"As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado"

I have little to add to what Rob, Dana, or Erik have offered on the subject, but I’d like to grit my teeth audibly for a moment and urge Ezra Klein and others to stop conflating “academics” with “the relatively small number of professors employed at one of the 946 doctorate- and master’s-granting universities in the United States.”

Kids whose parents work at community colleges also “grew up around academics,” as did kids whose parents work at four-year institutions where scholarship is regarded by administrators as a quaint hobby — like collecting equine figurines or roaming the beach with a metal detector — that professors indulge in because they’re never quite abandoned the habits they acquired in graduate school. Dana’s certainly right that for professors employed at schools formerly known as Research-I institutions, teaching likely “won’t matter a hill of beans when it comes time for tenure evaluations.” Applied to the profession as a whole, though, that statement makes little sense. At most schools, teaching and university/community service provide the sole basis for tenure and promotion decisions.

All that aside, the gimmick at Texas A&M — offering $10G as a reward for good evaluations — is a terribly misguided allocation of resources. In immediate terms, it’s little more than an invitations for professors to debase themselves in front of their students. If the administration at A&M were serious about improving classroom performance, they’d invest quite a bit more money in pedagogical training for their graduate students; hiring more professors and reducing class sizes; offering release-time for professors to design new courses; and so on and so forth. But since they’re clearly not serious, this is what they’re offering instead.

To that degree, Klein has the problem entirely backwards. To substitute one sloppy generalization for another, it would nevertheless be more correct to say that it’s not “academics” who hate teaching, but administrators. By their works ye shall know them.