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Comment by nraynaud | Hacker News Reader

I very often want to call BS on the research at universities, there is absolutely no link between having new insight and being a good explainer. I would gladly create teaching places without any research like there exist research labs that do absolutely no teaching. And then judge the teachers exclusively in their ability to get the students to improve their skills. No grants proposal, no publish or perish, no negotiation over authorship order, no peer review game, only how to explain stuff, how students learn, what's the best way to convey a concept.

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My understanding (from thousands of miles away) was that there are a lot of liberal arts colleges in the States that do little or no research. Whether this is the same in any other countries I do not know.

I'm a physics professor at a liberal arts college, and yes, we do very much value teaching here. Research is important, too, as a way for faculty to remain engaged with their disciplines. But we actively look for ways to get undergraduates involved in our research, which makes it a teaching tool, too (a bit of an apprenticeship model). I like to think that our values lead to more reliably good educational outcomes at the undergraduate level than larger universities tend to manage (but it's hard to even figure out what to measure to verify that).

(I do know, though, that I saw two fantastic teachers in my graduate department get denied tenure while I was there because (as we all gathered) their stellar research records might possibly have been even better if they'd spent less time on teaching.)

I went to a large and prestigious state university and did not feel like I got a personalized education at all. My wife went to a small liberal arts school (got a BS Biology) and almost never had more than 15 people in her classes. She knew all her professors well, was engaged, and learned so much more than I did. So what if the Dalai Lama visited my school and not hers, or that my D1 athletic teams were nationally ranked. She got a better education that better positioned her to succeed professionally.

I see a parallel in the advertising agency world. The ad agency has an interest in "winning awards" with their work to increase their prestige in the industry and win more clients. Winning awards is about innovation or art, and not tied to views, shares, or sales.

While most ads you see on TV are about increasing sales, some ads are more about being innovative and catching the attention of other industry insiders to win an award.

I see university research like that. The research part is about increasing the prestige of the university. If they can attract a big name like Dan Ariely with an offer to fund research (and teach one class per term), they can attract press, students, and prestige within their industry.

If you see teaching as a kind of persuasion, a prof with no ability to persuade will not be bringing in the grant money, and no grant money means no work, no work means no publish, and publish or perish means you get no grad students, no possible administrator or chair post, no cool presentations leading to awards, no job offers from a better (higher paid) school... its just not looking good.

Another way to look at it is you get lots of prestige by leading the field, and you lead the field by teaching people at conference presentations. Admittedly the people being taught are fellow academics not freshmen, but still...

Finally you could survive in a tenured job with no motivation to be leaders, but given the overproduction of PHDs ranges from merely 10x to as much as 1000x as many as necessary in some liberal arts, the odds of a slacker being hired when only the top 1% can get a tenure track prof job are extremely low, so there is that selection bias against slackers indicating very few profs will be slackers.

I think you're trying to say that good researchers will tend to be good teachers. In my experience, there is very little correlation between research output and undergraduate teaching quality. (My experience being grad school at two different universities.) You are correct that tenure-track professors will not be "slackers". They will, in fact, work themselves silly. But they are primarily evaluated on their research at research universities, not their undergraduate teaching. They tend to put their energies into what they are evaluated on.

Also keep in mind that teaching and classroom management is a skill, one which is rarely taught to young professors. I had a stark realization during my second year of grad school, when we were interviewing a faculty candidate coming straight from grad school: he was interviewing for a professor position, and he did not have significantly more teaching experience than I did.

I'm surprised that you seem to think that "slacker"/"non-slacker" is an intrinsic immutable property of a person rather than a situational response to incentives. I think most critics of tenure would argue that granting life long job security can and does cause "non-slackers" to adopt "slacker" behavior since they no longer have to compete for their job. The fact that someone worked hard to get tenure does not imply that they will continue to be productive when they have no competition.

I agree with the original point. In my experience, there's such a strong selection process in who even tries to get tenure that most people simply can't turn off their drive because its so fundamentally a part of them. Do they change the shape of their efforts? Sure. They might stop trying to go for many small publications and go for a longer view, try a new subfield, etc. But the base level of effort never really diminishes.

Now of course this is not for all universities but I think it applies to almost any R1 university, top teaching college, etc. Its not competition for their job that drives them, its just competition against their self-image, competition against peers for prestige, etc.

It should also be noted that tenure does not guarantee funding. A tenured faculty member who adopts "slacker" behavior will likely see their lab/group eviscerated, more "service" obligations heaped on them, and their job progressively becoming less fun.

Additionally, "tenured"/"non-tenured" is not a single binary switch in terms of prestige. Even with tenure there's things to be striving for.

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