Bob Owen, associate dean of LS&A, stated that he would give junior faculty members that same advice if he were in a position to do so.

Bob: If I put myself in the role of a department chair, I would probably counsel an assistant professor to hold off on their involvement until they got their own research effort going. After that hurdle I think that faculty can be more free to get involved in projects of this sort. The bias certainly would be toward tenured and full professors.

Tim Killeen, professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences, expanded on Bob's point, using a junior faculty colleague of his as an example.

Tim: Lisa Curran [School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE)] is very dynamic, passionate, and valuable for the classroom element, particularly for something like global environmental change. So we want to bring her in, but we don't want to damage her prospects for tenure track.

Below, Lisa Curran, a junior faculty member herself, questioned how changes might be made so that the reward structure recognizes teaching efforts in team settings like the Global Change course.

Lisa: If you teach your regular load and you team-teach on the side, team-teaching counts for less, and I think people want to see that change. The question is, how do we implement it?

Ben van der Pluijm, geology professor, said there needs to be a change not only in the way teaching time factors into tenure considerations, but also in the way that preparation time is calculated. According to him, "prep" time is especially important in the Global Change course because it requires multiple professors to synchronize their lectures.

Ben: Dealing with the large amount of prep time to teach this kind of course is the major problem that you run into with interdisciplinarity. That is why we need to talk about it. The current organizational structure does not have that solution built in, because it still counts your hours in the class as your teaching load. In other courses you can wing a class but you can't here because if I am not done, George will simply say, "Friday is my turn, so if you didn't get to formation of oxygen in the atmosphere that ruins my class." So, it's very different and that is what people don't realize until you've done it and the administration has heard enough about it. It is a fundamental structural change that the university will have to make, but that's got to be very expensive. We are talking about a fundamental change of how we see and how we spend our time.

George: I put in about ten hours a week, which is 25% of my work time, but I don't give any lectures, and as Ben said, if other people haven't had the experience, I really don't think they appreciate it. They just think you are making it up.

According to Lisa Curran, the types of challenges George talked about are due to the type of pressures that characterize research universities. Despite this, however, she observed that her colleagues are taking steps to change the way administrators value teaching.

Lisa: Let's face it, in the end, this is a research institution. And so one of the difficulties if you enjoy teaching--and I actually love it--is how will the standards reflect that? I think the provost, Tim Killeen certainly, and a number of people are trying to change how much teaching is worth in a tenure process versus just counting publications, per se. And Nancy Cantor [provost] has been pressuring deans and chairsÉThe questions that abound are: How do we make the review process more equitable for this teaching service? And how do we then find people that want to do this--and there are many senior people who don't want to. One common theme is, "Oh, we've got to keep junior faculty out of this, because it's just too much work, and there are no rewards." Well that seems like a very defeatist attitude to me. I think that external reviews need to have recognition for these things, like having a website win an award. This could mean that an organization like NSF says that a review process must look at the impact of this work.

In order to change the value of teaching, teaching time must be fully calculated. As Lisa Curran said above, team teaching across departments does not get counted equally with teaching that goes on in a single department. Bob Owen suggested that courses be cross-listed to solve this problem.

Bob: One way to get around the problem of having professors teaching across departments, in terms of who gets credit, is to have courses cross-listed. So, there's been an effort to do that with what we call "university courses."

Another way to increase the value of teaching at the University is by creating professorships that reward quality teachers, according to a central administrator.

Central administrator: In the early '90s the university created professorships that recognize excellence in teaching. There are ten or twelve of these very distinguished professorships that provide rewards and prestige for faculty. Many steps have been taken at the department and college level which have produced a real turn-around.

Dan Mazmanian, dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment, said that, although he is not in a position to hand out rewards for good teaching, he does make sure that no one is penalized for teaching outside of his or her department.

Dan: I surely don't penalize participation in Global Change, but I'm also not on the promotion and tenure committee other faculty members are. So they have a reality to live with, which is a peer-based reality. I can do a lot, but when it comes time for a tenure decision, I can't walk in and say, because junior faculty member x spent a long time with Global Change, we're going to overlook, or treat him or her differently than others in terms of their research, in terms of their service to the school, and so on and so forth.

Susan (interviewer): Have you seen any situations where faculty who have been involved in this course, either at the core, or in a more peripheral way, have been penalized, from the stand point of tenure and reward?

Dan: Not in SNRE. Not in my school.

George Kling, biology professor explained that the tenure and reward structures at state schools should more closely resemble those of private universities where professors have more time to try innovative teaching methods.

George: Now, private universities have a lot more money to invest in reducing the overall time commitments of professors. That allows them to teach in this new kind of way. Columbia has twice as many Graduate Student Instructors as they do faculty, whereas we have about one-fifth. We have many more faculty than graduate student instructors. So they have a huge amount of money and resources to spend that we don't have. Stanford, Harvard--the same way. I don't know how that is going to work with state schools. That is why I think it has to be a very large systemic change that involves society.