I don't know of any top German econ dept where research is not viewed as the most important hiring criteria.you consider passau top?
Of course not.
German Market
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You are very dismissive without trying to make a more nuanced argument. Not really likeable.
But to the content: as d17e points out we see evidence that universities are realizing and acting upon the realization that for the bachelor-level teaching being a top researcher is not of positive value. Moreover, universities are incredibly slow-moving administrative monsters acting within a tight corset of rules set at the country level which historically classified every kind of "beyond high school"-education as university-level education. That is, splitting education in undergraduate and graduate in terms of institutions, where the former is taught by lecturers at a "vocational school" and the latter is taught by prolific researchers at universities is almost impossible to achieve and for sure not in a one-off. So, many people agreeing that there is no value in being an excellent researcher in bachelor-level teaching and observing that most countries did not implement a split in the education is not contradicting itself. And - to pick a teaching example - you cannot possibly believe that understanding in-depth the newest developments in asymptotic theory of regression discontinuity estimators is of any help to explain OLS and AR models to bachelor students.Being at the cutting edge of research [...] is (at best) without value for bachelor-level education.
1a5c here: That's where we disagree, so there is no point in discussing the remainder of your post. As I wrote before, most people seem to side with me (that this value is strictly positive), as evidenced by the way in which the overwhelming majority of developed countries have organised their university system. If, as you suggest, the value of quality research for Bachelor-level teaching was weakly negative, we would expect most countries to move Bachelor education to pure teaching institutions.
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You are very dismissive without trying to make a more nuanced argument.
Can't see why you are writing this. All I did was to point out that my disagreement was already at the beginning of d17e's post, as an explanation why I didn't engage with the rest of the post.
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As a reply to both d17e and 0b5e: Yes, some, but not all, UG teaching is delegated to adjuncts or TAs. This is true in the US, the UK, and Germany. Typically, it is the part of teaching that is more about practicing the methods taught in a module that is delegated to non-permanent staff. The part of the teaching that requires more general insight is usually allocated to active researchers and, believe it or not, there are ways to use the insights gained from producing original research to make these lectures much clearer and more engaging.
[By the way: Many adjuncts in the US, or Teaching Fellows in the UK, are very good researchers who enter such a position as a temporary solution while they still hope to find a full-time academic position eventually. This type of exploitation tells us less about the value of research experience in teaching but rather about market failure in the academic job market.]
Coming back to the original argument that universities should not hire accomplished researchers as Professors because that research experience wouldn't improve their teaching quality: The contradiction in this argument is that you use the example of PhD students and TAs being used in UG teaching as 'proof' why universities don't need research experience to teach these classes. That is to say, this type of teaching is already done by non-Professors. On the other hand, you argue that universities should hire even more research inactive people as Professors, although the existing allocation of more "mechanical" teaching to TAs and more "insightful" UG plus all PG teaching to research active Professors seems quite efficient.
In Germany, there are already very few permanent academic staff (a.k.a. Professoren) per student. Appointing even more glorified teachers and administrators to these few positions wouldn't leave much academic substance in universities. Furthermore, for a Professor who only focuses on teaching and admin, the teaching load in Germany is still very light. In other words, appointing weak or inactive researchers to positions that are designed to include quite some time for research is a waste of taxpayers' money. Fortunately, the market conditions have shifted towards a situation in which the opportunity costs of hiring your research-inactive buddy are so large that most Econ appointments seem to be largely in line with academic quality.
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0b5e here. Just quickly want to add that I did not really comment on the discussion that was going and which you reference in the lower two paragraphs. I just felt that what you (originally) said was a little bit too categorical in the sense that you were not even willing to think about good researchers not being the perfect teachers at all levels because then universities would not be needed anymore. I have no strong feelings about who universities should hire - neither in general nor for teaching. I just wanted to enrich your discussion by pointing out that your "good researchers are good teachers and therefore universities benefit on both fronts by hiring good researchers" claim is not one that everybody agrees on and that you can use as a premise for all further arguments.
As a reply to both d17e and 0b5e: [...]
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@0b5e: OK, then it seems like we agree that the statement "Research experience is an important determinant for the quality of some, but not all teaching at universities", but our disagreement in the extent of the former type of teaching - I think research experience is beneficial for most teaching at universities, whereas you think it's the other way round.
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As a reply to both d17e and 0b5e: Yes, some, but not all, UG teaching is delegated to adjuncts or TAs. This is true in the US, the UK, and Germany. Typically, it is the part of teaching that is more about practicing the methods taught in a module that is delegated to non-permanent staff. The part of the teaching that requires more general insight is usually allocated to active researchers and, believe it or not, there are ways to use the insights gained from producing original research to make these lectures much clearer and more engaging.
[By the way: Many adjuncts in the US, or Teaching Fellows in the UK, are very good researchers who enter such a position as a temporary solution while they still hope to find a full-time academic position eventually. This type of exploitation tells us less about the value of research experience in teaching but rather about market failure in the academic job market.]
Coming back to the original argument that universities should not hire accomplished researchers as Professors because that research experience wouldn't improve their teaching quality: The contradiction in this argument is that you use the example of PhD students and TAs being used in UG teaching as 'proof' why universities don't need research experience to teach these classes. That is to say, this type of teaching is already done by non-Professors. On the other hand, you argue that universities should hire even more research inactive people as Professors, although the existing allocation of more "mechanical" teaching to TAs and more "insightful" UG plus all PG teaching to research active Professors seems quite efficient.
