alt Hacker NewsTeaching is not really relevant in the hiring process of professors.
I saw several committees for prof position and teaching is treated like a checkmark. You should done it and provide a small sample lecture (which you prepare much more than your average lecture) and don't have to suck at it. After this checkbox, the differentiating factors are about citations and how much grant money you can/could/do have... (Western Europe, maybe somewhere else it's different).
Replies
Can confirm this. Teaching is a pass / fail grade for new professors to get tenure in most places. Your ability to get grant funding and publish highly cited papers are astronomically more important to the university than your teaching abilities.
I was told by a seminar speaker one time about a pre-tenure professor who was awarded his University's highest teaching award one day. The very next day he was denied tenure because he didn't publish enough.
I recommend reading the book "Tenure Hacks" [1] to anyone interested in pursuing a career as a tenured professor. I don't agree with all of the points in the book, but it is an important and eye-opening alternative perspective to the typical narrative surrounding academic positions.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Tenure-hacks-secrets-making-tenure/dp...
I feel terrible for the idea of jugding academics based on the amount of grant money they can get... It feels like encouraging a lot of smart people to find ways to waste money, even when they know that they don't really need that much for their project.
I would say teaching is not that relevant specifically for most tenure-track positions at big research universities. It is absolutely something you need to demonstrate some actual experience and proficiency with if you get a position at a small liberal arts college or a community college, where tuition is basically how they keep the lights on.
I’d also say that even at an R1, teaching volume at an acceptable quality is sometimes rewarded if your college within the university is very undergrad-heavy, because it can be part of how the university apportions funds to departments. So, it wouldn’t matter at a med school, but potentially a little in arts and sciences, though still in distant second to research.
There are also a small but increasing number of tenure track teaching-focused positions at big research universities. These folks typically help design and teach the biggest intro lectures and/or other very time- and labor-intensive courses. There are fewer of these positions than I’d like to see in an ideal world, but not zero.