I sometimes just wonder, a lot of professors are bad at teaching because they don't have to be good at it. Is it the same for universities? It feels like reputation for universities are quite detached from the courses they have or teaching quality. Rankings focus a lot on quantitative measures, but teaching quality is hard to measure quantitatively. The output of universities, i.e. the quality of their students, depend on both the teaching quality and "IQ" of their students before admission, which is mostly a feedback loop because universities with good reputation get the best students... Optimizing for teaching quality also means that professors spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output and reduce the ranking, which has a more immediate effect on the reputation than teaching quality.

Teaching is not really relevant in the hiring process of professors.

I saw several committees for prof position and teaching is treated like a checkmark. You should done it and provide a small sample lecture (which you prepare much more than your average lecture) and don't have to suck at it. After this checkbox, the differentiating factors are about citations and how much grant money you can/could/do have... (Western Europe, maybe somewhere else it's different).

I would say teaching is not that relevant specifically for most tenure-track positions at big research universities. It is absolutely something you need to demonstrate some actual experience and proficiency with if you get a position at a small liberal arts college or a community college, where tuition is basically how they keep the lights on.

I’d also say that even at an R1, teaching volume at an acceptable quality is sometimes rewarded if your college within the university is very undergrad-heavy, because it can be part of how the university apportions funds to departments. So, it wouldn’t matter at a med school, but potentially a little in arts and sciences, though still in distant second to research.

There are also a small but increasing number of tenure track teaching-focused positions at big research universities. These folks typically help design and teach the biggest intro lectures and/or other very time- and labor-intensive courses. There are fewer of these positions than I’d like to see in an ideal world, but not zero.

Can confirm this. Teaching is a pass / fail grade for new professors to get tenure in most places. Your ability to get grant funding and publish highly cited papers are astronomically more important to the university than your teaching abilities.

I was told by a seminar speaker one time about a pre-tenure professor who was awarded his University's highest teaching award one day. The very next day he was denied tenure because he didn't publish enough.

I recommend reading the book "Tenure Hacks" [1] to anyone interested in pursuing a career as a tenured professor. I don't agree with all of the points in the book, but it is an important and eye-opening alternative perspective to the typical narrative surrounding academic positions.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Tenure-hacks-secrets-making-tenure/dp...

I feel terrible for the idea of jugding academics based on the amount of grant money they can get... It feels like encouraging a lot of smart people to find ways to waste money, even when they know that they don't really need that much for their project.

It does distract from the process of actually doing research, but I will point out that funding agencies take past productivity into account, so you can’t do literally nothing with the money and expect a grant to get renewed.

Managers in tech get judged by how much HC they accumulate. Same thing.

I think it doesn't really enter the equation. The single worst lecturer I've had at university is now a professor. I don't enough about tenure tracks and we also call them differently (not adjunct, associate, etc) - but he's still there, 20y later, teaching (I think he just had gotten his PhD back then). I can only hope he has improved from "open script, read one page at a time, close script, dismiss".

At least he showed up! That is what we call an A for effort.

Meh, not actively messing up the course is already better than some of the other professors...

> spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output

It's ironic that universities are primarily judged by their research output rather than their teaching, even though their original purpose was to share and preserve knowledge.

But the academic paper printer goes brrrr!

Oh don't you worry, most of them are like that almost everywhere.

There is a box to tick to keep tenure. Academics tick that box.

System behaves as designed. Situation normal: all fucked up.