Teaching-Oriented Faculty at Research Universities

The Communications of the ACM has put out an interesting piece about the treatment and role of faculty who wish to focus on teaching more than research. This viewpoint article, Teaching-Oriented Faculty at Research Universities, includes comments from people I’ve worked with, but who remain anonymous in the article itself.

The unifying characteristic of TOF is excellent teaching. We teach large classes, introductory classes, specialized classes; we typically teach more classes and more students than other faculty in our departments and by common measures we do it very well. Unlike our non-TOF colleagues, we are also evaluated primarily on the basis of our teaching.

These teachers usually staff the bulk (nearly 50%) of introductory undergraduate courses. They also provide academic service through curriculum development. Both of these services allow other faculty to focus more of their time on research. Yet, I feel that many of these faculty are not fully respected among their peers, because they are not leading a research program or publishing as many deep, technical papers. The TOF often don’t meet the same metric that other faculty use to assess themselves.