Higher Ed's Ruinous Resistance to Change

About four years into my 17-year term as president of Macalester College, I met with the director of our Center for Scholarship and Teaching. She was almost certainly the most widely respected faculty member on campus, good at pretty much everything and relentlessly devoted to the improvement of the institution.  She’d been digging into the subject with some energy and, after careful examination of both internal evidence like teaching evaluations and external studies with larger data sets, had concluded that in fact there was no positive correlation between traditional measures of research productivity and effectiveness in the classroom.