IHE: "All College Professors Should Be Scholars"

[Ruralguy]

I really don't want to get into an argument about changing the mission or teaching load of R1s. I'll stick to my guns that not every prof at a SLAC that isn't elite needs to be an active scholar, though I noted before how it can help.

I'm not really familiar with the term DBER, but I have temporarily (errr...maybe not...I don't have much more than a decade!) switched focus from traditional scholarship (more or less similar to R1 stuff with a few ticks down on the grants) to writing popular consumption books and articles for physics education related journals. I talk about techniques. I can't really test their effectiveness at a tiny school, plus some of these journals explicitly state that they no longer publish stats of education related articles! So, similar to what Eigen said about J. Chem Ed.. However, my school tends to accept these, though there are always detractors stating how it isn't real stuff. Frankly, I think my developed techniques add more to the field than most of my "real" work put together!

Anyway, to each his or her own, and to each school, it's own mission. But it's probably dumb to overdo research at a 4-3 load school , especially if you hate doing it and it's so incremental that it might be incrementally subtracting from the field rather than adding to it. Better for my colleagues like that to do DBER ish stuff, or nothing....just focus on getting it right with the students. I don't just mean teaching a fun intro section...I mean teaching advanced techniques accurately and effectively and getting students involved in research projects whether they lead to publication or not. As I said before, you don't need to give such people a medal unless they are exemplary , just let them do their jobs well without forcing them to push put crappy papers.

[Ruralguy]

By the way, the teachers in my grad program were excellent. My undergrad teachers,especially several in physics,were worse. Both were R1s. Either you care or you don't. Or the program cares or doesn't. I think virtually all were excellent researchers, so that was basically irrelevant to the class room teaching, though one or two were good
at bringing in real research methods to the class.

[fizzycist]

What I don't get is why every prof at a research active place needs to be great at both teaching and research. As a dept we need to collectively do good at both, but why can't some faculty specialize in one over the other?

I mean that always ends up happening in practice but there is always this annoying pressure to pretend that each individual loves both equally.

As a mediocre lecturer, I try to avoid teaching large traditional lecture classes that I am not good at. And as an above average researcher I make sure to take on as many students into my labs as possible including the ones who lack preparation. And I expect the great lecturers to take on a larger role in the big undergrad classes and not kill themselves writing grant proposals all the time. (And yes I definitely think we should value and cherish these faculty)

What is wrong with that?

[eigen]

What I don't get is why every prof at a research active place needs to be great at both teaching and research. As a dept we need to collectively do good at both, but why can't some faculty specialize in one over the other?

I mean that always ends up happening in practice but there is always this annoying pressure to pretend that each individual loves both equally.

As a mediocre lecturer, I try to avoid teaching large traditional lecture classes that I am not good at. And as an above average researcher I make sure to take on as many students into my labs as possible including the ones who lack preparation. And I expect the great lecturers to take on a larger role in the big undergrad classes and not kill themselves writing grant proposals all the time. (And yes I definitely think we should value and cherish these faculty)

What is wrong with that?

Honestly, from a financial standpoint, I have a more general issue with the money that is being brought in from tuition (usually on the backs of people paid sub-par wages) being used to subsidize research.

If we wanted to move to having more "soft-money" research positions that are common at medical schools, I'd be all for it. If you are a good enough researcher to bring in funds from research to cover your salary, that's great! But cynically, what I've seen, is that many faculty who are mostly researchers are paid more than the people who are predominately teachers, but from funds brought in by lecturers, adjuncts, and graduate TAs.

I also think we would benefit from having more research-centric places that were not directly tied to undergraduate institutions (ala Scripps, as I mentioned above) rather than having monolithic universities that try to do everything well.

I'm not saying this is you (you seem to value your teaching colleagues), but generally in US higher education teaching faculty are paid less and less valued by the institution than research faculty, despite being responsible for keeping most of it going. I also see a lot of (broad) mission creep from being focused on training and education to being focused on producing research, and worry that higher education and our view of professors as scholars is getting in the way of a view of professors as educators.

[onthefringe]

As a mediocre lecturer, I try to avoid teaching large traditional lecture classes that I am not good at. And as an above average researcher I make sure to take on as many students into my labs as possible including the ones who lack preparation. And I expect the great lecturers to take on a larger role in the big undergrad classes and not kill themselves writing grant proposals all the time. (And yes I definitely think we should value and cherish these faculty)

What is wrong with that?

This is NOT aimed at you.

