Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

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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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