In Germany, there are already very few permanent academic staff (a.k.a. Professoren) per student. Appointing even more glorified teachers and administrators to these few positions wouldn't leave much academic substance in universities. Furthermore, for a Professor who only focuses on teaching and admin, the teaching load in Germany is still very light. In other words, appointing weak or inactive researchers to positions that are designed to include quite some time for research is a waste of taxpayers' money. Fortunately, the market conditions have shifted towards a situation in which the opportunity costs of hiring your research-inactive buddy are so large that most Econ appointments seem to be largely in line with academic quality.No offense, but I think you are moving the goal post a bit: there's a difference between claiming professors need Top5 CVs and professors need to be better than deadwood. I think no one would object to the waste the deadwood professors in the German system are. But you can be a decent researcher without Top5 publications and I think there are enough of those in the system that a dichotomy Top5/deadwood is empirically not true. I would say professors that are active in research (and policy stuff as well) have positive impact on their teaching but the difference between decent and Top5 in contribution to teaching is likely small/nonexistent. I would love to see an empirical paper on this ;)
And adjuncts being Top5 researchers??? Come on. There may be decent researchers amongst them but an adjunct with Top pubs would be very non-representative. (Maybe due to Covid or personal reasons but otherwise just not reality)
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No offense, but I think you are moving the goal post a bit: there's a difference between claiming professors need Top5 CVs and professors need to be better than deadwood.
That wasn't my intention. I couldn't agree more that any obsession with top 5 publications prevents departments from making the best possible appointments, at least under the current market conditions (where most applicants have at most very few publications in that category).
I think no one would object to the waste the deadwood professors in the German system are.
Many posters in this thread would (or maybe it's just one posting from different IPs). Indeed, the post to which I first replied today was the latest in a whole series of posts that claimed that departments shouldn't hire successful researchers as they wouldn't care about teaching and admin.
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I think this is a good discussion, and I agree with much of what has been said in favor of hiring based on research excellence. Of course it is not necessary for a decent hire to have a top 5, but truth is that many of the hires we saw in the last decade do not even have top field publications, especially in areas outside of core econ such as environmental, finance, or accounting. I believe that research is a key criterion for a position and at least from my own experience as a student, there seems to be a strong positive correlation between excellence in research and teaching. Btw - it shouldn't be too difficult to relate faculty research output to teaching evals, placements etc, including finding shocks to all of these things... AER, here I come.
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Falls jemand für die Lehre ein nettes Beispiel für die "absence of evidence = evidence of absence" fallacy sucht: SH-Tweet vom 18.11.:
"In a randomized controlled trial, Danish researchers did not find face masks effective at conventional levels of statistical significance.Put simply, face masks are useless."
In dieser Studie (https://doi.org/10.7326/M20-6817) gab es ein dünnes Treatment (Intervention: Encouragement to follow social distancing measures for coronavirus disease 2019, plus either no mask recommendation or a recommendation to wear a mask when outside the home among other persons together with a supply of 50 surgical masks and instructions for proper use.). Die Autoren merken außerdem an, dass lediglich der Selbstschutz gemessen wurde und sie zum Fremdschutz keine Aussagen machen können.
In der Treatmentgruppe (n = 3.030) haben sich 42 Teilnehmer (1,8%) infiziert, in der Kontrollgruppe (n = 2.994) 53 (2,1%). Die Infektionsreduktion von 1/7 ist bei diesen niedrigen Zahlen nicht signifikant...
Aus dieser Studie den Schluss "face masks are useless" zu ziehen, ist schon eine Leistung.
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It’s so silly. He had a job there before and left after a few months. How is he surprised that they don’t want him back?
The master of vir.tue sig.nalling, Rudi, is behaving like a cry-baby on Twitter because he got rejected at Frankfurt.
However, anyone knows who got accepted instead? -
It’s so silly. He had a job there before and left after a few months. How is he surprised that they don’t want him back?
The master of vir.tue sig.nalling, Rudi, is behaving like a cry-baby on Twitter because he got rejected at Frankfurt.
However, anyone knows who got accepted instead?
Did he sound surprised?
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I hope your post is meant as a description of this situation, and not in defense of this bad equilibrium.
Not an equilibrium:
Lots of researchers that are really pushing out one Top 5 after the other, but no one teaches the large classes, no one heads the hiring comittees, no one organizes the seminars, no one deals with student lawsuits, no one manages the department, no one goes to the Senate meetpush outings, etc.If all researchers at all universities churn out top 5 after top 5 nonstop, then we definitely need more top 5 journals, say 25-30.
The cult of the top 5 is strong in this thread. -
I hope your post is meant as a description of this situation, and not in defense of this bad equilibrium.
Not an equilibrium:
Lots of researchers that are really pushing out one Top 5 after the other, but no one teaches the large classes, no one heads the hiring comittees, no one organizes the seminars, no one deals with student lawsuits, no one manages the department, no one goes to the Senate meetpush outings, etc.If all researchers at all universities churn out top 5 after top 5 nonstop, then we definitely need more top 5 journals, say 25-30.
The cult of the top 5 is strong in this thread.Especially from people who most likely have never published a Top 5. There are still not so many in Germany who can do that and those who can do not post here.
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It’s so silly. He had a job there before and left after a few months. How is he surprised that they don’t want him back?
The master of vir.tue sig.nalling, Rudi, is behaving like a cry-baby on Twitter because he got rejected at Frankfurt.
However, anyone knows who got accepted instead?
Did he sound surprised?
No but weird to post it at all.
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@0b5e: OK, then it seems like we agree that the statement "Research experience is an important determinant for the quality of some, but not all teaching at universities", but our disagreement in the extent of the former type of teaching - I think research experience is beneficial for most teaching at universities, whereas you think it's the other way round.
Is research experience in terms of having a top 5 better for teaching compared to decent ranked publications. I don’t think so unless you teach PhD level. Which brings us back to the point that small universities do not care about top 5