But where I am, what it means is that some faculty tend to get to teach mostly upper level and grad classes in their specialty because they are "bad" at teaching and those same faculty also frequently are assigned minimal and unimportant service because they are not good at that either. The people who care enough to get good at teaching (which, I might add is a learnable skill) end up doing more time consuming teaching and service which leads to less time to focus on research and (predictably) less success in that arena.

I don't think the general idea that having some faculty who are focused on research and others more focused on teaching isn't an efficient way for the department to excel at both, but it needs to be set up that way at hiring and with comparable salaries and paths to promotion for both groups, not a stealth teaching and service tax on the faculty who care enough to devote time to the less well rewarded aspects of their jobs.

[Ruralguy]

I agree with all of this, OnTheFringe. I especially despise service shirkers...or worse, the people who use service to serve their hobby horse rather than the institution.

[fizzycist]

What I don't get is why every prof at a research active place needs to be great at both teaching and research. As a dept we need to collectively do good at both, but why can't some faculty specialize in one over the other?

I mean that always ends up happening in practice but there is always this annoying pressure to pretend that each individual loves both equally.

As a mediocre lecturer, I try to avoid teaching large traditional lecture classes that I am not good at. And as an above average researcher I make sure to take on as many students into my labs as possible including the ones who lack preparation. And I expect the great lecturers to take on a larger role in the big undergrad classes and not kill themselves writing grant proposals all the time. (And yes I definitely think we should value and cherish these faculty)

What is wrong with that?

Honestly, from a financial standpoint, I have a more general issue with the money that is being brought in from tuition (usually on the backs of people paid sub-par wages) being used to subsidize research.

If we wanted to move to having more "soft-money" research positions that are common at medical schools, I'd be all for it. If you are a good enough researcher to bring in funds from research to cover your salary, that's great! But cynically, what I've seen, is that many faculty who are mostly researchers are paid more than the people who are predominately teachers, but from funds brought in by lecturers, adjuncts, and graduate TAs.

I also think we would benefit from having more research-centric places that were not directly tied to undergraduate institutions (ala Scripps, as I mentioned above) rather than having monolithic universities that try to do everything well.

I'm not saying this is you (you seem to value your teaching colleagues), but generally in US higher education teaching faculty are paid less and less valued by the institution than research faculty, despite being responsible for keeping most of it going. I also see a lot of (broad) mission creep from being focused on training and education to being focused on producing research, and worry that higher education and our view of professors as scholars is getting in the way of a view of professors as educators.

Well I agree with everything you wrote except I'm not sure about the initial premise that tuition always subsidizes research active faculty.

At risk of naively overgeneralizing uni budgets, but here goes: If a research active faculty brings in ~$1M/yr in external funding on research, of which ~$300k/yr is overhead, then the money is there to cover their salary and lab costs. Obviously the salary is not directly paid from the overhead pool, but it goes back into the Uni budget one way or another.

It may be the case that a great instructor can pull in $1M/yr more than a mediocre one in tuition for a department. If so, they should definitely be compensated (I would argue they should definitely be compensated regardless of extra tuition dollars, but you started this;). The problem is that the extra money may come at the expense of a different department.

If overnight we populated all intro classes across all depts with great instructors, how many additional tuition dollars would we bring to the university?  At the non-elite public R1 I work at, I'd guess you could expect on the order of $10M/yr at the start. Maybe after a while reputation effects would bring more students from out of state, but this is a long haul for a typical admin. If we instead replaced overnight all of our research active faculty with those at an elite R1, our research budget would go up by order $100M/yr overnight. Maybe that would eventually fall years later as the faculty had trouble renewing all their grants at the lower ranked place, but it's complicated.

But whatever, I'm sure these kind of budget debates have been exhausted with much greater sophistication on these fora. i generally agree that great teachers should be compensated and valued more than they currently are.

[Ruralguy]

The primary flaw in the argument is that it only holds for R1s in the sciences.
Its increasing less applicable as you go to other fields, but also as you go down the food chain (and a number of those lower down places have significant research demands for tenure and promotion). 

[eigen]

What I don't get is why every prof at a research active place needs to be great at both teaching and research. As a dept we need to collectively do good at both, but why can't some faculty specialize in one over the other?

I mean that always ends up happening in practice but there is always this annoying pressure to pretend that each individual loves both equally.

As a mediocre lecturer, I try to avoid teaching large traditional lecture classes that I am not good at. And as an above average researcher I make sure to take on as many students into my labs as possible including the ones who lack preparation. And I expect the great lecturers to take on a larger role in the big undergrad classes and not kill themselves writing grant proposals all the time. (And yes I definitely think we should value and cherish these faculty)

What is wrong with that?

