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Comments about "Receiving tenure is long, stressful road"
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10 Comments on this article:
"Research is considered significantly more important than teaching in evaluating a candidate." This one sentence summarizes the biggest problem with the tenure process at Stanford. The institution has made it very clear that research is more important than teaching.
Yes, but this happens to be a research university. An undergraduate at a research university should expect to work and learn independently, to seek out advice and guidance on his own, instead of waiting idly for it to arrive, packaged on his doorstep. If students want hand-holding, professors who teach exclusively as a sole profession, and invitations for tea and cookies at the professor's houses after their 6 person seminars on a lawn, then perhaps they should have went to a small liberal arts college.
It's also clearly stated that teaching is not completely taken out of the equation.
Based on the course evals, it's also obvious that on average most tenured faculty also earn good marks on the teaching department.
Grad students like me, appreciate very much the emphasis put on hiring the best researchers around, although I am also very skeptical about the sentence "The tenure review process, however, is generally regarded as something safe from department politics". There are fields, such as hard sciences and engineering, where that might be true; however, in humanities, which are so prone to subjectivity, I doubt that politics don't influence those decisions. Most of the serious articles one reads about "politics in tenured appointments" , although not specific to Stanford, relate to cases which happen in the humanities; and there is a good reason for that: funding/resources in those fields, as well as opportunities for future graduates, are a lot scarcer, so they possess the right mix that makes politics flourish.
"The institution has made it very clear that research is more important than teaching."
So what? Where do you think every research university gets its reputation and operating budget from? Its undergrads and their tuition? Ha!
In response to Tom. I would disagree that every research university gets its reputation and operating budget from undergrads and tuition. Certainly much of it comes from them, but you should not discount the money brought in by faculty doing research, especially in the basic sciences. For every research dollar a faculty member brings in, Stanford gets an additional 58 cents on top of that as indirect costs. In the medical school here at Stanford, which has slightly less that 800 faculty, the research dollars per faculty member are higher than in any other institution in the country, and contribute a sizable portion of the Medical School's operating budget. As for reputation, Stanford's research is highly regarded nationally and internationally by peers at other institutions.
Response to G: In case you didn't figure out already, Tom was being sarcastic; you both agree.
Couldn't agree more with Tom and G, and most notably V. Research is what Stanford is known for and excels at. Teaching at the undergraduate level, however, is not the focus here and rightfully so. A research university is for those undergrads who are willing to work to learn from great researchers, rather than be taught by great teachers.
"We’re very, very careful about hiring," Etchemendy said. "We only hire people we think really have a chance to make tenure."
How about only hiring people who can actually TEACH THE DAMN MATERIAL? That's more than can be said for half of the profs I had.
Alum: You're right - there is no vetting of prospective faculty hires' ability to teach. I know faculty who can't teach to save their lives, and others who are fabulous. The hiring decision (in my somewhat limited experience - I'm only an Assistant Professor) is made entirely based on an ability to do research (at least in the Basic Sciences).
Getting tenure should require both excellence in research and excellence in teaching. A lack of either should cause tenure to be denied. The point of a research university is that the faculty skillfully and effeciently teach the basics of a subject and then the students build on that base by conducting research with faculty guidance. Expecting the faculty to be skilled at teaching the basics isn't expecting handholding. And with students paying $50,000 a year faculty who can't teach should be required to learn or sent packing. We require that teachers in grade schools demonstrate an ability to teach. Why not college professors.