I would aim to hire the best teachers (conditioned on a very strong understanding of the material, obviously), while for the graduate school I would aim to hire the best researchers, who would have to teach fewer courses since they would never teach undergrads.
This seems like an obvious solution, so I wonder whether some institutions are already doing it, or there is a catch that we didn’t notice.
(This is just a wild guess, but it perhaps a university that only does a half of that—i.e. hires best teachers and mediocre researchers, or best researchers and mediocre teachers—would be just as popular, for half the cost. You cannot get unlimited amounts of students anyway, so if you already get those who want the best teaching, you don’t need to also attract the ones who want the best research, and vice versa.)
I was thinking from the opposite direction, whether it would make sense for the professors to make pairs—one who wants to teach, plus one who wants to do research—and trade: “I will teach your lessons, if you write my thesis and add me as a co-author to your publications”. Not sure if this is legal. (Also, it seems fragile: if one decides to quit or gets hit by a bus, the other’s career is also over.)
There are in fact many universities that have both “research faculty” and “teaching faculty”. Being research faculty has higher prestige, but nowadays it can be the case that teaching faculty have almost the same job security as research faculty. (This is for permanent teaching faculty, sessional instructors have very low job security.)
In my experience, the teaching faculty often do have a greater enthusiasm for teaching than most research faculty, and also often get better student evaluations. I think it’s generally a good idea to have such teaching faculty.
However, my experience has been that there are some attitudinal differences that indicate that letting the teaching faculty have full control of the teaching aspect of the university’s mission isn’t a good idea.
One such is a tendency for teaching faculty to start to see the smooth running of the undergraduate program as an end in itself. Research faculty are more likely to have an ideological commitment to the advancement of knowledge, even if promoting that is not as convenient.
A couple anecdotes (from my being research faculty at a highly-rated university):
At one point, there was a surge in enrollment in CS. Students enrolled in CS programs found it hard to take all the courses they needed, since they were full. This led some teaching faculty to propose that CS courses (after first year) no longer be open to students in any other department, seeing as such students don’t need CS courses to fulfill their degree requirements. Seems logical: students need to smoothly check off degree requirements and graduate. The little matter that knowledge of CS is crucial to cutting-edge research in many important fields like biology and physics seemed less important...
Another time, I somewhat unusually taught an undergrad course a bit outside my area, which I didn’t teach again the next year. I put all the assignments I gave out, with solutions, on my web page. The teaching faculty instructor the next year asked me to take this down, worrying that students might find answers to future assigned questions on my web page. I pointed out that these were all my own original questions, not from the textbook, and asked whether he also wanted the library to remove from circulation all the books on this topic…
Also, some textbooks written by teaching faculty seem more oriented towards moving students through standard material than teaching them what is actually important.
Nevertheless, it is true that many research faculty are not very good at teaching, and often not much interested either. A comment I once got on a course evaluation was “there’s nothing stupid about this course”. I wonder what other experiences this student had had that made that notable!
This seems like an obvious solution, so I wonder whether some institutions are already doing it, or there is a catch that we didn’t notice.
(This is just a wild guess, but it perhaps a university that only does a half of that—i.e. hires best teachers and mediocre researchers, or best researchers and mediocre teachers—would be just as popular, for half the cost. You cannot get unlimited amounts of students anyway, so if you already get those who want the best teaching, you don’t need to also attract the ones who want the best research, and vice versa.)
I was thinking from the opposite direction, whether it would make sense for the professors to make pairs—one who wants to teach, plus one who wants to do research—and trade: “I will teach your lessons, if you write my thesis and add me as a co-author to your publications”. Not sure if this is legal. (Also, it seems fragile: if one decides to quit or gets hit by a bus, the other’s career is also over.)
There are in fact many universities that have both “research faculty” and “teaching faculty”. Being research faculty has higher prestige, but nowadays it can be the case that teaching faculty have almost the same job security as research faculty. (This is for permanent teaching faculty, sessional instructors have very low job security.)
In my experience, the teaching faculty often do have a greater enthusiasm for teaching than most research faculty, and also often get better student evaluations. I think it’s generally a good idea to have such teaching faculty.
However, my experience has been that there are some attitudinal differences that indicate that letting the teaching faculty have full control of the teaching aspect of the university’s mission isn’t a good idea.
One such is a tendency for teaching faculty to start to see the smooth running of the undergraduate program as an end in itself. Research faculty are more likely to have an ideological commitment to the advancement of knowledge, even if promoting that is not as convenient.
A couple anecdotes (from my being research faculty at a highly-rated university):
At one point, there was a surge in enrollment in CS. Students enrolled in CS programs found it hard to take all the courses they needed, since they were full. This led some teaching faculty to propose that CS courses (after first year) no longer be open to students in any other department, seeing as such students don’t need CS courses to fulfill their degree requirements. Seems logical: students need to smoothly check off degree requirements and graduate. The little matter that knowledge of CS is crucial to cutting-edge research in many important fields like biology and physics seemed less important...
Another time, I somewhat unusually taught an undergrad course a bit outside my area, which I didn’t teach again the next year. I put all the assignments I gave out, with solutions, on my web page. The teaching faculty instructor the next year asked me to take this down, worrying that students might find answers to future assigned questions on my web page. I pointed out that these were all my own original questions, not from the textbook, and asked whether he also wanted the library to remove from circulation all the books on this topic…
Also, some textbooks written by teaching faculty seem more oriented towards moving students through standard material than teaching them what is actually important.
Nevertheless, it is true that many research faculty are not very good at teaching, and often not much interested either. A comment I once got on a course evaluation was “there’s nothing stupid about this course”. I wonder what other experiences this student had had that made that notable!