When Northeastern's top two administrators start talking about how important teaching is to the university, you'd think people would be sitting up and taking notice.

President Curry made a point of highlighting teaching in his annual fall address to the university. "Our central occupation is and ought to be good teaching," he told the crowd. "And more of our rewards, incentives and professional development opportunities need to be focused on good instructors."

Provost Michael Baer echoed the president's sentiments. Pointing out that a recent survey found that most faculty don't think teaching is fairly rewarded at Northeastern, he announced he was establishing a commission on teaching and learning. "To succeed in the future we cannot simply give more weight to teaching; we must evaluate and reward it fairly," Baer said.

Despite the strong words from the top and the initial work of the provost's commission, the message is not getting down to the level where rhetoric becomes reality, many faculty members say. Good teaching still takes a back seat to research, they say, and few concrete steps have been taken to recognize the value of teaching. And they wonder just how much the university is capable of changing.

"Says Kathleen Kelly, an associate English professor who prides herself on her teaching, "In my tenure case, I knew the department was not going to care that much about my teaching. The rhetoric has been there for years. But there are only two ways that it's really going to change: when teaching is rewarded more financially, and when each department or unit decides to take more responsibility for teaching than it does now."

Others share these views. In a faculty survey administered as part of the strategic planning process, only one-third of the respondents felt that the university's current merit system rewards teaching appropriately, and less than a third felt that the tenure and promotion system appropriately rewards it.

Those who would like to see greater emphasis on quality teaching have lots of suggestions about how the university can support the effort. They say teaching must be much more closely monitored than it is now, students' learning outcomes must be taken into account and faculty should get better  advice on how to present teaching accomplishments in their dossiers. And most important, they say, good teaching must weigh more heavily in decisions on merit raises and tenure.

Northeastern is a relative newcomer to the world of research universities. Prior to 1975, annual outside research funding stood at under $5 million and research played a much less important role in tenure decisions. As Nathanson recalls, "There had never been any expectation that you would do  research. In fact, I got tenure in 1976 after writing only three articles and a review." But the university's approach to research turned around in the mid-1970s . . . As a result, research activity became a much greater measure of a faculty member's worth than it had in the past. "Then tenure requirements went up," Nathanson says. "That's very typical of a lot of schools. But that program succeeded in a way which tended to undermine some of the focus on teaching."

"The reward structures rewarded research and did not equally reward teaching," agrees executive vice provost Daryl Hellman. "And whether we  intended to or not, that sends a signal. Now, we need to undo that."

One problem, many agree, is that it's very hard for junior faculty members to focus on teaching when they are also expected to produce the research or scholarship that is required for tenure. "All of us feel a little bit of guilt that we haven't actually lived up to our full potential as teachers," says  Haughton. "We're busy doing everything else. The life of an academic is one of endless compromise on how to spend one's time."

Says Nathanson, "Six years to get a book published while starting your teaching - that's a lot."

While the "publish or perish" mentality may be intrinsic to Northeastern and other universities for years to come, there are clear signs across the nation of a renewed focus on teaching. And while the new effort may stem partly from a genuine desire to offer students a better experience, it also comes in response to a growing realization that students, parents and public and private funding agencies are becoming more and more concerned about the services universities provide.

"It's inherently difficult for any group to police itself," says Malcolm Hill, associate dean of arts and sciences for academic affairs and a 15-year veteran of teaching geology at Northeastern. "There are real social pressures to think about. If I went into one of my colleague's classes, and I thought they were horrible, it would be very difficult for me to say that to them. It's almost like an Errol Flynn movie: you go looking for reasons to chop them apart, because you want to make them better, but it would be easier if the person lived in France and you weren't going to see them till the next academic conference."

Documenting good teaching can also be an uncomfortable issue when it comes to tenured professors, says the English department's Kelly. "When people don't have tenure, people are walking in and out of their classrooms all the time," she says. "But when people have tenure, that doesn't happen. I'd like classrooms to be more open, to have colleagues look at what each other is doing. But I'm not sure we could really go into each other's classrooms. Some people might flip."

