I’m terribly sorry to bother you, since I know how busy you all are and shit, but I wonder if I could impose upon you to please make up your zarking minds: Do you value teaching or Don't you? Coz I hear you talk about enrolment. “Teaching is vitally important! The uni depends on those tuition dollars.” I understand. The politicians are only ponying up so much for the uni, so the only way to balance the budget is to put more bums in the seats. Not ideal, but I get it.
And I’m willing to do my bit, I really am. I can teach tolerably well. Given a class that actually wants to learn, I can usually manage to convey a few scraps of information over the course of a semester. They seem to like having me as a teacher - or at least they don’t seem to hate me. And it’s not like I object to doing it. Word is, teaching was once even considered an honourable profession! Imagine that! So why does it always feel like I’m just another piece of chopped liver the cat dragged in?
See, when I watch what you do, I get confused. All the highest paid faculty do no teaching. All the ones you fawn over and praise. All the ones making speeches and getting profiled in those glossy recruiting brochures? They don’t teach. They have shiny labs, with shiny grad students. I’m pretty sure their offices don’t leak when it rains. And I can’t really figure out the whole teaching release thing. I mean if teaching is so important, why is teaching release a reward for good behaviour? I thought teaching was good behaviour. But no, there’s Dr. Gazormniplatz, who phoned in his intro to hamster weaving lectures to write his big gerbil genomics grant. I sat in on his lectures. He couldn’t string together two sentences, but he told off colour jokes and gave good grades, so his evals were good. What do you do? You give him three years off from teaching. Then there’s professor Pinckelschmidtt. Those were some lovely advertisements you produced for our fine institution of higher ..er.. something. “Come and learn from this wonderful cutting edge scientist! He uses machines that go ‘ping’!” Does he teach? Don’t be ridiculous!
Well OK, I can research too if pressed. I’ve been known to make the odd novel finding in my field, publish an occasional musing. I even get the odd invitation to travel to far off lands to share my ideas with others. Mind you, I do have a handicap, I must admit. I have this nasty habit of wanting to do slow, pokey research and get to the bottom of things before I write them up. I know the idea is publish publish publish – and make as much of a splash as you can. But I tend to like big data sets with reasoned thorough analyses. It does tend to keep my bibliometrics low, but my peers seem to respect me for it, so I figure it’s a draw.
But it’s as if doing what you ask for is actually a handicap. I prepare my lectures to be engaging and relevant. I labour for hours devising interesting experiential exercises (now those, the students hate). I grade written answers instead of shipping bubblesheets off to the scantron machine. I give feedback. I stay abreast of the field outside of my specific research focus. It all takes time away from cranking out another book on the fossil history of the Cricetinae. Maybe I need more machines that go ‘ping’.
I just can’t get my head around why you would create so many incentives to avoid doing the thing you want people to do. I even asked my chair about why the non-teachers get the big bucks. He answered in some sort of zen koan – “Money is not an expression of value, grasshopper” he told me. Wait! – what?!? That’s the definition of money! Ya. See, if I’m not mistaken, the central organizing principle of a free market economy is that people are willing to pay more for the things they value more. But there’s an economics department across the quad, so you could go and ask them. Maybe you’re running Tuk U on some sort of highly sophisticated economic model to be paying the teachers so poorly, when you value them so highly. Is it reverse psychology? Perhaps it’s opposite day.
Or maybe you could just make up your zarking minds!
Rozencrantz and/or Guildenstern
Department of Hamster Husbandry
University of Tuktoyaktuk
Kinda common knowledge in the engr. field that how much you earn and how many promotions you get aren't related at all to how technically adept you are or how much nose to the grindstone you do. It's all about how much ass you kiss, how much business you bring in for the company, and/or how many presentations you can give in a week. More visibility = better.
ReplyDeleteWhenever a university administrator tells you a zen koan, it usually means, "I don't know, but I'm not willing to acknowledge that I don't know." It can also mean, "I'm lying to you," or, "I am deluded."
ReplyDeleteBeware particularly being told, "Your work is its own reward." A snappy comeback to this is for you to say, "So give me your paycheck."
For scandalously many faculty I know, it may be just as well they're not teaching much, since they treat teaching as something to be scraped off one's shoe. Let's hope the faculty you mention can keep the big bucks that the university enjoys rolling in. If for any reason they were required to do more teaching, they would do it horribly.
But then, I am coming to think more of the "sink or swim" method of teaching all the time. So few of my students who are hand-holding intensive seem to benefit much, or at all, from it. A definite benefit of being an active researcher on top of a full teaching load is that the chronic stress makes me far less tolerant of student snowflakiness.
As far as science goes, here's a bit from "Advice to the Young Astronomer," by Ed Nather:
"You don't have to follow the 'mainstream' of current astronomical research, and you shouldn't. If your primary goal is to learn how the universe really works, and not just to get your name in the newspaper, look where others are not exploring. Nature is so rich you are unlikely to look carefully at anything without learning something new, particularly in unexplored territory. New instruments are wonderful here. If you follow current fads in astronomy you'll just be wasting your time - the fad-followers will publish what they find and you can read about it, for free. If you have to rush to publish something, quick before you get scooped, you are doing the wrong research. Stop it, and do something nobody thinks is interesting. Trust me: it will be."
