Hiring, Tenure and Promotion at the New Baylor

Charles A. Weaver, III, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Immediate Past Chair, Faculty Senate

Excerpt

... The message new faculty members are hearing is clear: publish, and publish well. Does this mean that Baylor no longer values teaching? Not necessarily. Too often this discussion misses the point entirely. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard indignant rejections of the assertion that publication and teaching excellence are mutually exclusive. The problem with this indignation is that no one ever asserted that productive scholars were incapable teachers in the first place. This has become the 'lie repeated often enough,' unfortunately. What is beyond debate, however, is that an increased emphasis on publication must come at the expense of something, usually the amount of teaching. Newly hired Baylor faculty members simply don't teach as much as they once did. Further, I do believe that Baylor tolerates mediocre teaching' competent, mind you, but not exceptional' to a much greater degree than it once did. As an institution, we have fairly well settled on the lower bounds of 'acceptable' scholarly output. We have a number of faculty who have been denied tenure in the past five years because they did not publish enough. We are still exploring the lower bounds of teaching effectiveness.