Teaching-Focused Research Universities

[Wahoo Redux]

On another thread one of the most esteemed formuites made an excellent suggestion that we talk about our experiences as researchers at teaching-focused schools.

Undoubtedly people will have a wide range of experiences in this regard since the schools in question probably vary a great deal, but it is an interesting subject considering the market and the probability that a great many schools will be folding or merging in the near future.

For instance, Golazo left this description on another thread:

I'm at a regional comprehensive. Teaching is first. But if you don't hit the (admittedly modest) scholarship targets, you will get denied, unless there is a compelling reason (I built a new program from scratch instead of publishing). Service and being a good member of the community also matter, but not in the face time in your office way. But you need to be able to show that you are contributing. At the same time, decent teaching can get tenure if you hit beyond the minimum of everything else.

That are probably places where scholarship is treated with suspicion, but I think these are less common than suggested--even my first job at a place and location that were all pretty terrible there was a clear desire for some scholarship. I've had several 4-4 interviews and at all but one, scholarship was clearly part of a successful trajectory.

This sounds very much like where I teach (Golazo, have we passed in the halls?).

A number of subjects suggest themselves.  For instance:

Hiring at a teaching R2 regarding research:

The subject interests me because our prez just approved a tenure-track line.  We have at least two adjuncts with doctorates in the appropriate field.  Both are great people, and one is a good friend of my wife and mine.  Both have done good work at our school in their capacities and both are well liked.  And it seems almost certain neither will make the first cut because neither has a publication to their names. 

We are teaching focused...but even for my job (5/5 lecturer) I was up against fairly credentialed candidates. 

The faculty actually failed a tenure search several years ago because they could not locate a candidate with impressive enough research credentials; the kicker is that the people on the SC couldn't have cobbled together a half dozen publicans to save their collective lives!  Irony thy name is CV Line...or does that stoop to the level of hypocrisy?...or did they just do their jobs?

Researching your way off the R2 treadmill

This one may no longer be relevant (since we may no longer have enough jobs to have employment ladders anymore) but how did you work your way to a 'better' position through research?

Attitudes at teaching R2s

I write and publish a fair amount.  The people here are always congratulatory and I have never experienced the 'who-do-you-think-you-are!?' attitude. Neither has my wife who also publishes and just won a campus-wide award.  In fact, even the admin assistant congratulated me on my last book when it showed up in the newsletter. 

This is almost exactly the opposite experience from our previous teaching-focused Div III school where the people did indeed react with either puffery or defensiveness to any junior colleagues' successes.

Titans vs. Olympians

If there is a big difference where I am it is that, by and large, the elder guard is simply riding it out and the enlisted personnel are hitting it pretty hard.  I don't know if this because we younguns were inculcated with the idea of publication and conferencing from the get-go or if we, like the people I talk to, want to gird ourselves as best we can for any coming apocalypses. 

Reactions to / from the real Olympians

We had a presentation from an Ivy League professor the year before COVID.  Boy, he was such a nice guy!  He made humble little me feel like a real live colleague.  It was so refreshing.

Administration

None of us can figure out our admin.  One minute they seem to hate us.  The next they are approving tenure lines.  I wonder what other people's experiences with R2 admin is like.

Or whatever.

Personally I am interested in your own experiences as a person who actively researches, even if you get no material benefit from it, while saddled with a heavy teaching load.

What say you, fora?

[Parasaurolophus]

I'm at a former-CC-turned-university. We're basically an R_nothing, although my dean is keen to somehow boost our research cred. We teach 4-4, occasionally a bit more. Regularized faculty are eligible for research leave, and can apply for grants. Non-reg faculty can't do either one, which is a problem because by the time you're regularized, it's been so long that for most people their research profile is completely dead and not competitive for grant funding. In theory, any and all research we do can be counted towards our "professional development" hours. Otherwise, it counts for nothing.

Nobody holds research against you, though. And in my department of 6, three other faculty have been reasonably research-active. I publish a boatload, because I want a shot at an R1 job someday (and also because I find it fun and fairly easy).

I serve on the university's (new) research ethics board (basically IRB), and I've not been impressed by what I've seen there. But we don't have the resources for much, so... (Plus, a lot of the senior faculty still only have a terminal Master's, so there's only so much they're prepared to do anyway.)