Currently, all teachers are subject to student evaluations. But, as English professor Mary Loeffelholz points out, many faculty members are skeptical of student evaluations. Many also disagree about how best to evaluate teaching. Because of that, peer evaluations vary from unit to unit.

"If I were trying to set priority number one, it would be to try and monitor a bit more the mediocre teaching," says Haughton. "Everybody should have to provide a copy of all of their teaching materials. And there should be a couple of people in each department whose job it would be to go through those materials and write reports on them." Haughton says he also thinks faculty charged with peer review of teaching should be able to drop into a colleague's class unannounced to observe the professor's performance and to talk to students. "I think more of that is needed," he says. "Sort of quality control."

Nathanson agrees. "If we had the kind of faculty culture where people were regularly visiting each others' classes to learn and provide feedback, regularly looking over each others' syllabi, exams, paper assignments, having after-the-fact discussions about how classes went, I think that would really improve teaching a lot," he says.

Clearly, some faculty members don't think there are enough rewards for good teaching. "I think if students are complaining about you, they might think twice about giving you tenure," says the sociology department's Breines. "But I don't think promotion from an associate professor to a full professor has anything to do with teaching. And I do think teaching should be quite significant. After all, it's what we do."

"I always presumed when I was hired that I was here to teach," says journalism's Jerome Berger, who was recently denied tenure. "I always thought that the school, with its foundation on co-op, placed importance on the classroom. And I knew I was supposed to do some kind of research or scholarship. But in reality, what I think has happened is, it's write a book or be gone. I don't think my teaching was counted enough."

"I personally feel that if a university like Northeastern has room for people who are spectacular researchers and who, quite frankly, couldn't occasionally teach their way out of a wet paper bag, then the university, which is 90 percent tuition-driven, should also have some room for the other kind of people, too," says Hill. "But not a lot of people share that view."

Loeffelholz says that the strategic planning task force on faculty decided against recommending a tenure option on the basis of spectacular teaching alone. "We did that because the university has made a commitment to being a research university," she says. "We need that contribution. But we thought that perhaps, at later stages of professors' careers, it might be possible to promote someone to full professor on the basis of teaching." She defends the continuing commitment to strong research, despite the fact that several recent negative tenure decisions - including Haughton's and Berger's - prompted students to question why good teachers were losing their jobs.

"To reward those who are dedicated teachers but perhaps less able researchers, who get stuck at the associate professor level, Nathanson suggests manufacturing some new titles to create new promotion opportunities. "Or maybe we keep the titles and diminish the financial differences," he says. "Because now we have a mini-version of apartheid, in which the pay differential between professors and associate professors can become very substantial. I don't think it's right."

One important factor in supporting good teaching, faculty agree, is making sure to provide professional development support and technical support. Both could be better at Northeastern, some say.

We have no instructional development professionals," says Owen. She said she'd like to see a setup at Northeastern like the large instructional development program that exists at Syracuse University. "They help you put an ordinary lecture course together, a computer course together," she says. "They have a whole support staff. There are people around Northeastern who know a lot about using computers in the classroom, but that's not their sole purpose."

Owen said she's pleased with the new classroom building and the renovated Dodge building, and that faculty no longer have to put up with the old classrooms at the YMCA. But she'd like to see even more classroom improvement. "There are still no computers in the classrooms, no connection to NUnet, to the Web," she points out. Herman agrees that the university should offer more encouragement to faculty to use the new interactive technologies. For example, he says, the university could give faculty credit for producing CD-ROMs or courses on the Internet.Owen says library support could be better, too. She says recent cutbacks in library funds have meant that sometimes professors can't give students access to reserve books needed for their classes.

In addition to technical backup, faculty could also use help figuring out how to present their teaching accomplishments in their tenure dossiers. "There are no models as to how to present teaching information," says Loeffelholz. "It would be the simplest thing, for example, to pass out a format for how to present the summary of the student teaching evaluations."

Still, Owen thinks that, perhaps because of the overall lack of financial resources, senior officials are putting the onus on individual faculty members to improve teaching. "People do mean well, there's no question about that," she says. "But it should be a community commitment. I don't know why they think individuals are going to be able to take this upon themselves with no support."