Honestly, from a financial standpoint, I have a more general issue with the money that is being brought in from tuition (usually on the backs of people paid sub-par wages) being used to subsidize research.

If we wanted to move to having more "soft-money" research positions that are common at medical schools, I'd be all for it. If you are a good enough researcher to bring in funds from research to cover your salary, that's great! But cynically, what I've seen, is that many faculty who are mostly researchers are paid more than the people who are predominately teachers, but from funds brought in by lecturers, adjuncts, and graduate TAs.

I also think we would benefit from having more research-centric places that were not directly tied to undergraduate institutions (ala Scripps, as I mentioned above) rather than having monolithic universities that try to do everything well.

I'm not saying this is you (you seem to value your teaching colleagues), but generally in US higher education teaching faculty are paid less and less valued by the institution than research faculty, despite being responsible for keeping most of it going. I also see a lot of (broad) mission creep from being focused on training and education to being focused on producing research, and worry that higher education and our view of professors as scholars is getting in the way of a view of professors as educators.

Well I agree with everything you wrote except I'm not sure about the initial premise that tuition always subsidizes research active faculty.

At risk of naively overgeneralizing uni budgets, but here goes: If a research active faculty brings in ~$1M/yr in external funding on research, of which ~$300k/yr is overhead, then the money is there to cover their salary and lab costs. Obviously the salary is not directly paid from the overhead pool, but it goes back into the Uni budget one way or another.

It may be the case that a great instructor can pull in $1M/yr more than a mediocre one in tuition for a department. If so, they should definitely be compensated (I would argue they should definitely be compensated regardless of extra tuition dollars, but you started this;). The problem is that the extra money may come at the expense of a different department.

If overnight we populated all intro classes across all depts with great instructors, how many additional tuition dollars would we bring to the university?  At the non-elite public R1 I work at, I'd guess you could expect on the order of $10M/yr at the start. Maybe after a while reputation effects would bring more students from out of state, but this is a long haul for a typical admin. If we instead replaced overnight all of our research active faculty with those at an elite R1, our research budget would go up by order $100M/yr overnight. Maybe that would eventually fall years later as the faculty had trouble renewing all their grants at the lower ranked place, but it's complicated.

But whatever, I'm sure these kind of budget debates have been exhausted with much greater sophistication on these fora. i generally agree that great teachers should be compensated and valued more than they currently are.

At least from my understanding at my university, that $300k overhead would not be enough to cover both the actual overhead costs of the lab (space, utilities, infrastructure, support staff) and an average PI salary. Overhead is usually scaled such that it covers non-salary portions of running / supporting the research lab. There's a reason why soft money positions at med school necessitate 4-5 concurrent major grants with ~2 months of salary support on each. Like I said, to me this would be an argument for following the medical school model and scaling "hard" money (salary) proportional to teaching responsibilities, and letting excellent researchers bring in enough grant money to cover their salary and lab costs.

As for tuition revenue: I think you're underestimating the revenue from tuition. Lets consider a randomly selected state R1 (University of Minnesota). Tuition is 13,318 per year for 13 credits per semester. This works out to around $512 per credit hour, or $1536 for a typical 3 credit course. An intro chemistry lecture is 600 students taught by a single instructor. That means for one class, that instructor brings in just under $1 million dollars in tuition revenue ($922,0915). An average instructor is teaching more than 1 course per semester.

Granted, not all of that tuition revenue is coming directly to the department- but my guess is that a non-TT instructor is being paid a lot less for the million dollars they are bringing to the university for that class than the TT-research faculty bringing in $300k in overhead on a million dollar grant.

You also have assumptions that research revenue scales evenly, but grant money is finite: you can't increase the number of research faculty by 10x and assume a 10x increase in grant dollars. What it means is that the existing grant dollars are 10x more competitive. You're also comparing the increase in research dollars, but not the increase in money that actually goes to the university (overhead), which would be far less than $100 million on $100 million in grants.

[fizzycist]

Eigen, I agree that something like a 6 or 7.5 month salary might be more appropriate for research active faculty.  To some extent, course buyouts serve that purpose but probably you are correct that it isn't enough.

A few other things:
-research grants also pay for grad tuition which could be $100k/yr for the 1M/yr research lab.  But my point wasn't to do an exact accounting of the money, just to show that it is the right order of magnitude to cover salary.

-i was not estimating the tuition dollars from a typical courseload (which I agree can be >1M). I was estimating how much more a great lecturer would bring in compared to an average one (maybe 25% higher enrollment?). There are also support staff, ed tech, TAs etc to pay so once again it was not an exact estimate, but I think 1M/yr was reasonable o.o.m.

