Professing Professionally

Daniel Drezner (a tenured professor at Tufts) and Megan McArdle (economics editor/blogger at The Atlantic) talk about why elite schools don't care about teaching. I think that Megan overstates the extent to which even the best schools don't care about teaching. Over the summer, I was speaking with a professor at one of the top business schools who protested vigorously that although research drove tenure decisions, a really bad teacher would not get tenure no matter how good his or her research.

The real question, as Dan suggests at the end, is how we tell the good teachers from the bad. There is a lot of attention being paid right now -- particularly at teaching schools -- to student evaluations and, I promise, grad students and new faculty care about their evaluations. But, if learning is the point, then student evaluations are problematic; as Dan says, most students value easy grading without too much work over disciplined learning.

Of course, how any particular school approaches this question is a matter of strategy. How does that school go to market and how does it differentiate itself from its competitors? UMass has a murky strategy, and murky is never good. UMass will never be the high quality competitor in the University industry in Massachusetts, nor is it clear how UMass can differentiate its classroom product. That leaves it with being the low cost competitor, which is good for a state school but not how UMass wants to see itself, or with focusing on campus life. As a large state school campus in the middle of cornfields, UMass has a party school reputation (just Google ZooMass). On the one hand, this is a good market positioning if your target market is underachieving high schoolers (which is exactly UMass's market). On the other hand, the Administration hates this image with the white hot passion of a thousand nuns.

One way for UMass to square this circle is to lobby against partying, which it does, while putting a lot of emphasis on teaching evaluations, which it doesn't do. This leaves UMass with a murky image and an emphasis on the school as the economical alternative for Massachusetts high school students.