We discuss some centrally important decisions faced by colleges and universities regarding how to staff their undergraduate classrooms. We describe the multitasking problem faced by research-intensive institutions and explore the degree to which there may be a trade-off between research and teaching excellence using matched student-faculty-level data from Northwestern University. We present two alternative measures of teaching effectiveness—one capturing “deep learning” and one capturing “inspiration”—and demonstrate that neither is correlated with measures of research success. We discuss the move toward contingent faculty in US universities and show that on average, contingent faculty outperform tenure-line faculty in the introductory classroom, a pattern driven by the lowest-performing instructors according to our measures. We also present some of the ways in which instructor gender, race, and ethnicity might matter. Together, these pieces of evidence show that several institutional objectives associated with staffing undergraduate classrooms may be in tension with one another.

中文翻译：

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为高等教育课堂配备人员

我们讨论了学院和大学在如何为本科教室配备人员方面面临的一些重要决定。我们描述了研究密集型机构面临的多任务处理问题，并使用来自西北大学的匹配的学生教师级数据探索研究和教学卓越之间可能存在的权衡程度。我们提出了两种教学效果的替代衡量标准——一种捕捉“深度学习”，一种捕捉“灵感”——并证明两者都与研究成功的衡量标准无关。我们讨论了美国大学向临时教师的转变，并表明平均而言，临时教师在介绍性课堂上的表现优于终身教职人员，根据我们的衡量标准，这种模式是由表现最差的教师驱动的。我们还介绍了教师性别、种族和民族可能很重要的一些方式。总之，这些证据表明，与为本科教室配备人员相关的几个机构目标可能相互矛盾。