-i am not assuming anything about how how research dollars scale. Just assuming that an elite R1 brings in ~$100M/yr in grants more than a non-elite one, which I believe is the correct o.o.m. It is hard to say how much of that money should be "counted". I agree it isn't full amount but it also is more than just overhead--paying grad students (including their tuition), course buyouts, potentially sharable equipment, undergrad research etc. has benefits.


But I also agree with ruralguy that my (admittedly very rough) argument only holds for R1 natural science or engineering. What sort of Dept. do you work in?

[eigen]

Natural sciences, in the overlap of NIH and NSF funding.

FWIW, funding for research faculty at medical schools is closer to 5-20% salary for soft money, and they pay the same (or higher) overhead. This is why I'd argue that by and large, overhead doesn't cover salaries, since you can see cases on the same campus where soft money positions can't pull PI salary from the overhead, so I'm not convinced with the argument that hard money positions are being paid out of that. Ostensibly, the overhead sans salary should be the same.

I get you're arguing magnitude, just like I was with courses: allowing for all the various other things that need to be paid from the money, a single large lecture course and a very large grant ($1M) bring in roughly equal amounts to the university. But the course is per semester, and bringing in $1M per semester for a single researcher is quite a major accomplishment, especially in non-NIH fields.

You're taking about good vs great teachers, but that doesn't really hit relative teaching loads. In departments I'm familiar with, teaching stream faculty and adjuncts teach a lot more courses than the tenure track research folks, and are paid a lot less, have less job security, and are (again, in my experience) treated like second class faculty despite bringing in a large portion of the funding.

Good vs. great teaching to me is less a money argument than an "are we doing right by our students" argument, but you're absolutely right in that having great or horrible teachers doesn't seem to drive enrollments significantly.

[mleok]

At least from my understanding at my university, that $300k overhead would not be enough to cover both the actual overhead costs of the lab (space, utilities, infrastructure, support staff) and an average PI salary. Overhead is usually scaled such that it covers non-salary portions of running / supporting the research lab. There's a reason why soft money positions at med school necessitate 4-5 concurrent major grants with ~2 months of salary support on each. Like I said, to me this would be an argument for following the medical school model and scaling "hard" money (salary) proportional to teaching responsibilities, and letting excellent researchers bring in enough grant money to cover their salary and lab costs.

As for tuition revenue: I think you're underestimating the revenue from tuition. Lets consider a randomly selected state R1 (University of Minnesota). Tuition is 13,318 per year for 13 credits per semester. This works out to around $512 per credit hour, or $1536 for a typical 3 credit course. An intro chemistry lecture is 600 students taught by a single instructor. That means for one class, that instructor brings in just under $1 million dollars in tuition revenue ($922,0915). An average instructor is teaching more than 1 course per semester.

Granted, not all of that tuition revenue is coming directly to the department- but my guess is that a non-TT instructor is being paid a lot less for the million dollars they are bringing to the university for that class than the TT-research faculty bringing in $300k in overhead on a million dollar grant.

You also have assumptions that research revenue scales evenly, but grant money is finite: you can't increase the number of research faculty by 10x and assume a 10x increase in grant dollars. What it means is that the existing grant dollars are 10x more competitive. You're also comparing the increase in research dollars, but not the increase in money that actually goes to the university (overhead), which would be far less than $100 million on $100 million in grants.

At least at my public R1, a substantial fraction of students do not pay full sticker tuition, as they receive financial aid from the university that is funded in large part by students who do pay full sticker price (either in-state or out-of-state tuition). It also does not take into account the cost of other student services, the army of GTAs and graders necessary to support a 600 student introductory class, libraries and facilities. In any case, a 600 student course is hardly typical class size, even at a large public R1.

The medical school funding model works best if you're a clinician-scientist, but it's a soul-draining arrangement for non-clinicians who have to rely on external grants to cover their salary. As for overheads covering salary, it really depends on the field you're in. If you require substantial lab space and equipment, then you're probably right that the overhead doesn't cover the cost of the resources that the university provides, both in terms of salary support as well as space. But, if you're like me, and are a theoretician, where with the exception of travel and computing equipment, almost all the grant support goes towards salary support and tuition for graduate students, then the university does come up ahead, particularly since the only instruction that post-candidacy graduate students receive is from me.

[eigen]

At least from my understanding at my university, that $300k overhead would not be enough to cover both the actual overhead costs of the lab (space, utilities, infrastructure, support staff) and an average PI salary. Overhead is usually scaled such that it covers non-salary portions of running / supporting the research lab. There's a reason why soft money positions at med school necessitate 4-5 concurrent major grants with ~2 months of salary support on each. Like I said, to me this would be an argument for following the medical school model and scaling "hard" money (salary) proportional to teaching responsibilities, and letting excellent researchers bring in enough grant money to cover their salary and lab costs.

