Reply to What’s the educational difference between a highly-rated college and a good one?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Good luck at Hopkins (grad school anyway). I knew one person there who would barely make time for her doctoral thesis advisee.

Some faculty members at big research universities are selfish, desperate for tenure, do NOT like teaching and are under all sorts of pressures to do other things (like get grants, publish, etc).[/quote]

N=1[/quote]

Are you honestly debating the PP's last statement?

[/quote]

It’s meaningless — as a statement re JHU specifically or R1s generally and it offers no basis of comparison. Some (blanks) at (blank) are selfish, desperate, do not like their jobs, and are under pressure to spend their time doing other things is true of many jobs/workplaces. And in the context of this thread, it’s not as if junior faculty at SLACs aren’t also under pressure to publish and get grants. [/quote]

The point is that the structure and incentives at SLACs are set up to reward excellent teaching. If you get a great education at a large research university, that's great, but that's not by design. Yes, junior faculty at SLACs, particularly the top ones, are under pressure to publish, but they also receive things like third year sabbaticals and reduced administrative responsibilities to balance teaching with research. At other SLACs, junior faculty have reduced (but not non-existent) publication requirements. At a typical research university, in order to earn tenure a professor. in my field would be required i to publish a book at a university press, and publish six peer-reviewed articles. At a SLAC, there may very well not be a book requirement, or a book would be used in place of six articles because the expectation is that you'd spend a lot of time teaching and mentoring students. That is NOT the case at research universities. You can get tenure as a terrible, terrible teacher if you publish enough. But if you are an amazing teacher who doesn't publish enough, you will not only not receive tenure, but you will be forced to leave the university. That is the harsh reality of teaching and publishing at higher education institutions.[/quote]

SLACs may be structured to purge really bad/unpopular teachers (where R1s will promote some excellent researchers who are bad/unpopular teachers), but it’s hard to to argue that the structure/incentives reward “excellent” teaching in a contexts where (a) there’s been no attempt to teach profs to teach and (b) oversight is nonexistent and there are no standards wrt what constitutes good teaching. To the extent that teaching is evaluated, it’s predominantly through enrollments and student feedback. So happy (or not unhappy) customers in real time — a version of popularity. And there are structural factors that interfere with good teaching — small faculty = repetitious courseload, including courses outside your area of expertise and combination of few colleagues and no grad students = fewer opportunities and incentives to keep learning/exploring/stretch yourself wrt developments in your field. This also means undergrads often see one approach to a subject vs have access to many.

I’m not saying SLACs are inherently worse than R1s from an educational perspective — but there are pros and cons of each model of undergraduate education and, ultimately, they are all staffed primarily by profs who were educated/socialized in R1s. There aren’t two separate job (or training) tracks and faculty often move between different types of schools over the course of their careers, usually based on factors like location, prestige, and offer (salary/perks/workload). Since tenure is uncertain, junior faculty can’t afford to ignore the publish or perish imperatives of the field/industry as a whole.  And, post-tenure, the “incentives” argument gets iffy.  [/quote]

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