Teaching-Focused Research Universities

[Golazo]

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

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.

While it would be a pleasure we are actually classified as BA arts and sciences, though we do have masters and a couple of doctoral programs this is only about 5% of our students. Our admin is actually a lot better than it could be, our problem is our BOG. Our president has successfully pushed back against some of the worst ideas and we had pretty broad freedom to choose the modality that we wanted to adopt over the last two semesters, as well as a very robust masking policy. 

We also have to differentiate between 4-4s. Though I now have course releases because of admin work, when I was on a 4-4 it was 4 or 5 sections of the same intro and a rotation of 3 or 4 upper level classes, rotated over 2-3 years, including standard recurring core classes and a lot of input into which elective. Our classes are capped at 25 lower division and 20 upper division. Over the last three years, I've had enough time to write an article that was accepted at a very good journal and another one that is under review at a reasonable mid-level journal, and a third conference paper I'm revising. This is perfectly fine for where I'm at, though obviously somewhere with a lower teaching expectation would probably expect a couple of more articles and another hit at the level of my recent top one.

I once interviewed for a job that is 4-4 with 7 or 8 different preps a year for 15 different classes over 2 years, with caps at 40 students. They didn't have any scholarship expectations at all and might indeed have viewed scholarship as a distraction to being a teaching machine. This is the only interview I've had where I was not asked about my scholarship at all, except for someone to note that I'd written some book reviews and popular non-review things with students and could I do that at 4-4 place.

We also need to differentiate between different disciplines. I don't need a special building or much more than time, though a really good RA would be useful. 

[Faith786]

The more prestigious R2's tend to have 3-4 and 3-3 teaching loads for TT faculty.

Thanks for this comment. I was trying to figure out what exactly these teaching loads represented...

[mleok]

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 think the caveat is that in the experimental sciences, it's hard to publish your way out. You know the joke, a mathematican has almost the same resource needs as a philosopher, except that we also need a wastepaper basket. None of my colleagues have tried to use their startup funds on a fancy expresso machine... yet.

[Ruralguy]

Yes, it really depends on the resources you need to get data, publish, and then get grants to fund your work , students, etc.. In some experimental sciences you might be able to do this if you primarily use shared resources (say, a particle accelerator or a telescope). But if you do this, then your contribution to the field has to be fairly large without you necessarily needing to build your own instrumentation. That could be a hard sell to many R1's.

[eigen]

Yes, it really depends on the resources you need to get data, publish, and then get grants to fund your work , students, etc.. In some experimental sciences you might be able to do this if you primarily use shared resources (say, a particle accelerator or a telescope). But if you do this, then your contribution to the field has to be fairly large without you necessarily needing to build your own instrumentation. That could be a hard sell to many R1's.

I think it's also that a lot of experimental sciences are set up as "small companies" at R1s, where publications scale with the number of full-time researchers (PhD students, post-docs).

It's hard to match that scale if it's just you and undergradates (or even just fewer grad students) pushing work out the door.