For Boyce Watkins, classes are the least of his worries.

He’s an assistant professor of finance at Syracuse University, so technically he has to teach a couple each semester, but he doesn’t need to focus on them. At least not if he wants to get tenure, he said.

Published research, he’s been told time and again, is more important than teaching. At a recent staff meeting at the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, a senior faculty member put it plainly.

The only thing that matters for tenure is getting research published in premier journals, the faculty member said, according to Watkins.

‘The pressure is huge,’ said Watkins, who does not have tenure. ‘It’s basically like being an actor and somebody saying, ‘If you don’t win an Oscar, then you suck.”

Though he works hard to make sure he is still well-prepared for his classes, they sometimes get lost in the shuffle, Watkins said.

Watkins’ dilemma is typical of university faculty across the country, a problem that some universities are trying to solve. A recent task force on education at Harvard University advised that teaching should be given equal significance as research in determining salary, underscoring the trouble between the two competing pursuits.

The problem is simple. Professors, such as Watkins, must choose to focus on either teaching or research. Whichever they choose, the quality of the other will suffer.

The length of time spent on research can hurt the professor’s performance in the classroom, said Keith Bybee, associate professor of political science in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

‘There’s only so many hours in the day,’ he said, ‘there’s only so much time you can devote to any one task and if you’re putting a lot of time into one thing, that’s going to mean less time for other things. So I think people emphasizing research, almost by definition, are going to be putting less time into teaching.’

Where professors choose to spend their time, on teaching or research, differs on a school by school basis, said faculty members at SU.

For Tula Goenka, a recently-tenured television, radio and film professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, teaching often prevented her from focusing on research, she said. Unlike Watkins, her heavy course load often got in the way of her work with documentaries and South Asian film work.

‘It’s very time-consuming to be teaching students and especially teaching them in the creative field,’ Goenka said. ‘Because it’s not like we go lecture and then correct papers at the end of the semester.’

But SU’s teaching culture is strong and in many ways ahead of Harvard’s, said Kal Alston, associate provost for academic affairs. SU values and financially rewards good teaching, and students at SU are more likely to deal with a professor rather than a teaching assistant, not true for the undergrads at a school like Harvard, she said.

‘I think we have had a culture in which teaching is very important,’ Alston said. ‘It’s equally important to research in the tenure process, in the promotion process, in the annual evaluation of tenured faculty.’

Alston also said professors should use their research in the classroom, letting students learn about the newest discoveries in a subject.

Other professors at SU, however, said because research is easier to evaluate and can be more marketable, it is often considered more important than quality teaching.

Research is given more weight because there is no definitive, empirical way to assess what is truly good teaching, said Marvin Druger, chairman of the department of science teaching in the School of Education.

‘You can look at someone’s papers and you can read them and evaluate them, while it’s very hard to evaluate someone’s teaching,’ said Druger, who won a Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence award from the university.

Still, the administration has tried to improve teaching throughout the years, he said.

‘I think it counts a lot more in tenure and promotion that it did in the past,’ Druger said. ‘But basically major universities focus on grants and research. And teaching always seems to be secondary.’

Furthermore, a school’s reputation often hinges not on the teaching quality, but on the acclaim it receives from cutting edge researchers, said Randal Elder, associate professor of accounting.

‘You can do a good job in a classroom,’ he said, ‘but it’s very hard to translate that classroom performance into a reputation that would be marketable, transferable to other locations, whereas if you are effective as a researcher, you establish a national reputation. And that has value in the marketplace.’

Newhouse, however, is different, said Lawrence Mason, professor of visual and interactive communications and chairman of the Newhouse tenure committee.

Though research does tend to draw graduate students to the school, undergraduates choose Newhouse for a different reason.

‘Our undergraduates, I think, come here because we have a reputation for turning out people who are successful in the industry,’ said Mason, referring to famous graduates such as Ted Koppel, Bob Costas and Mike Tirico.

The school puts a premium on teaching, especially in the tenure process, Mason said. Members of the tenure committee try to observe each candidate more than once and often in more than one type of class.

David Rubin, dean of Newhouse, assesses all of the student evaluations of junior faculty members and gives them advice on how to improve, Mason said.

Also, the tenure models at Newhouse let professors be flexible, allowing them to choose what they want to focus on, Mason said. They are able to concentrate on either being excellent teachers, excellent researchers or a combination of both.

Newhouse professor Goenka fit into that third model. While working toward tenure, she tried to equally concentrate on her teaching skills coming from a non-academic background as a film editor and her creative research on documentaries.

For Watkins, the assistant finance professor, his choices for tenure are more limited.

‘Ultimately, if I’m going up for tenure at SU, I would much rather be an expert or top-notch researcher than a top-notch teacher, if I’m really trying to get tenure,’ Watkins said.

‘So that says that while SU is better than a lot of universities – a lot of research universities – it’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.’

Published on April 2, 2007 at 12:00 pm