There are colleges that focus a lot on teaching -- Rose Hulman, Harvey Mudd, Swarthmore, etc. I think the problem is that people want academic fame as well as good teaching.
However a lot of fame comes from, I think, path breaking research (and startups) coming out of universities -- that's why you see the universities' names in newspapers. That's why US news ranks those universities as having great departments (in their disciplines of speciality)
So if you want that you by necessity have to value research and entrepreneurship in profs a lot higher than you value teaching.
What one can try and get is good teaching colleges which may not be necessarily famous for research, etc. but are still popular with recruiters for recruitment out of ugrad. The colleges mentioned above do do that. There are other colleges too -- University of Warsaw is a very popular recruitment ground for big tech companies like Google even though it's not on the same level as a top US school for research. University of Waterloo and Brown are a couple of others that come to mind that are popular with recruiters to a bigger extent than their rankings would indicate. Perhaps we need more advertisment of such options.
The other possibility is for prestigious schools to hire more teaching fac. But that would mean taking resources away from research oriented fac. So the market dynamics make it hard to do that.
Ideally universities would have the financial resources to hire both teaching and research oriented fac but given the current political climate...
In my view, a huge issue is that no matter how you try to recruit and manage separate research and teaching faculty, it will always quickly devolve into a caste system.
At the university where I taught math as an adjunct, the teaching and research faculty didn't even interact with one another.
One thing that I've seen that I thought helped a lot is having a tenure-track style system for teaching faculty. I believe at UVa it was called "expectation of continued employment" instead of "tenure", but the idea was similar; after working for 6 years your performance was evaluated and if it had been satisfactory, your job was guaranteed in, as I understand it, a similar way to a tenured faculty member.
All of the teaching faculty in the Computer Science department, if I remember correctly, were on that track (or had been and now had the guaranteed employment), and were definitely a big part of the departmental life. When the department's accreditation was renewed, they were highlighted as a particular strength of the department: which I think would be really rare for the typical adjunct teaching model as I've heard it described.
That being said, I did see the adjunct/research faculty caste system develop elsewhere at the university, although I don't know what the details were RE: expectation of continued employment/etc. I think it is possible to avoid, but requires a concerted effort by the department as a whole to avoid, and that requires it being something enough people in the department want.
Comments
There are colleges that focus a lot on teaching -- Rose Hulman, Harvey Mudd, Swarthmore, etc. I think the problem is that people want academic fame as well as good teaching.
However a lot of fame comes from, I think, path breaking research (and startups) coming out of universities -- that's why you see the universities' names in newspapers. That's why US news ranks those universities as having great departments (in their disciplines of speciality)
So if you want that you by necessity have to value research and entrepreneurship in profs a lot higher than you value teaching.
What one can try and get is good teaching colleges which may not be necessarily famous for research, etc. but are still popular with recruiters for recruitment out of ugrad. The colleges mentioned above do do that. There are other colleges too -- University of Warsaw is a very popular recruitment ground for big tech companies like Google even though it's not on the same level as a top US school for research. University of Waterloo and Brown are a couple of others that come to mind that are popular with recruiters to a bigger extent than their rankings would indicate. Perhaps we need more advertisment of such options.
The other possibility is for prestigious schools to hire more teaching fac. But that would mean taking resources away from research oriented fac. So the market dynamics make it hard to do that.
Ideally universities would have the financial resources to hire both teaching and research oriented fac but given the current political climate...
In my view, a huge issue is that no matter how you try to recruit and manage separate research and teaching faculty, it will always quickly devolve into a caste system.
At the university where I taught math as an adjunct, the teaching and research faculty didn't even interact with one another.
One thing that I've seen that I thought helped a lot is having a tenure-track style system for teaching faculty. I believe at UVa it was called "expectation of continued employment" instead of "tenure", but the idea was similar; after working for 6 years your performance was evaluated and if it had been satisfactory, your job was guaranteed in, as I understand it, a similar way to a tenured faculty member.
All of the teaching faculty in the Computer Science department, if I remember correctly, were on that track (or had been and now had the guaranteed employment), and were definitely a big part of the departmental life. When the department's accreditation was renewed, they were highlighted as a particular strength of the department: which I think would be really rare for the typical adjunct teaching model as I've heard it described.
That being said, I did see the adjunct/research faculty caste system develop elsewhere at the university, although I don't know what the details were RE: expectation of continued employment/etc. I think it is possible to avoid, but requires a concerted effort by the department as a whole to avoid, and that requires it being something enough people in the department want.
Teaching and research fac have very different goals though so I don't think it's a bad thing if they don't interact much.
There's a lot of ego on part of some research fac though, I agree that that one should try and address.
That's fair enough. In fact, I never even met my supervisor, which was just fine.