The faculty actually failed a tenure search several years ago because they could not locate a candidate with impressive enough research credentials; the kicker is that the people on the SC couldn't have cobbled together a half dozen publicans to save their collective lives!  Irony thy name is CV Line...or does that stoop to the level of hypocrisy?...or did they just do their jobs?

Hehe, that rings true. Our dean pushes for us to hire the "best and brightest", but the reality is that we only advertise locally and don't have much to offer the best and brightest--not least because the path to good employment is through a temporary appointment with no guaranteed workload. It's better than sessional work, but not exactly anything to write home about.

[eigen]

I'm at a somewhat-Selective LAC building its way into a regional private university, with a 3/2-ish teaching load.

Excellent teaching is the bedrock requirement without which you won't make tenure (or likely get hired), but the requirements for service and scholarship are also required. The bar for service increases steadily with rank, but you're not likely to make tenure without doing enough college level service to get yourself known.

The bar for scholarship is ephemeral, but is broadly categorized. You need to publish things, you need to bring in grants if you're in the fields where they're common, and you need to be building a national profile of your research program. We have research funds, sabbatical programs, and conference/travel funds as well as pretty decent institutional research support.

In my lab-sciences perspective, the chances of significantly switching trajectory are relatively low. The orders-of-magnitude difference in productivity at a top R1 where you're looking at millions of dollars of startup funding and running a small company full of junior scholars to a SLAC where it's you and a handful of undergrads with a much more modest startup are significant. In my field, papers from a lab are driven largely by the number of post-docs or grad students employed by the lab, with the PI keeping everything flowing, generating big picture ideas, and bringing in funding. In my experience, publications scale pretty well with the number of senior-ish scholars in the group, so a large group will almost always publish more than a large group, assuming they're both well run. All that to say, in my field, you don't really ever "publish out" of a PUI.

That said, in fields not driven by "number of hours at the bench collecting data" work for scholarship, I have friends that absolutely have published their way from my school to R1s, and that gets a lot more plausible in the humanities, at least for us.

[Ruralguy]

I would agree, in the sciences it's quite difficult to publish or grant your way out. I saw one guy in math do it here.
Most of the others, and there have only been two or three, were in languages or social science. I have seen an uptick in people just leaving to do..whatever...anything else...just getting sick of academia.

[jerseyjay]

I am at what used to be until 20 years ago a teachers' college. Now it is a university, but it is essentially an open admissions school. The teaching load is heavy (4:4, and there have been semesters where I've had four preps, three of them new courses). Twenty years ago, there were no research requirements, but over the past decade more or less the publishing requirements have gone up. All of the historians who have been hired in the last decade have published a book for tenure, while none of those hired in the twenty years before then have much more than a book review.

I, personally, find the teaching part of the job very rewarding. If I did not, I do not think I would have survived very long. My department likes me because I am willing to develop/teach classes in a variety of subfields. One of the things I appreciate about my school is that while I do not really get the opportunity to teach courses in my specialization, the flipside is that I am not constrained to only teach courses in my specialization. I teach both wicker and cloth baskets, where at an R1 I would be focused on courses like "Wicker in the Middle Ages".

I also like to research and publish. I find it interesting and, in its own way, relaxing. If I did not like publishing, I doubt that I would get tenure. I know that when I was hired the fact that I had already published quite a bit was good--even though the more senior members of the committee had never published anything. Because I like research, and because of the topics I study, my research is relatively cheap, and I don't require huge grants (although I would certainly be open to more money for research efforts.)

Key to getting along is that I like teaching, and that I do not act like having published more makes me better.

What I don't like so much is service, or at least much of it. (Some I do like.)  But I try to do my fair share, to be a good citizen. The fact that I do not act dismissive of service and do try to do it also makes for a better relationship with senior faculty.

[polly_mer]

I would agree, in the sciences it's quite difficult to publish or grant your way out. I saw one guy in math do it here.
Most of the others, and there have only been two or three, were in languages or social science. I have seen an uptick in people just leaving to do..whatever...anything else...just getting sick of academia.

I've definitely seen people move from R2 to R1 after about a decade of solid research that includes externally funded graduate programs.  However, I don't know any R2s where people in my fields teach more than 2/2.  Those R2s are not teaching-focused, although people who blow off teaching for research will not make tenure.  Teaching must be solid and research must be excellent as well as substantive.

