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Make teacher quality a main priority
Universities that perform better in research do not necessarily provide better teaching, a new report by the Grattan Institute argues.
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It is quite simple – teaching does not bring money to the University, research does – so as long as the universities have to fight for funding, the culture is not going to change.
It is true that many universities are down-playing the importance of teaching. Management often forgets that teaching provides most of the income to a university, and must be seen as its core business.
Andrew Norton’s proposal to create teaching-focussed positions, and have universities compete for them with only 12 “winners” is, however, probably as misguided as the research-focussed culture which he rightly criticizes. In all likelihood it would lead to more bureaucracy and more pointless compliance regimes, with even fewer resources going to the departments that support their universities.
What really has to change is the distribution of resources within universities. Ideally, academics should engage in both teaching and research, since each activity enriches the other. Creating teaching silos and research silos is exactly the wrong thing to do, and generally does not work well. Instead, there needs to be a re-investment in the teaching/research departments that are the life-blood of universities. In some instances, that might require a serious reduction in the number of highly-paid executive positions within the bureaucracy, in order to achieve the necessary efficiencies.
With better-resourced teaching/research departments, it would be possible naturally to re-invest in teaching excellence, without significantly weakening research or introducing yet further pointless competition.
Teacher quality is a furphy (a common one here and in the US) endlessly pushed by the Grattan Institute. Even a kind analysis of their line points out the obvious problems .. http://inside.org.au/the-grattan-line/
The problems are systemic. They will be solved by more funding and a better overall thinking through not only about how people learn but what kinds of conditions make it easier for people to teach. Under both sides of politics, for different reasons, university staff and admins have been squeezed for more than a decade. Neither learning nor teaching has done well out of this.
Surely the activity that is responsible for earning the vast majority of the income for a business should be the activity that receives the largest amount of internal investment in the assurance and continuing improvement of its quality. In most universities, certainly in Australia, income earned from learning and teaching would probably equate to between 80-90%+ of overall annual income. It is, in effect, the ‘goose that is laying the golden eggs’ and these very golden eggs are cross subsidising improvements in other areas of university business eg. research activity. To extend the metaphor, it must then make most sense to invest in ‘keeping the golden egg laying goose satisfied’ i.e. ensuring that the student’s learning and teaching experience (both actual and reported) is challenging, transformative and led by research informed and world class academic teaching practitioners. After all, we want that goose to keep laying.
University lecturers might be more interested in teaching if they had to do rather less of it. Back in the mid 1980s, at my institution, if you had a class of 50 students you got the assistance of a half time tutor despite having far less administrative work associated with that class than today. Now you’d be considered underworked despite workloads climbing to 60-90 hours a week. The more research you do, the more manageable your teaching load becomes. ‘Publish or perish’ has a new meaning these days.