How Important Is Undergraduate Teaching In Public R1 Universities? How Important Should It Be?

Our guest author today is Ian Robinson, Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and in the Residential College's interdisciplinary Social Theory and Practice program at the University of Michigan.

I ended my previous post by arguing that (1) if teaching is at least as valuable as research, and (2) nontenure-track (NTT) faculty teach at least as well as tenure-track (TT) faculty, then the very large pay disparities between the two classes of faculty that characterize American universities today violate a basic principle of workplace fairness: equal pay for equal work. When conditions (1) and (2) are met, then, all an institution can do to defend current practice is plead poverty: we can’t afford to do what we ourselves must acknowledge to be “the right thing."

But what about places like the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where I work? Is condition (1) met in what are sometimes called “R1” universities like mine? If not, maybe big pay disparities are warranted by the fact that, in such universities, research is a much higher institutional priority than undergraduate teaching. If teaching is a low enough priority, current pay inequalities could be justified by the fact that NTT faculty are not paid to do research and publishing – even though many of them do it – and, conversely, that most TT faculty pay is for their research and publishing, rather than their teaching.

Are Nontenure-Track Faculty Worse Teachers? The Short Answer Is No.

Our guest author today is Ian Robinson, Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and in the Residential College's interdisciplinary Social Theory and Practice program at the University of Michigan.

Critics of higher education’s growing reliance on nontenure-track (NTT) faculty for undergraduate teaching routinely assert that NTT faculty are inferior teachers, and, therefore, that the quality of undergraduate education is deteriorating. This is true even of critics such as Marc Bousquet, the author of How the University Works (2008), who see themselves as friends of exploited NTT faculty and supporters of efforts to organize them into unions.

I think that these critics are wrong, and that their error has two important negative consequences: first, it devalues the work that NTT faculty do; and second, it impedes our understanding of one of the major successes of the “neoliberal” model - that it has been able to introduce a two-tiered faculty system in which many newer faculty are paid half or less of what the top tier is paid per class, without dramatic decline in the quality of undergraduate education that would de-legitimize the two-track system.

To understand how this has been possible – and where the critics go wrong – we need to start by asking: What determines teaching quality? I would suggest that there are five major determinants:

Staff Matters: Social Resilience In Schools

In the world of education, particularly in the United States, educational fads, policy agendas, and funding priorities tend to change rapidly. The attention of education research fluctuates accordingly. And, as David Cohen persuasively argues in Teaching and Its Predicaments, the nation has little coherent educational infrastructure to fall back upon. As a result of all this, teachers’ work is almost always surrounded by important levels of uncertainty (e.g., lack of a common curricula) and variation. In such a context, it is no surprise that collaboration and collegiality figure prominently in teachers’ world (and work) views.

After all, difficulties can be dealt with more effectively when/if individuals are situated in supportive and close-knit social networks from which to draw strength and resources. In other words, in the absence of other forms of stability, the ability of a group – a group of teachers in this case – to work together becomes indispensable to cope with challenges and change.

The idea that teachers’ jobs are surrounded by uncertainty made me of think problems often encountered in the field of security. In this sector, because threats are increasingly complex and unpredictable, much of the focus has shifted away from heightened protection and toward increased resilience. Resilience is often understood as the ability of communities to survive and thrive after disasters or emergencies.