University Education Dilemma: The Challenge of Balancing Teaching with Scholarship

When engineering professors are reviewed for tenure and promotion at the end of 5 years as an assistant professor, the expectations related to scholarly output include a minimum number of published refereed articles in top-tier journals varying from three to over a dozen. In addition, some engineering institutions require that professors have secured grants that at a minimum are equivalent to their salary for all 5 years. With the reduced availability of grants and increasing competition for having manuscripts published, the requirements for tenure become less attainable, and many assistant professors either leave academia before being reviewed for tenure and enter the engineering industry or are denied tenure when they become eligible at the beginning of their 6th year in academia.

If tenure-track professors are focusing on writing grants, conducting research, writing scholarly manuscripts, reviewing manuscripts, editing journals, and presenting the results of their research at conferences, these activities reduce the amount of time they have available for preparing course notes and materials, writing homework assignments and examinations, conducting lectures, grading assignments and examinations, and holding office hours. Achieving some type of balance between research and scholarship is becoming more difficult for academics; they are evaluated on their achievements in both scholarship and teaching, yet at different times their focus is on only one of these two areas. Newly hired academics who have recently completed their Ph.D. might be teaching courses for the first time in their career, yet during their first year in an academic position their focus needs to be on writing research proposals or they will fall behind in their pursuit of scholarly achievements. In order to meet minimum tenure requirements, academics typically pursue scholarly achievements according to the timeline shown in Table 1.

Unfortunately, the first year of an academic career normally entails developing courses and teaching them for the first time without any prior education on how to teach courses. Teaching evaluations occur each year, as contrasted with evaluations for scholarship, which may occur only at years 3 and 6; therefore, tenure-track professors tend to focus on teaching rather than on scholarship during their first year in academia. Newly hired tenure-track professors may have little or no knowledge about how to write appropriate proposals unless they are mentored by a senior faculty member who provides insight into funding agencies, procedures, processes, and cycles.

If engineering professors focus on their teaching when they are first hired because they choose to do so, or have heavy teaching loads, or are required to teach a variety of courses, this focus will extend the timeline shown in Table 1 by at least a year, potentially precluding their attainment of tenure at the beginning of their sixth year. If faculty members have performance reviews on a yearly basis for reappointment or are reviewed at the end of their third year, professors who focus on teaching their first year could conceivably not be reappointed at the end of the third year because they will not have been able to publish the results of their research by the third year. Some universities reappoint engineering professors at the end of their third year based on publications from their Ph.D. dissertation research and the attainment of external research funding, because it demonstrates that they will potentially produce scholarly publications based on the results of their funded research by the time they are being reviewed for tenure in their sixth year. But the time dedicated to producing publications based on their research could compromise their teaching during the first few years in their tenure-track position.

With the increased burden of requirements for teaching and scholarship for tenure-track professors, it might be an appropriate time for some universities to commingle traditional hiring models for tenure-track faculty with short-term contract models for hiring faculty such as industry professors, professors of practice, or fixed-term professors who focus exclusively on teaching higher numbers of courses (usually four per semester) than tenure-track faculty members. Industry professors, professors of practice, and fixed-term professors may have either a Ph.D. or a master’s degree, but they normally are required to have a minimum number of years of industry work experience. Hiring these types of professors helps to reduce the teaching loads of traditional tenure-track professors, allowing tenure-track professors more time to focus on scholarly pursuits during the tenure process and enabling engineering departments to obtain more research funding.

Faculty members who are not tenure track could be hired as full-time faculty members for periods of 1, 2, or 3 years with the potential of having their contracts renewed at the end of the contract period after an appropriate review process. The faculty members in these positions are not required to conduct research, but they may be involved in advising students, assisting with student organizations, and participating in other department initiatives. Non-tenure-track faculty members are usually paid less than tenure-track faculty members, and it is easier to terminate their contracts at the end of the contract period than it is to terminate tenure-track faculty members because tenure-track faculty members are still employed for 1 year after they are denied tenure. Because non-tenure-track faculty members are not obligated to conduct research, they are able to focus exclusively on teaching, potentially increasing the quality of the teaching in engineering departments.

The constraints imposed on tenure-track and tenured faculty members in engineering departments make it difficult for them to balance their teaching requirements with scholarly pursuits. Sometimes, rather than attempting to achieve a balance between these two areas, tenure-track faculty members focus on one area to the exclusion of the other. Even if this exclusive focus lasts only one year, it could have a negative impact over the next few years of their career and possibly lead to denial of tenure. If tenure-track faculty members do not have a mentor, it is important for the department head, or the members of the committees that review their yearly progress, to provide guidance on the milestones they have to achieve during each of the 5 years before their review for tenure. Accomplishing yearly achievement milestones, such as those listed in Table 1, could help tenure-track faculty $members$ balance achievement of these milestones with their teaching requirements during each of the 5 years before tenure review.

Using professors hired on fixed-term contracts who have industry experience could help ease the teaching burden on tenure-track and tenured professors and provide them with additional time to pursue funded research grants and to publish in scholarly journals. Having fixed-term professors in engineering departments could also lead to an improvement in the quality of teaching because the fixed-term faculty members would focus exclusively on teaching.