A school as large as the University necessarily has a significant proportion of classes that must reach large quantities of students at a time. For example, fall semester microeconomics and spring semester macroeconomics each easily pull more than 1,000 students every year. Although large classes are undoubtedly necessary at the University, they are not the best use of tenured research faculty. Faculty lecturers, who do not have the same research responsibilities as tenure-track research faculty, can often focus exclusively on pedagogy and getting introductory content across. However, job security for lecturers at universities is historically poor and inconsistent, leading to a system where lecturers float from school to school seeking temporary employment. The University can be at the forefront of change in higher education by creating a quasi-tenure track for lecturers focusing exclusively on teaching, thus improving the quality of undergraduate education, as well as granting greater job security.
Many introductory classes do not need to be taught by research professors. Although tenured research faculty at universities are not exclusively focused on their own research, an Inside Higher Ed report found that professors only spent 40 percent of their time in a given week on teaching-related tasks. Lecturers, in contrast, do not have the same responsibilities outside of teaching and mandatory departmental meetings. This allows researchers to spend more time devising curriculum, improving presentations and meeting with TAs to lay down a consistent plan for teaching introductory lectures.
The University’s reputation for undergraduate teaching could only improve through the hiring of more professional lecturers. Undergraduate rankings, although not without their flaws, use undergraduate reputation and faculty resources to make up 42.5 percent of a school’s ranking score. These metrics take into account the amount of time that students have to interact with faculty, as well as the size of the classes offered by the University. Counterintuitively, by hiring professional lecturers to teach introductory seminars, more spots open for tenured research professors to teach upper-level seminars of their own, thus increasing the degree of specialization once students surpass the introductory level.
A greater degree of job security for lecturers is necessary in order for them to be more than academic mercenaries that float from school to school. Typical lecturer positions are one-semester or one-year contracts, with employment severable by the university after the period of time is up. In contrast, institutions develop departmental reputations over time for certain types of scholarship: for example, in economics, the saltwater versus freshwater debates over macroeconomic study pitted various East Coast institutions with Midwest universities. Standard, one-year lecturer positions prevent lecturers from teaching introductory lectures in accordance with the prevailing norms of the department. By offering lecturers some degree of tenure and job security, lecturers could tailor their introductory level classes to the specific institution.
Increasing the amount of lecturers at a given school also increases the amount of advisors that are able to help new students adjust to the University. Too often, because of the large size of the most popular majors at the University, first- and second-year advisers are unable to provide specialized instruction in which courses to take in order to further explore a field, due to being too busy with their own research and work. In contrast, a full-time lecturer brought on-staff exclusively to teach students the basics of a given field could also take the time to become quasi-advisors to students who are either considering future coursework in a given field, or pursuing a job in the specific subject area. New students, the ones who are most likely to take large, introductory classes, would appreciate the additional time available in the form of office hours that lecturers would be able to provide, compared to research professors.
Currently, tenure-track positions are only made available based on good scholarship and not necessarily good teaching ability. Universities typically have multiple purposes, and in the case of this University in particular, the research aspect of academia tends to loom the largest in the minds of the administration. However, placing an emphasis on undergraduate education at its most basic level shows the administration truly cares about developing new students and helping them excel in the fields of their choosing. Hiring tenure-track lecturers is the most cost-efficient, effective and productive way to achieve that goal.
Eric Xu is a Viewpoint writer.
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