As for tuition revenue: I think you're underestimating the revenue from tuition. Lets consider a randomly selected state R1 (University of Minnesota). Tuition is 13,318 per year for 13 credits per semester. This works out to around $512 per credit hour, or $1536 for a typical 3 credit course. An intro chemistry lecture is 600 students taught by a single instructor. That means for one class, that instructor brings in just under $1 million dollars in tuition revenue ($922,0915). An average instructor is teaching more than 1 course per semester.

Granted, not all of that tuition revenue is coming directly to the department- but my guess is that a non-TT instructor is being paid a lot less for the million dollars they are bringing to the university for that class than the TT-research faculty bringing in $300k in overhead on a million dollar grant.

You also have assumptions that research revenue scales evenly, but grant money is finite: you can't increase the number of research faculty by 10x and assume a 10x increase in grant dollars. What it means is that the existing grant dollars are 10x more competitive. You're also comparing the increase in research dollars, but not the increase in money that actually goes to the university (overhead), which would be far less than $100 million on $100 million in grants.

At least at my public R1, a substantial fraction of students do not pay full sticker tuition, as they receive financial aid from the university that is funded in large part by students who do pay full sticker price (either in-state or out-of-state tuition). It also does not take into account the cost of other student services, the army of GTAs and graders necessary to support a 600 student introductory class, libraries and facilities. In any case, a 600 student course is hardly typical class size, even at a large public R1.

The medical school funding model works best if you're a clinician-scientist, but it's a soul-draining arrangement for non-clinicians who have to rely on external grants to cover their salary. As for overheads covering salary, it really depends on the field you're in. If you require substantial lab space and equipment, then you're probably right that the overhead doesn't cover the cost of the resources that the university provides, both in terms of salary support as well as space. But, if you're like me, and are a theoretician, where with the exception of travel and computing equipment, almost all the grant support goes towards salary support and tuition for graduate students, then the university does come up ahead, particularly since the only instruction that post-candidacy graduate students receive is from me.

Just for context, 600 is an average to small size for an introductory chemistry class at large public R1 in my experience. 800-2400 (Penn State, LSU) is not unheard of. That's one of the reasons I used UMN as an "average" example.

I don't disagree that soft-money positions are soul crushing. But are they more soul crushing than adjunct / lecturer positions?

My argument is that at least in my field (trying to keep from over-generalizing here) we're (largely) subsidizing one particular model of faculty at R1, non medical, institutions: hard-money positions that are majority research. At least in my field, grant money is not so substantial (and overhead costs are significant enough that overhead doesn't pay salary) that grant funding brings in more money to the average R1 than tuition does. But the individuals responsible for the majority of the teaching (grad students teaching labs, instructors and adjuncts teaching lectures) make a fraction of the pay of those in hard-money research positions and have little to no job security.

Moreover, comments are frequently made (again, in my experience) that the less research active faculty are not "really" professors, which is why they aren't paid as much.

I would think moving to a system with teaching stream professors (with possibility for tenure/job security and commensurate pay), research stream professors (soft-money scaling depending on % teaching vs. research effort) and something in the middle as a "traditional" faculty position that aims to split time among teaching and research.

As several people have mentioned, there are a number of faculty who do not like teaching and would prefer to be predominately research. I think those positions should be supported, but I would argue that there are far more "pure" or "majority" research positions that pay well (at least in my field) than there are majority teaching positions that pay well.

[dismalist]

Lovely to learn what we all want. The much more serious question is what makes an institution succeed?

Research universities succeed if they produce good research. The teaching part of research universities is merely having the students sit at the feet of successful research professors and listen to them. Teaching quality is almost irrelevant here because the point is to be able to imbibe the best.

It would be absurd to believe that 30 or 40 per cent of college age students can profit from such. For non research universities, being able to teach would be nice, say for all first year courses, probably second. Beyond that I think one has to keep one's hand in research, and be able to show it, somehow.

Think how different things are in Britain: High class schooling and three years of college, specialized. The first two years of US college is put into high school. Germany is similar: 13 years of high school, then four years of university to the masters. [Parenthetically, none of the European heavily state funded systems provide for climbing walls, the overall college experience, or anything else along those lines.] No one has to think about conducting research in the years under our 14th year of school.

In the present US system, keep research away from instructors of year 14 and below, and save money.

[mamselle]

In repsonse to the title:

We aren't already?

M.