Sometimes people ask me: “what would I change in higher education, if I could”? My answer varies, but right now my fondest wish is for everyone to just cut the BS around the teaching/research balance.
Whenever a debate on teaching and research starts, there’s always people who either intimate how “unfortunate” it is that we have to talk about trade-offs, or people who claim that any deviation from the current trade-off means the death of the academic. But this is nonsense. There are only twenty-four hours in a day; trade-offs between teaching and research are always being made. The issue is not teaching v. research, but where the balance is. Twenty-five years ago, it was perfectly normal for professors to teach five courses a year. Now, even at mid-ranking comprehensives, the idea of 3/2 is enough to cause paroxysms. Just because it’s a good idea for professors to combine research and teaching doesn’t mean that any specific combination of research and teaching is right.
Even if we take it as read that, “engagement with research” makes you a better teacher (something which is much less empirically established than many assume), it’s clearly not equally the case in all disciplines. Researchers in some disciplines – Physics and Math come to mind – are so far removed from the understanding of your average undergraduate that it’s probably a waste of everyone’s time to put them together in a classroom. Conversely, language courses are almost never taught by people engaging in research on language acquisition, because it’s unnecessary. Indeed, first and second year courses in many disciplines probably don’t even need researchers teaching them – a fact institutions acknowledge every day because they keep handing them to non-tenure track faculty.
Over the past 25 years, teaching norms at large universities went from five courses per year to four, to even three; that is, full-time teaching time went down by 20-40%. The academy did this without ever engaging the public about whether that was the right way to spend public and student dollars. It’s therefore worth debating, in light of current fiscal pressures, whether the current (historically unprecedented) trade-off between research and teaching is the right one. We once had good research universities with many professors teaching five courses a year; there’s no reason we couldn’t do so again. Shutting discussions down – as CAUT Executive Director, Jim Turk, recently did – by equating any change in the balance as an attempt to turn universities into high school isn’t just unhelpful and obnoxious: it’s BS.
And so I say: no more BS. Let’s all be grownups and talk reasonably about what balance makes sense, not just for professors, but for students and the public as well.
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…CAUT needs to change its attitude or change its name!!
A lot of faculty members also have only two courses per year. You might also note that teaching is a lot more difficult than it was 25 years ago since a lot more is expected of faculty now.
Thanks for the post. While you have a point it is about balance, what I disagree with most is: “Indeed, first and second year courses in many disciplines probably don’t even need researchers teaching them – a fact institutions acknowledge every day because they keep handing them to non-tenure track faculty.”
This is wrong on two counts. First, it depends a bit on the subject, but for the most part I’d disagree. Media studies, for example, has changed and is changing drastically, that a good lecturer will adapt to these changes by being on the ground and uncovering new research, which in turn makes the first and second year courses much more relevant. This could be said for many other subjects and disciplines. It also usually leads to more inspiring academics – someone presenting their ‘cutting edge’ research is likely to inspire more than someone who has been giving the same lecture for 10 years. But of course as you suggest, this depends largely on the subject and the individual lecturer.
The second aspect which is wrong here is the suggestion that this is why institutions hand them to non-tenure track faculty. In any university I’ve worked at, non-tenure track faculty occurs for the sole purpose of saving money. The casualisation of academic workforce is purely economic rationalism, and any suggestion these moves are made for the purpose of better pedagogy is, in my opinion, blatantly incorrect.
With respect, I think you’re missing a key element when you bring up the gulf between research and the level of understanding of the average undergraduate. The point is not necessarily to teach the undergraduate about the research, but rather for the teacher to have a detailed, nuanced understanding of the subject. Serious university-level teaching demands expertise, and critical thought about the subject.
This isn’t something you can get, for example, by reading textbooks. For one thing, even when the subject matter is well established, textbooks often contain gaps, errors and misconceptions — and these may be repeated by one author after another. For another, textbooks give the “textbook treatment” — they often don’t convey very well how the material fits into the bigger picture and how it needs to be adapted to suit more complex contexts. They also tend to focus on the conventional wisdom of the field, based on a range of unstated and often unexamined assumptions.
I would say that the examples that you cite — math and physics — are in fact good examples of fields where it’s particularly important for teachers to have a sophisticated understanding of the material. Working at the frontier of the subject by doing research is an excellent means of developing the necessary appreciation.
Personally, I think that that is the primary reason why university instructors should be engaged in research. The current pressure to produce exaggerated quantities of research and to work on “practical applications” is where the real “BS” comes in. By its very nature, most research will never amount to a hill of beans, and most “applied” research never really does get applied. But the activity of research is an excellent vehicle for teaching graduate students, and it dispels misconceptions, naivete and conventional wisdom in teachers.
One thing that doesn’t get raised in this debate is how research has changed over that time, too. These days it is defined largely by outputs (publications) and funding acquired. None of the research work counts unless there is a lot of both. Expectation for quantity of output has increased in almost all disciplines which makes it even harder to talk about how research/scholarship might inform teaching. Scholarship that informs teaching is largely considered “teaching prep” and dismissed as not “productive”. And the kinds of outputs that might require percolation or come from seeing interesting connections between things one has worked on over a long period of time also suffer in this model.
The connections between teaching and research might even be more fruitful when considering wider impacts. We know that research use by non-academics is related to relationships with the research producers. Building connections over time through teaching, co-op placements, invited lectures by practitioners/users, and the sorts of discussions which might not immediately seem to lead to those final products that are so valued …
Hi Jo.
I think that’s bang on.