A handful of people went R2 to R1 to elite research institution.  However, that's a 20 year journey and no one started at a S(mall)LAC teaching 4/4 or higher with Super Dinky levels of service requirements.

It's more common in my fields to be on soft money at an elite institution for a decade and then move to a S(elective)LAC or comparable R1 as an associate professor with a shortened tenure clock.

I am extremely unusual in being off the research track for years and then getting a non-academic research job.  If my current specialty weren't so rare in US citizens for these applications, then  I wouldn't have been hired.  There's no way I would have been hired at a comparable US R1 as a TT professor recently because I have such a large gap in my research productivity and don't have the necessary current external funding record.

[polly_mer]

Voice of doom time for those reading along at home:

The R2 institution may be solid and going nowhere.  However, if this specific department is truly teaching-focused, then that's a service department that will likely be shedding full-time jobs in the next few years.

If this specific department is trying to grow their research productivity and yet aren't giving the support necessary to attract and retain researchers, then that's another way this department will likely be facing cuts in a few years.

We are teaching focused...but even for my job (5/5 lecturer) I was up against fairly credentialed candidates. 

A 5/5 lecturer at a research place (R1 or R2) has a poor long-term outlook.  That looks a lot like being a general education service provider who can be replaced by adjuncts or will just be eliminated as more and more students meet the gen ed requirements through AP or transfer/dual credit.

The faculty actually failed a tenure search several years ago because they could not locate a candidate with impressive enough research credentials

This looks a lot like the department that has aspirations of becoming a research department, but without the actual support and/or resources that experienced researchers know they will need to be successful.

How many graduate students are here?  A handful of master's students at an R2 is not really a research environment, even in the humanities.

What's the teaching load for someone who teaches primarily graduate courses?  Is it one upper-division undergrad and one graduate seminar?  Or was the ad looking for the unicorn of a very experienced researcher who would teach mostly undergrad general ed electives at a 4/4? 

While many people are excellent teachers and excellent researchers, there's only so many hours in a day.  High research expectations coupled with a current department doing little research and a high teaching load is not appealing to anyone who knows what a solid research environment looks like and how much work even a moderate teaching load is.

Researching your way off the R2 treadmill

This one may no longer be relevant (since we may no longer have enough jobs to have employment ladders anymore) but how did you work your way to a 'better' position through research?

By Carnegie definition, an R2 is a high research activity, doctoral granting university.  There are only about 130 of these places in the US.  An R2 TT/T faculty position should be a research position with some teaching.  If you're doing a teaching treadmill at an R2 instead of being supported to do the research necessary so you could move to a better position, then that's another sign of a position that is ripe to be cut during the next round of refocusing the institution.

Attitudes at teaching R2s

I write and publish a fair amount.  The people here are always congratulatory and I have never experienced the 'who-do-you-think-you-are!?' attitude. Neither has my wife who also publishes and just won a campus-wide award.  In fact, even the admin assistant congratulated me on my last book when it showed up in the newsletter. 

If you're at an R2, then research is indeed valued because that's what people do at an R2.  There wouldn't be any pushback against research productivity because that's the expectation.  If your department doesn't have that expectation (per a different thread last year), then that is yet another sign that your department is a service department that can be cut and likely will be cut as the national changes in general education arrive at your institution.

This is almost exactly the opposite experience from our previous teaching-focused Div III school where the people did indeed react with either puffery or defensiveness to any junior colleagues' successes.

That's a primary difference between an R2 (a high research activity institution with doctoral programs that may also value teaching) and a teaching place where research is viewed as a distraction from teaching and service.  Readers at home need to know at what type of place they are and act accordingly to meet expectations.

Administration

None of us can figure out our admin.  One minute they seem to hate us.  The next they are approving tenure lines.  I wonder what other people's experiences with R2 admin is like.

One possibility is that TT folks can be required to work harder for less pay doing tasks that are currently being done through an adjunct army augmented by non-TT teaching staff.  TT faculty can also replace some of the clerk-level administration by taking on those tasks.  Advising by faculty, even when the faculty are not in the major department, is one way to be student-centered as a selling point.

