Budget cuts. Furloughs. Swine flu. The university may be able to add another item to its list of woes: too few teaching awards.
It may not seem like a big deal, but teaching awards can really count when graduate students begin their job hunts, graduate students said.
“When we’re out on the job market, it’s, in general, saturated with PhDs,” graduate student Aaron Tobiason said. “And you need anything you can to be able to stand out.”
No one knows exactly how many awards the university actually gives out, but Ken Holum, the former chair of the University Senate — the university’s highest advisory body — said asking around has led him to conclude there aren’t enough. That could make it hard for graduate students to compete in the job market with graduates from other schools. More awards would also encourage good teaching rather than just good research, he said.
“This means we’re missing an opportunity to reward good teaching in a systematic way,” Holum said.
Graduate Student Government President Anu Kothari agreed, saying there aren’t enough awards for graduate students and the deficit highlights how they are often short-changed at this university.
“It’s definitely not good for [graduate students’] morale,” she said. “It strengthens the idea that awards are for faculty, and graduate students are treated more like employees. And they are not given access to as many awards as faculty are, and that’s really unfortunate since a lot of the teaching burden really falls on us.”
Last year, the Senate Educational Affairs Committee reviewed the issue but was unable to determine how many awards there were. Earlier this month, the Senate Executive Committee sent a letter to Provost Nariman Farvardin asking him to compile a list.
Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs Ellin Scholnick, who was put in charge of the project, said she would search department websites and electronic newsletters for information about the awards rather than conducting a labor-intensive survey. She said she did not know when the process would start or how long it would take to complete.
If it turns out that Holum is right, adding more awards may be appropriate, she said. But she emphasized that awards are not the only way to encourage good teaching.
“It’s not just the formal awards per se, it’s the building of the culture in which it’s expected that there be good teaching that’s ultimately the issue,” Scholnick said.
Quality of teaching and research are weighed when departments perform salary reviews, Scholnick said, but Holum said teaching too often gets the short end of the stick.
“In theory faculty members, professors, are promoted in part because of their teaching,” he said. “I think … that actually good teaching has very little weight.”
Holum suggested additional teaching awards should come with monetary rewards, although he said that might not be possible right now with the economy struggling.
Tobiason, a Senate Executive Committee member, said he’s not sure if there are too few awards but that it’s important to not go overboard with creating new ones.
“The easy answer would be of course we need more awards for teaching assistants,” Tobiason said. “At a certain point it becomes the issue if that there are so many you water down the ‘pop’ of each one.”
cox@umdbk.com