So yes, perhaps you do need more machines that go "PING!" You may find that the ones that tell you the most about the Universe are the ones you're not inclined to show to administrators first, because they're covered in duct tape since you made them yourself. They also may not be the most expensive ones, but trust me: all are expensive as hell. Never use your own money to pay for them, of course.
As far as university administrators making up their minds goes, forget it. As no less than Ian Gillan observed to a sound man, "You can't make everything louder than everything else."
DeleteWhen a university admin tells you a zen koan, it probably means all three!
DeleteI actually did participate in a big multi user grant to get a machine that goes "PING!" Looked great on my CV at tenure time, but it feels kinda fraudulent, since I don't think anyone ever got anything very useful out of it. It was just the trend of the day, we figured the application would be successful and the admins really wanted Tuk U to have a successful application in the competition. Awful lot of mostly taxpayer money just so I and a few others wouldn't be turned down for tenure.
Meanwhile, yes - I can do a fair bit of research on a shoestring. I have enough Scot in my ancestry that I can pinch a penny (sorry, nickle) until it begs for mercy. And I'm willing to be non-trendy. I find a fair bit of value in conducting a sober evaluation of the trendier ideas. It doesn't bring in big overhead, or industry partners, or do anything "comercializable" so my metrics suck but my peers respect my work.
And yes, there's often duct tape involved.
You had me at "machines that go 'ping!'"
ReplyDeleteThe only way we can get a course release in my "branch" of our uni system is to agree to take on admin work, which is usually more work that just teaching the course would be (for the same pay). The last time I did that, I had a year-long appointment (including work over the summer, outside the contract year) for a 1-semester release.
You mis-heard the adminstriviators:
ReplyDeleteThey don't value teaching.
They value talking about valuing teaching.
The latter, they do very much, and reward people mightily for. Not you: you're not talking about valuing teaching, you're just talking about teaching. In fact, talking about valuing teaching for more than three words (i.e. "I value teaching") requires it's own special training in saying things over and over again without sounding like it.
YES YES YES YES
ReplyDeleteThey don't value teaching when it's happening, they value 'teaching' as a means of getting bums on seats and as shorthand for excessive critical discussion of pedagogy by people who non-ironically give lectures on why you should never give a lecture.
Froderick: "Never use your own money to pay for them, of course." But it you can't get any money and you want to do the research to keep yourself a tiny scrap of sanity (and to teach the students that will benefit from being taught how real science actually works) then what do you do?
I pay for some of my own research, but I think that may be a bit different (and more possible) in the humanities than the sciences. I tend to take vacations/breaks at home, and use what travel money I have for conferences and research trips. But research trips (at least domestic ones) tend to be cheaper than machines that go "ping!"
DeleteOf course, I also buy my own (home) computers, and software, and will soon start paying the fees for a domain name or two and some hosting. Some of that my university provides on campus, but I want to work at home (and can, because the tools of my trade are relatively compact and safe). The domain names give me control over my own work, and make it easier to move on to another university should the opportunity ever present itself.
@Cassandra: I hope you're getting a tax write-off for all that.
Delete@Grumpy: I will confess that where I wrote, "Never," I perhaps should have written, "Avoid."
Still, never spend more than $100 of your own money on science. Furthermore, anything less than that, such as a roll of duct tape essential for keeping operational a very expensive machine that goes "PING!", really should come out of your department's petty cash budget.
I will confess that, all too often, I don't get fully reimbursed for petty cash. University administration all too easily forgets about it, even though they do know all about the machines that go "PING!", especially the most expensive machines that go "PING!" Admin can also be bad about making sure one gets reimbursed for all incidental expenses at conferences, too. Get, save, copy, and file the copies of all your receipts for everyting, nevertheless.
As introvert.prof observes below, some research can be done for not much money. This will depend highly on your field: I won't presume to tell you what you could do in yours. For mine, much astronomical data, especially from NASA spacecraft and from the U.S. national observatories, are in the public domain and can be downloaded from their web sites by anyone for free. Many of them have developed sophisticated user interfaces to help with this: an example is the National Virtual Observatory. I can do many kinds of astronomical research for next to nothing, if I publish in free journals and don't go to conferences. Of course, admin hates that, but it can fill out one's publications list on the application for a grant.
There may be small pots of money around, too. This will depend greatly on your university, and your situation at it. Might there be returned overhead on those big grants brought in by those heavy hitters who teach so badly? Even through the worst of the budget crunch, my university was still fairly good about faculty-sponsored student research awards, limited to perhaps $1000 and requiring the participation of a competent student, but it can help. Another source of small amounts of funding may be your professional society. Mine, the American Astronomical Society, has Small Research Grants, much of which are used to cover travel and lodging expenses when one gets telescope time at any of the U.S. national observatories. (The national observatories did away with travel funding for observers during the cuts of 1987. They may have thought that robotic and remote observing would become more common than they later proved to be, or they may just have been desperate to cut somewhere.)