Another possibility is trying to move the department from a general education service department to a department that can attract full-pay graduate students as an MA cash cow.  20 years ago, this was all the rage and pretty lucrative.  Now that online graduate humanities programs are well established by good universities, not just Phoenix/Capella, and can draw from a national market, this is no longer a cash cow for regional places.  Getting on that bus now is not good.

A third possibility is trying to fix a department that should be drawing majors and graduate students by raising the research bar.  Teaching faculty cannot be pushed into becoming research productive, but new TT hires can be told the bar is now raised.  Having new TT faculty recruiting for the major and graduate program while being research active is a way to pick up students from all those English programs that have been closing in the past five years.  Having a stronger in-person program is a way to benefit.

However, none of that is really a positive for anyone currently employed off the tenure track in the department.  Going from non-TT to TT with research expectations would probably be better for someone who wants to remain in academia.  Having the resources to ramp up to great levels of research would be helpful to get that next job at a research place.

[eigen]

I think the caveat there, Polly, is that R2 is a school distinction, and doesn't require every program to be at that level. There are certainly R2 institutions that have some excellent and well funded graduate programs, but have other areas with no graduate programs, since the R2 designation is based on dollar amounts of funding and number of graduating PhDs, no matter how well they're distributed. Since the breakpoint is $5 mil in funding and >20 doctoral students, that can be done by one really high profile program and have less effect on the campus as a whole.

My undergrad school was an R2, but the chemistry department was a BS-only program and faculty taught a 4/4 load. There were only a few STEM programs that graduated PhD students, but they brought in huge amounts of funding. Only 11 PhD programs university wide, with some of those being co-localized in the same department.

This meant that what your "job" as a T/TT faculty member looked like depended mostly on your department, not the school or even the college level.

[polly_mer]

From a job security standpoint, you want to be in the departments that bring in students, funding, and prestige.

From a moving on up standpoint, you want to be a solid performer in bringing in students, funding, and prestige that is recognized in your external field, not just locally.

Being in a service department is more precarious, especially if the teaching is gen ed instead prerequisites for the big majors.

One big problem is how few true research positions exist at all compared to people who want them.

A second big problem is how different the day-to-day experience of being faculty at different places is, even with the same title.  The example of being a musician and somehow experience as a drummer "should" count for that lead guitarist position comes to mind.

[Ruralguy]

I recall being in a Chairs' meeting with our visiting accreditors, and when folks from one dept. spoke (Chair was allowed to bring in one other dept. member at his/her discretion) I couldn't help but think "These guys have a different job than I do." Its not because they have grant dollars (though they have some) or because they have grad students (no one her does), its because they teach so many of the students (most popular major by far) that they have to take short cuts, or at least, relative to the rest of us, it seems like short cuts. One of the things they frequently say is "I spend half of my time on research."  Half? Really? Yikes?
I'm having a super productive year if it gets to 25%.

[Ruralguy]

Wow, you really like that drum/guitar metaphor, Polly!

(as an aside, I love learning guitar...though I still sorta suck....maybe there's a metaphor in that...)

[Wahoo Redux]

This looks a lot like the department that has aspirations of becoming a research department...

Actually no, not at all.  And the disjunction between interview expectations and actual expectations is really interesting.  I think it is a sign of the time.

The research requirements are staggeringly low where we are (and sometimes people STILL don't meet them) and there is no overt indication that "research" is becoming a thing here----actually, the emphasis is all on making students happy. Only a handful of us publish anything, anyway.  No one talks about ongoing research or creative projects.  Mostly people just complain about the administration. 

And yet they play the game at interview time.

My wife had a very similar experience at her first job at a tiny, dysfunctional Div. III up in the cold north.  The chair of the SC asked her to outline her current and her second research projects (hu meant books) for a job at a place with even lower research expectations than the place we are currently at.  Turns out, the SC chair had had one thing published in a very minor journal years ago and that's it.  The other big-talker in the department had published hu's dissertation with Peter Lang years ago and loved to brag about hu's "book" whenever possible.

Not impressive, and they all liked to point out how lame the other people in the department were.

I think the expectations have simply transferred down the line because it is such a buyer's market.  Academics are able to insist on these sorts of milestones because, even for a job like mine with no research requirements, schools are getting CVs with a pile of achievements and experience; the bar has been has been raised because it can be raised.

