To be granted tenure, professors are expected by their universities to have demonstrated excellence in either research or teaching, and to have performed satisfactorily in the other. Excellent work, we have always taken it, is among the best 5 percent, one in twenty.
Concerning the demonstration of excellence in research, James L. Davis, engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin, says: “The key to tenure is, Does the individual have a unique contribution to his or her field, whatever that may be, and is that contribution recognized by his or her peers?”
Concerning the demonstration of excellence in teaching, Caitilyn Allen, plant pathology professor at Wisconsin, says that the individual should be “someone who changes the way people think” in his or her field.
Are these sensible criteria? One way to answer this is to consider tenured professors that you admire, and judge whether or not they meet one of the criteria and are satisfactory on the other.
We wonder how John Kenneth Galbraith stacked up. He excelled on a third criterion: contributing to the public’s knowledge of economists and economics, especially exposing the wrongness of certain economic tenets.
By and large, the universities today give few “tenure points” to educating the public. They prefer professors to write for professors.
Even if the criteria are sensible, there remains the hard problem of creating measures of effectiveness for them that accurately reflect their intent, allowing them to be measured. Like sensible criteria for education children, for managing ecosystems, or for telling whether a war is being won or lost, in the end there has to be an objective, believable way to evaluate performance. And the evaluators must not fudge.
The above quotations are from “Teaching Your Way to Tenure,” September 1, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education, pg. A18. The article also contains a number of interesting ideas on measuring excellence in teaching.
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For a biography of John Kenneth Galbraith, click here.
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