EDITORIAL BOARD Christine Byrd
Editor in Chief
Michael Litschi
Managing Editor
Jonah Lalas
Viewpoint Editor
Barbara Ortutay
News Editor
Amy Golod
Staff Representative
Timothy Kudo
Staff Representative
Brian O’Camb
Staff Representative
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Quality teachers needed … if they’re good
researchers.” That’s the message UCLA seems to be
sending to the faculty and student body.
Last week, a group of 19 students, including Student Regent
Justin Fong, were arrested at a sit-in demanding geography
Professor Joshua Muldavin be granted tenure. Though the Editorial
Board does not have a position on this specific case, the incident
raises important questions about the tenure process and the
university’s academic priorities.
Once granted tenure, a professor is hired by the university with
protection from termination, giving them a significant amount of
academic freedom. This is important to professors because it gives
them the leeway to do controversial research or go against the
university’s predominant ideology without fear of getting
fired.
The problem is the ambiguity of the criteria for granting
tenure. Currently, the tenure process takes a professor’s
research accomplishments, community service and teaching ability
into consideration. As some undergraduate students have pointed
out, these qualifications aren’t of equal importance because,
as Chancellor Carnesale has reiterated, this is a research
institution. This biases the tenure process in favor of professors
who can do the research but can’t teach the material.
UCLA seems to have a double-standard: you can be an excellent
researcher and a mediocre teacher and still get tenure, but you
can’t get tenure if you’re an excellent teacher and a
mediocre researcher.
Though there may be exceptions, having excellent research skills
does not equate to talented teaching. When a balance between these
two aspects of a professorship is not made, it’s the students
who are cheated.
Research is, without a doubt, essential to this university,
especially for graduate students and undergraduate students in
research-intensive programs. But good research is worth little if
students do not have professors with the exceptional ability to
inspire them and help them think critically. Good teaching skills
are especially important in lower-division undergraduate courses,
since these courses lay the foundation for a student’s
academic career.
But it’s not just the bias toward research that needs to
be reduced. The university also needs to address the bias against
professors who espouse different or unpopular ideologies.
Allowing personal politics to get involved in deciding whether
to recommend a professor for tenure is unfair to students and
departments. It denies students a faculty with diverse points of
view and minimizes the opportunity for them to think critically
about different opinions, since they receive little or no exposure
to alternative viewpoints.
Strong academic departments are those in which the research and
opinions of professors are challenged by colleagues who disagree
with them. Having a homogenous faculty whose opinions are
predictable and who offer little challenge to each other will
likely lead to stale research and weak work. The lack of
intellectual diversity is detrimental to the university.
More importantly, this can harm professors with excellent
research that falls outside of the dominant paradigm or is
controversial.
One way of assessing a professor’s qualifications while
minimizing personal bias is to give faculty from different academic
backgrounds outside of the department a greater role in evaluating
the tenure candidate’s work. Regardless of their home
department, experienced professors are capable of identifying a
candidate capable of working and teaching at the university level.
This would help ensure students have a more ideologically diverse
as well as balanced curriculum.
Another way of ensuring that students receive quality teaching
is by granting an associate professor position ““ with tenure
““ to candidates who are recognized as excellent teachers but
are not considered up to par in their research. This means students
are not robbed of good teachers and gives those devoted to teaching
an outlet for their talents. It also allows associate professors to
continue improving their research in pursuit of a full professor
position.
Though most undergraduate students are only here for about four
years, they are familiar with a professor’s ability to
teach.
The protest and campaigning by Muldavin’s supporters
reveals that students feel they have little say in the tenure
process. Student voices should in some way be heard by the tenure
committees to help strike that necessary balance between teaching,
research and service.
It’s truly unfortunate that conflict has to exist between
a university’s research aspirations and its students’
need to be taught by skilled teachers. But as long as teaching and
intellectual diversity is undervalued, this will continue to be the
case.