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Are good teachers also good researchers? Does spending more time on research improve one's teaching? Or does research get in the way of good teaching performance? It seems everyone has his own theory about this, some thinking that teaching and research are substitutes (you hear that mostly in teaching colleges) or complements (research universities think that). What about some empirical evidence on the matter?
Aurora García-Gallego, Nikolaso Georgantzís, Joan Martín-Montaner and Teodosio Pérez-Amaral provide this for a Spanish university. It turns out research and teaching are complements, at least for that university. What I find striking is that the professors who perform the most research also teach the most, and do it better. Those doing no research are among the worst teachers. That seems like the way a social planner would do it: Get the best people to work their ass off, while the worst should be kept away from anything productive. That is the way to increase productivity. That does not seem very fair, though, unless pay is tied to performance, which is not likely in this case. And how this study can generalize to other universities is not clear, especially as we do not know much about the university in this case.
Aurora García-Gallego, Nikolaso Georgantzís, Joan Martín-Montaner and Teodosio Pérez-Amaral provide this for a Spanish university. It turns out research and teaching are complements, at least for that university. What I find striking is that the professors who perform the most research also teach the most, and do it better. Those doing no research are among the worst teachers. That seems like the way a social planner would do it: Get the best people to work their ass off, while the worst should be kept away from anything productive. That is the way to increase productivity. That does not seem very fair, though, unless pay is tied to performance, which is not likely in this case. And how this study can generalize to other universities is not clear, especially as we do not know much about the university in this case.
6 comments:
Did they not control at all for tenure, or seniority in any way? It seems like an obvious variable that would drive both teaching load and research effort (and would explain why the two seem correlated, since instructors have to meet standards for both before tenure). It's absurd that the word 'tenure' only appears once in the whole paper!
As far as I understand it, professors have tenure from the start in Spain. So it is a useless variable here.
This just shows why incentives are broken in Southern European universities (Spain, Italy, Greece, I do not know about Portugal). Tenure is very easy to get, and the only professors who put any heart into their work are going to be better than the others in both teaching and research. The deadwood, and there are many of them, stink on both dimensions. Have a different incentive system that would get the majority to put in a reasonable effort, and the results of this study would be very different.
So, no, one cannot generalize this result.
To clarify: research universities in Spain (Pompeu Fabra, Carlos III, UAB) do not have tenure from the start. They have a tenure system similar to the US.
I have never heard of Jaume I before though. Don't know how it works there, or if they do any research at all.
One could be even more precise: all Spanish universities grant tenure from the onset, but the ones mentioned above hire first on time contracts to emulate the US tenure system.
My bad, I totally didn't think about alternate tenure rules.
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