I grew up among academics. And I have never since met a class of people so contemptuous of teaching. You'd think they were being asked to chew mud.
When in the course of making blanket statements based on what amount to personal anecdotes, Ezra should probably pause to consider whether he knows any academics who value teaching. Like, say, me, or Scott. It's true that some academics are contemptuous of teaching, and that undergraduate education isn't well supported institutionally in either the production or employment of most academics. However, many (in fact, most) others enjoy teaching, and make every effort to do it well; it's shocking that people actually try to do well at aspects of their jobs that don't lead directly to promotion. Moreover, the academics that Ezra grew up among may not have been representative of the profession as a whole; many academics have to worry quite a lot about their evaluations, because they work at institutions that value teaching over research, or because they've been forced into a succession of teaching oriented adjunct positions.
As for the substance of the proposal (paying $10,000 to some lucky professor on the strength of evaluations), I can say that evaluations (and I get fantastic evaluations) have almost nothing to do with teaching skill or effectiveness. They're useful for measuring student satisfaction, but this isn't the same thing as teaching. Off the top of my head I can think of half a dozen ways to pump evaluations, none of which have a positive impact on student learning. As an academic, I'd be happy to have $10,000 floating around the system (maybe the winner would feel generous enough to buy me a beer), but it's absurd to expect anything useful in terms of teaching outcomes to result from such a prize. Given his wide experience with the academy, I'm rather surprised that Ezra would believe that such a stunt could actually improve outcomes. Measures to improve the training of academics in graduate school would help, as would stronger institutional support for innovative undergraduate education. Indeed, if I had $10,000 and was tasked with improving professorial teaching effectiveness, I'm not sure I could come up with a less helpful way of spending it than instituting such a prize.
--Robert Farley
