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The most frustrating point in the article is the footnote: https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-explained-or-what-on-earth-is-an-adjunct/#ea

The most frustrating point in the article is the footnote: https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-explained-or-what-on-earth-is-an-adjunct/#easy-footnote-bottom-8-18391 https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-exp... If you don’t get into the right undergraduate program, you are likely doomed to never become a tenured professor since the whole system is stacked against you, no matter how good you are at teaching. He also makes a good point about tenure being the only way to influence a department and introduce new courses, etc., which just seems terribly unfair. A great teacher should be treated at the same level of prestige as a great researcher. Make influence merit based based on contribution to the university on its most important mission: teaching students. Don’t reward mediocre assistant professors with lifetime appointments. The part about professional managers running institutions now resonated. Imagine if the tech leadership at companies was a bunch MBA’s with no experience in the field.

seanc 4y ago
Honestly I think tech leadership is the exception, not the rule. I think in health care, education, manufacturing, retail... All those sectors, leadership has many MBA's who never got their hands dirty.
Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
> A great teacher should be treated at the same level of prestige as a great researcher. Make influence merit based based on contribution to the university on its most important mission: teaching students. The problem is that while research quality can be measured to a certain extent (in a flawed way that brings problems, like all the publish-or-perish culture, but it can be done); measuring teaching quality, even crudely, is an unsolved problem. If you measure by academic grades or pass/fail rates, you are just incentivizing easy exams and easy courses, typically not the best for learning. If you ask students, they will also be biased by the difficulty of the course, apart from other possible biases (gender, etc.). If you measure student employability, your metrics will be more correlated to discipline than to actual teaching quality, and you can't rate individual teachers/courses that way anyway. If you count "achievements" like acknowledging teachers for taking training courses, etc., people will just do that to improve their metrics without necessarily improving teaching quality. There just doesn't seem to be a good solution. I am a professor in a metrics-obsessed academic system and to be honest, research metrics are gamed by some but at least if you're good you're going to be fine. Teaching metrics are pure noise, and I say this as someone who hasn't had any problem with them (in fact I've reached full professorship).
- ec109685 4y ago
  Obviously this author has their biases, but shouldn’t a hiring / promotion committee be able to cut through this and find “the best teachers” for their students, and incorporate these factors you’ve outlined. Similarly in the corporate world some companies have much better developers than others even though there isn’t a perfect way of evaluating a developer, especially at the more senior level.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  You can measure the real world success of the students, but this would only be useful several decades later.
BeetleB 4y ago
He does qualify it with "humanities". In my experience, this is not true in engineering. I went to a low ranked undergrad and got into a top 3 ranked school for grad (with no research). As did many of my peers.

seanc 4y ago

Honestly I think tech leadership is the exception, not the rule. I think in health care, education, manufacturing, retail... All those sectors, leadership has many MBA's who never got their hands dirty.

Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago

> A great teacher should be treated at the same level of prestige as a great researcher. Make influence merit based based on contribution to the university on its most important mission: teaching students. The problem is that while research quality can be measured to a certain extent (in a flawed way that brings problems, like all the publish-or-perish culture, but it can be done); measuring teaching quality, even crudely, is an unsolved problem. If you measure by academic grades or pass/fail rates, you are just incentivizing easy exams and easy courses, typically not the best for learning. If you ask students, they will also be biased by the difficulty of the course, apart from other possible biases (gender, etc.). If you measure student employability, your metrics will be more correlated to discipline than to actual teaching quality, and you can't rate individual teachers/courses that way anyway. If you count "achievements" like acknowledging teachers for taking training courses, etc., people will just do that to improve their metrics without necessarily improving teaching quality. There just doesn't seem to be a good solution. I am a professor in a metrics-obsessed academic system and to be honest, research metrics are gamed by some but at least if you're good you're going to be fine. Teaching metrics are pure noise, and I say this as someone who hasn't had any problem with them (in fact I've reached full professorship).

ec109685 4y ago
Obviously this author has their biases, but shouldn’t a hiring / promotion committee be able to cut through this and find “the best teachers” for their students, and incorporate these factors you’ve outlined. Similarly in the corporate world some companies have much better developers than others even though there isn’t a perfect way of evaluating a developer, especially at the more senior level.
MichaelZuo 4y ago
You can measure the real world success of the students, but this would only be useful several decades later.

BeetleB 4y ago

He does qualify it with "humanities". In my experience, this is not true in engineering. I went to a low ranked undergrad and got into a top 3 ranked school for grad (with no research). As did many of my peers.