And the poor job-hopefuls, who worked hard to build a resume, will cower and subjugate themselves because our lousy school might be the thing that stands between them and a mélange of PT gigs someplace even worse.

On the other hand, when I applied for my current FT job, my two biggest competitors both got jobs elsewhere before their interviews and the SC had to go back to the stacks and work their way down.  This was pre-COVID, however...

What's the teaching load for someone who teaches primarily graduate courses?  Is it one upper-division undergrad and one graduate seminar?  Or was the ad looking for the unicorn of a very experienced researcher who would teach mostly undergrad general ed electives at a 4/4? 

All FT teach 4/4 or 5/5 depending, up and down the numbers, even people who teach grad-level classes, including myself.

We just advertised a FT humanities gig during COVID.  The department will probably find several young unicorns in the pile.  Whether they react fast enough to snare them is another matter. 

[mythbuster]

I'm at an institution that, within the last 2 years, go re-classified from an M1 to an R2. This reclassification was entirely because of the creation of a leadership Ed.D. and some clinical based PhD programs in our College of Health. Our university is now concerned that we may get re-classified back DOWN to an M1 if we don't graduate enough people from these programs.
   I state this as an example of how the classifications don't really correlate well with "research productivity".
 
   The other statement I would like to contribute is the huge variability within departments and colleges at these types of institutions in terms of valuing research productivity. My department is big on pushing research, and so our departmental tenure expectations for research are MUCH higher that others. I'm not talking the book vs papers type differences, but major differences in apples to apples comparisons between similar types of departments. This can lead to issues a higher levels as my department heavily weights research productivity over teaching. Once your dossier makes it to the higher levels it can be a shock to see a sudden scrutiny of your DFW rates and student eval scores.
   Our administration is likewise wishy-washy on the whole thing. One day they will proclaim the importance of research, and another day it's all about how many large enrollment courses each of us can teach. If the faculty here have one consistent message to our admins, its to make up their minds! But of course, they want us to be all things to all people all at once.

[Mobius]

A research university where all faculty teach at least a 4/4 is research in name only and no one is buying it. I've seen faculty refer to their departments as R1 when the university is clearly not an R1. Funny how people and institutions label themselves.

[Aster]

Polly pretty much nailed it. If a place is claiming to be a research-focused institution, there are specific telltales that identify it as such.

*Graduate students and graduate programs. And not weird nichey graduate programs, but standard, normal graduate programs.
*Research infrastructure. Special Buildings. Special Facilities. Dedicated Support Staff. A lot of all of that.
*Type of Faculty and Workload Breakdown of that Faculty.
If your institution is claiming to be a research institution, then the bulk of the TT faculty must have regular release time allocated for research. Not a few boutique departments, not a few TT charitable superstar faculty. No, the bulk of the TT faculty need to have a split teaching/research load.

Otherwise, if you don't have these things, then you're a teaching-focused  institution with gimmicky marketing and maybe having a few faculty who trickle out some pubs intermittently on their free time. A 4-4 teaching load is the maximum that a TT faculty person should have at a legit R2. Anything higher than 4-4 is a full-time teaching professor. The more prestigious R2's tend to have 3-4 and 3-3 teaching loads for TT faculty.

I remember when I worked at "Above Average R2" and the institution had recently gotten itself upgraded to "Carnegie Doctoral" status. Basically, all it did was add in an EdD program and a handful of self-created weird-niche vo-tech doctoral degrees. The senior administration was unabashedly honest in telling all of its faculty the reason for upcharging its status. No, it wasn't to attract better quality faculty. No, it wasn't to attract more or higher quality graduate students. No, it wasn't to allow faculty more release time to pursue actual research activities. The actual reason for plopping down an EdD program and a few weird-niche doctoral programs was to gain access to more state funding. That was it. And it worked... for a few years. They got some much-needed funding for new buildings and new TT hires. But then more and more R2's (and even lower-ranked institutions) started jumping onto that exploitative minimum-effort approach for "Carnegie Doctoral" status. The gravy train ran low. The state legislature wised up pretty quick. The funding that was traditionally set aside for the "major research universities" was re-funnelled back to the actual major research universities and the "Carnegie Doctoral" moniker became something of a local and regional joke.