Are Tenured Professors Really Worse Teachers? A Lit Review
Earlier this month, a team of researchers at Northwestern University, including the school’s president, Morton Schapiro, released a paper titled, “Are Tenured Professors Better Teachers?” Their answer, based on eight years of the school’s student records, was essentially no. On average, tenure-line profs actually underperformed compared to their tenure-ineligible colleagues, at least when it came to the task of teaching first-term freshmen.
I’m not writing about this paper for a second time now because I particularly love my alma mater. Rather, this isolated, interesting study on a very specific university — with results that might not be generalizable beyond a handful of similar institutions — has managed to cause a great deal of controversy in academic circles, where some have interpreted it as a politically motivated attack on the entire institution of tenure.
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