Teaching Will Never Rise In Reward System In Higher Education, UB Sociologist Says

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Teaching will never be as lucrative as research in the reward system of higher education and continuing to blame the emphasis on research for a perceived neglect of teaching is foolish and counterproductive, a University at Buffalo sociologist maintains.

In fact, most colleges and universities should lighten the teaching loads of faculty members so they would have more time to conduct research, says Lionel S. Lewis, UB professor of sociology.

In a new book, "Marginal Worth: Teaching and the Academic Labor Market" (1996, Transaction Publishers), Lewis notes that it is the pursuit of scholarship that makes a college professor more than just a school teacher.

"He or she has the responsibility to enlarge the knowledge of his or her discipline," he writes, adding that "people who do research are better teachers.

"Those who want to teach without doing research must accept the consequences," he says.

Using concepts from economics, particularly from the labor-market model and sociology, Lewis examines the contemporary academic labor market to explain why teaching -- which is almost universally acknowledged to be at the center of the American educational experience -- is only modestly rewarded.

The evidence collected and analyzed by Lewis -- including letters, reports and other documents provided by 15 academic administrators and senior faculty from across the country -- suggests that this is not the case because teaching is not a particularly productive activity, its quality is hard to measure, it does not generate automatic prestige, most students do not learn a great deal and in many instances, other matters absorb the attention of faculty.

It is research that brings prestige to an institution, Lewis says. It is an activity that can be easily assessed; research can contribute to teaching, but teaching does not contribute to research, he adds.

"To reward teaching would be to go against all economic theory."

Faculty are paid what the market thinks they are worth, he says, noting that the market value rises for those with special abilities or unique characteristics because they cannot be easily replaced. "Those who teach and do research are rarer than those who simply teach, and they get paid more," he writes. "If the remuneration for those who only teach and those who teach and do research were made more comparable, then the supply and demand would be thrown out of balance and fewer academics would spend time doing research."

Moreover, there is little evidence that students want to learn much beyond what is needed to graduate or to get a job. "Learning simply for the pleasure of learning is not highly valued in student culture," he says, noting that most undergraduates learn next to nothing, forget most of that and are hardly changed by the college experience.

Even the best and the brightest students do not select the most prestigious colleges or universities -- those where undergraduates are said to be ignored -- because of the quality of the teaching. In fact, they choose a school largely because of its reputation and the prestige a degree from that institution will bring to their career prospects.

"Given what students get from their undergraduate years, there is no way to determine if colleges or universities are going a good job. There is no way of knowing if teaching were assessed better, and effort and outcome more adequately rewarded, students would get a better educationÉThus, there is little reason to change the distribution of rewards in colleges and universities if the goal is primarily to improve the education of undergraduates."

The academic marketplace operates in such a way that teaching is at most a marginal consideration in the evaluation of individuals, Lewis writes. Academics are not rewarded for teaching and only marginally for research. Longevity and seniority bring merit raises, as does administrative work; discipline, i.e., physicists earn more than historians, and type of institution, with faculty members at research institutions earning more than those at liberal arts colleges.

The disparity in how the academic labor market works, how it is thought to work, and how it is thought it should work frustrates academics, making them feel unappreciated, he says. In addition, the frequent and public criticisms of higher education and the quality of teaching by people such as William Bennett, Allan Bloom and Lynne Cheney add fuel to the fire.

Teaching is an intrinsically motivated activity, Lewis contends. "It is a calling, rather than a career; if one enjoys teaching that should be reward enough," he says.

Teaching will be rewarded only if it goes hand in hand with research, Lewis asserts. Research is so important, he says, that faculty members with heavy teaching loads might need to have them reduced to make time for research.

"It clearly makes more sense than the oft-heard contention that the definition of scholarship should be broadened to include teaching (or the preparation for teaching). This would have no effect on the academic labor market," Lewis concludes.