Importantly also: all students doing research during lean times will need to work for academic credit only, at least for one semester, before I'll start to pay them from a grant, if I ever do so at all. That's not a bad policy in flush times, though. I've had too many flakes ask me to do astronomical research, and then immediately balk at the prospect of having to stay up past midnight. Funnily enough, I recall having no problem staying up until dawn when I was a student, particularly not when partying. I also make sure to tell them that the job prospects in astronomy and most other basic sciences are "stinky," but that's a separate issue.
DeleteAmen. I don't know whether Tuktoyaktuk, like my own fine institution, is an R2 trying to become an R1, but this phenomenon seems to be exacerbated in such situations. Or maybe it's just that the R2 is already acting like an R1?
ReplyDeleteIn my book, two other major signs of valuing teaching (other than paying teachers as well as researchers) would be (1) making sure that all teaching faculty (including non-TT ones) carry loads that allow them to give each student the amount of individual attention the class size implies(in other words, no teaching 4 or 5 or 6 small basic-skill-intensive sections at the same time; most professional associations have pretty good guidelines on this subject, which are widely honored in the breach), and (2) actively involving the great majority of teaching faculty working under average conditions (let's say the instructors for at least 85%-90% of the sections) in the committee work involved with designing, updating, and, where required,assessing, course requirements, curriculum, outcomes, etc.
In short, recognize teaching faculty as knowledge workers, and recognize that knowledge workers need time to reflect, individually and collectively, on what they're doing. Otherwise, the whole enterprise begins to feel like plucking factory-farmed chickens on an assembly line, and the results tend to be similar -- uniform, superficially acceptable, but not, in the end, very good (for the chicken, the plucker, or the eventual consumer).
Grumpy, you find something that doesn't take a lot of money to do. This is not easy, of course, and administrators don't value it because they don't get to siphon off a large proportion of your grant to pay for their landscaping.
ReplyDeleteBut every so often you see somebody publishing something that takes almost no money -- like the guy in N.C. who made a career out of studying the physics of vascular transport in plants.
I remember new hire orientation at my R1 a decade ago, when they burbled on and on about teaching. I politely raised my hand and said, "I'm so pleased to hear you value teaching so highly. That must mean it counts for a great deal in the promotion process, perhaps even as much as research. Am I right?"
ReplyDeleteOne dean began to jabber complete nonsense. The other cut her off and said, "No. It does not." At least he was honest. The motto where I work is that good teaching won't help you, but bad teaching can be used to hurt you.
RaoG, are you currently having fun listening to motions and debate about pensions?
ReplyDelete@Grumpy: I seem to remember that your field is either biogeography or ecology? Something involving Great Tits, I recall? I've long had a fondness for those, so might I suggest that you start a research program doing what an amateur naturalist does, only more systematically and better, well enough to get published in refereed (and very preferably free) journals? Novel mathematical, statistical, or graphical techniques can be as good as machines that go "PING!" here, and can cost a whole lot less.
ReplyDelete(Some of you may be wondering why I mention "free" journals. In many of the sciences, the authors are required to pay, in order to get their papers published, even after they've been accepted by the referees. Indeed, the journals won't even consider a paper for publication unless it's been accepted by the referee: it's much like the [supposedly nominal] inter-relationship between college admission standards and tuition. The journals often charge by the page, and these "page charges" can be hefty, $100-$150 per page, and more for color graphics. [One published journal page comes to about four manuscript pages, straight out of one's computer's printer.] Authors are expected to pay these "page charges" from research grants: they're often a major line item in the budget of any application for a research grant, and if a scientist fails to budget for them, the committee evaluating grant proposals will likely look askance at it. ["What, this applicant doesn't plan to publish the results?"] This means that reputable, refereed journals that support themselves in other ways, such as charging libraries high subscription rates or primarily electronic publication, are most welcome. In some fields, such as chemistry, the free journals are the more prestigious ones. In other fields, such as astronomy, the reverse is true, and of course deans who used to be chemists never understand this. There are still at least two first-tier, refereed, free journals in astronomy: if an astronomer without a grant can't get a paper past the referee in either, it may be time to improve the paper.)
Many amateur astronomers carry out fine research programs with public-domain data from spacecraft, not all of which belong to NASA (one has discovered over 100 comets falling into the Sun in images from the European Space Agency's SOHO solar observatory). But then, amateur astronomy has had a wonderful record of real discovery at least as far back as when William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781. The sky is open to anyone.
Again, a series of papers like this would be useful for filling out the publications list on a subsequent applicaton for a grant. Having a big blank there doesn't look good. Other people in your department may know where to apply for grants: if not, see what you can find at the next conference in your field. Good luck!