I know the UK system, the US is probably the same.
Whenever a professor applies for a research grant, and gets it, the university gets a slice of the money. Whenever a professor publishes a paper in a fancy journal, the university gets a bit of prestige (and, in the UK, every few years some computer evaluates all those papers by some criteria of fancyness and doles out money to universities in proportion to how many good papers their employees have made.)
Two people apply for a professorship at the university. One of them last year secured a load of grants, which they translated into a lot of papers in Nature journals. One of them didn’t. That is a measurable, quantifiable difference. You can write down the numbers, and see that $X>$Y.
Maybe at interview you ask them both to do a dummy lecture. Its all a bit subjective though, nothing you can pin a hard and fast number on.
So any of the following is sufficient reason to hire the one with the grants and papers:
They are not that much worse at teaching.
The institution is cynical and wants money. The bottom line isn’t directly damaged by bad teaching, it is by missed grants. Teaching only very softly feedbacks on revenue.
You (consciously or not) weigh objective measures more highly that subjective ones.
You believe in “the game”. It wouldn’t be fair to hire person B when everyone knows the game is research grants, and person A has played the game better. If the game doesn’t matter then why do you deserve to keep your own job that you got by playing it so well?
You hire the grant-machine. Do they suddenly put all their time into teaching as best they can? Well to get promoted they need … more grants! The teaching is something that pulls time away from the activities that the system rewards.
Yes, its an awful system. How to fix it I don’t know.
I know the UK system, the US is probably the same.
Whenever a professor applies for a research grant, and gets it, the university gets a slice of the money. Whenever a professor publishes a paper in a fancy journal, the university gets a bit of prestige (and, in the UK, every few years some computer evaluates all those papers by some criteria of fancyness and doles out money to universities in proportion to how many good papers their employees have made.)
Two people apply for a professorship at the university. One of them last year secured a load of grants, which they translated into a lot of papers in Nature journals. One of them didn’t. That is a measurable, quantifiable difference. You can write down the numbers, and see that $X>$Y.
Maybe at interview you ask them both to do a dummy lecture. Its all a bit subjective though, nothing you can pin a hard and fast number on.
So any of the following is sufficient reason to hire the one with the grants and papers:
They are not that much worse at teaching.
The institution is cynical and wants money. The bottom line isn’t directly damaged by bad teaching, it is by missed grants. Teaching only very softly feedbacks on revenue.
You (consciously or not) weigh objective measures more highly that subjective ones.
You believe in “the game”. It wouldn’t be fair to hire person B when everyone knows the game is research grants, and person A has played the game better. If the game doesn’t matter then why do you deserve to keep your own job that you got by playing it so well?
You hire the grant-machine. Do they suddenly put all their time into teaching as best they can? Well to get promoted they need … more grants! The teaching is something that pulls time away from the activities that the system rewards.
Yes, its an awful system. How to fix it I don’t know.