MEGAN MCARDLE: Learning About Education the Hard Way.

Another possibility is that “Undergraduates are central to our mission” is a kind of polite public fiction within the university community, the sort of thing that everyone believes ought to be true but often isn’t, like “America is a great melting pot.” And I think there is some evidence of that. Consider, for example, the way faculty are hired and retained.

One of my favorite professors at the University of Pennsylvania, a truly gifted and amazing teacher, failed to get tenure the year I was a senior. After a grassroots campaign by his adoring students, the department reconsidered and gave him an extra year, after which he again failed to get tenure, and he went off to the West. I eventually got to ask someone else in the department why he’d been let go, and the answer was simple: His scholarly work was not impressive enough. So arguably the best and most beloved teacher in the department, the one whose class I have carried with me lo these 20 years and more, wasn’t good enough to teach undergraduates at Penn because he wasn’t publishing enough groundbreaking research.

Does that sound like an institution where educating undergraduates is central to the mission? Not really. Or at least: It is not central to the mission of the faculty, because if it were central, it would carry more weight in deciding who to hire and retain. Most of the professors I know who are trying to get tenure seem to spend a lot of time worrying about getting enough publications in the right journals, and comparatively little time worrying about whether their teaching skills are good enough to get them that golden ticket.

Compared to other institutions, university departments barely attempt to evaluate a professor’s skill at educating undergraduates — they do not, for example, spend much time supervising classrooms or trying to figure out how much the undergraduates have learned. Yes, they often look at student evaluations, but those are arguably better for measuring whether the teacher is good-looking or an easy grader than they are at measuring whether the students are, y’know, being educated.

So to people outside, teaching undergraduates seems like a nice thing that the faculty would like to do, or at least persuade someone else to do, rather than an overriding priority. Individual professors may consider this central to their own mission, but the faculty as a body don’t seem to focus on it much.

Indeed.