" redirection; if interest is shown in experimental or interdisciplinary courses at the baccalaureate level, movement toward tenure or promotion may be stalled. The "needs of the department" will be perceived as not being met. What happens within the department is echoed and reinforced among the established disciplines on a national scale. The professional associations do not as a rule see their responsibilities as embracing the teaching function, even though it is inspired teaching that attracts young minds and pulls new recruits into the disciplines. The national conferences of the disciplines rarely offer sessions dealing with teaching effectiveness, and when they do so, those sessions are likely to be poorly attended. Synergy of Teaching and Research The university's essential and irreplaceable function has always been the exploration of knowledge. This report insists that the exploration must go on through what has been considered the "teaching" function as well as the traditional "research" function. The reward structures in the modern research university need to reflect the synergy of teaching and research--and the essential reality of university life: that baccalaureate students are the university's economic life blood and are increasingly self-aware. The kind of collaborative exploration that is urged here cannot be carried on in lecture sessions with hundreds of students. Budgetary constraints and the nature of survey courses may mean that some such courses continue; still, the teaching schedule of each faculty member needs to provide for small-group situations for baccalaureate students and a context that places them in joint exploration. Faculty course loads must also allow for research mentoring as part of normal operations rather than as poorly-compensated overloads. Universities rightly assume that whoever appears in front of their classrooms can command the material that should be conveyed. Rare individuals can also captivate and stimulate student audiences, large and small, with their dynamic classroom presentations. Since it is likely that most universities will need to retain some large classes, those individuals capable of striking success in the classroom should be suitably rewarded. Recognition as distinguished teacher-scholars should include added remuneration. Evaluating Teaching In calculating academic rewards, it has been painfully difficult to evaluate the quality of research as separated from its mass. Nevertheless, departments and deans find that for passing judgment on peers, research productivity is a much more manageable criterion than teaching effectiveness. Faculty gossip, student evaluations, and alumni testimonials have all been notoriously weak reeds, and reliable self-evaluation is all but impossible. The publication of Scholarship Assessed, begun by Dr. Boyer before his death and published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, pursues the issues of evaluating research. Recently the National Research Council has initiated a major study on how to evaluate science and mathematics teaching. But at this point promotion and tenure committees still find teaching effectiveness difficult to measure. Publication is at least a perceptible tool; the relative ease of its use has reinforced the reliance on it for tenure and promotion decisions. Evaluating good teaching will always be difficult, but effective integration of research and teaching should be observable, as should the development of interdisciplinary approaches to learning. Departments and deans must be pressed to give significant rewards for evidence of integrated teaching and research and for the imagination and effort required by interdisciplinary courses and programs. When publication is evaluated, attention should be paid to the pedagogical quality of the work as well as to its contribution to scholarship. It has been emphasized here that a university is a community of learners. Some of them are more experienced than others; some are far along the way toward academic maturity, and some are not. Still, all are committed to the exploration of defined areas of knowledge, and in the university as envisioned here, they work together. Faculty members, graduate students, baccalaureate students all bring their particular combinations of energy, imagination, experience, and accumulated knowledge to bear. The divisions that have been created between them are artificial and counter-productive and must be bridged for effective collaborations to occur. All members of an academic team can share in the efforts and the rewards. Recommendations:
| SIGNS OF CHANGE University Case Study Eberly Center University Carnegie-Mellon University The Eberly Center at Carnegie-Mellon University, founded in 1982, conducts programs to provide faculty and teaching assistants with an understanding of the learning process and varied teaching strategies, and offers opportunities for feedback on course design and implementation. Programs emphasize theory, modeling, practice, and feedback and draw on cognitive science research; for example, cross-disciplinary studies of expert-novice differences help faculty understand the difficulties that students new to a subject might have in setting up problems, transferring knowledge to new settings, and interpreting complex patterns. SIGNS OF CHANGE University Case Study Redefining Scholarship University Syracuse University Syracuse University has undertaken a program to redress a perceived overemphasis on research at the expense of teaching. The program has included conferences to enlist administrative support for change and a redefinition of "research and scholarship" by each division to include "the scholarship of teaching." A chancellor's fund was established to support the necessary changes, and a faculty grant program was created to reward teaching excellence and to provide funds for innovations. |