Teaching or Tenure?

When Elizabeth Bogan's oldest son was accepted to the University, he gave his "Yes!" letter to his mother.

"When the letter came in the mail, he brought it to me and said 'Mom, you are the one who has always wanted to go to Princeton. So here you go, I'm going to MIT,' " said Bogan, an economics lecturer who — though she went to Wellesley as an undergraduate at a time when Princeton was not admitting women — was named valedictorian of her high school class over a young man who would later go to Princeton. "So the next day I wrote to Alan Blinder, who was the chair of the economics department at that time, and asked if I could come visit the University."

Bogan — whose ECO 101 class has the highest enrollment of any course this semester at the University — left her job at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she was chairman of the department of economics and finance and a tenured full professor, to come to Princeton for a three-year appointment as a senior lecturer.

"I was first invited as a visitor and, after my time there, my students petitioned the department to find a way to hire me," said Bogan, who, at FDU, oversaw a department with 40 faculty members and 700 students seeking MBAs. "I was really fortunate because the school was creating the senior lecturer position and I fit right into that."

The question of whether the University should be more or less accommodating to faculty members like Bogan goes to the core of Princeton's identity as a school that straddles — sometimes uncomfortably — the balance between world-renowned research institution and small liberal arts college. In the end, it tries to be a little of both.

The senior lecturer position, which the University created in 1992, is for individuals with extraordinary skills in teaching who focus their approach to education on instruction, rather than research.

Originally established to aid the language departments, the position has been given to 14 faculty members during the last eight years. Each department is allowed to have only one. It is a position that purports to protect Princeton's focus on the education of undergraduate students.

However, there's a catch.

The senior lecturer post is not on the tenure track. Individuals who hold this position, such as Bogan, are not considered full professors, and each senior lecturer is reviewed every three to five years by the Faculty Advisory Committee for Appointments and Renewals.

"The rank of Senior Lecturer was created for individuals who can make a major contribution to the teaching program, but for those who, for one reason or another, are not suited for the appointment of professorial rank," associate dean of the faculty Catherine Rohr said. "These people focus on teaching rather than researching."

Because Princeton is a research-based university, the criteria for appointment as a full professor with tenure include a substantial contribution to a certain field in the form of research and publication of that research.

Get the best of ‘the Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

"Princeton takes great pride in taking good care of their undergraduates, and compared to Harvard and Yale, it does very well," Blinder said. "Nevertheless, the faculty here work under the primary mission of research because this is a research university. But this does not automatically take away from the undergraduates — we would like to think that a faculty member who is good at researching is good at teaching as well."

Bogan, from the beginning of her career in college education, did not have years and years of research in mind.

"It's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to listen to lots and lots of different ideas rather than spending time developing just one. That did not include the challenge of teaching," Bogan said.

At Princeton, individuals hoping to get tenure have six years to develop and publish their ideas — an amount of time that takes those people away from both their families and their students.

"When I first went into teaching, I wanted to have a family as well. That's why I got a job at a school that wasn't in the first tier," explained Bogan, who said she has no plans to pursue tenure at Princeton. "I could spend time with my kids, make tenure and did not have to publish a great deal in six years in order to do that. The age that individuals compete for tenure are the same age at which women have children, and it is difficult to do both."

"As long as women are the primary care givers, it is hard for women, who care about their children's early development, to make tenure," Bogan said. "This is why the position of senior lecturer may attract more women, because of the time flexibility."

This could be one of the reasons that of Princeton's 660 full professors, only 13 percent are women. However, the University of California has tried to rectify this problem by making two tenure tracks, one for research professors and the other for "clinical professors," — who specialize in relaying information to students.

"I wouldn't have a problem with a parallel tenure track. It would be better for the institution if it took teaching into account," Bogan said. "I fully recognize that this is a research institution and the dominant criteria for tenure is research rather than the dissemination of knowledge. But that does not necessarily mean that because the school attracts the best researchers, it attracts the best communicators."

"A university has two outputs — the creation and the dissemination of knowledge, and it is not always the case that these two things can be done by the same person," Bogan continued. "If a person is a great researcher, it does not always mean that that person is a great teacher. It is not an automatic link. What I like to do is listen to the great new insights that the researchers come up with, and then bring those ideas to a level that undergraduates can understand."

"Teachers are the glue in certain departments," she added, "because they bring the new ideas that are developed in the department to the students."

Bogan, who earned a master's degree in quantitative economics at the University of New Hampshire and a Ph.D. in mathematical economics at Columbia, focuses her week on undergraduate students.

"From nine to five or six o'clock, four days a week, I spend time directly speaking and working with students. On the fifth day, I prepare my lectures for the week," said Bogan, who is advising five seniors on their theses. "I have some family time and a life, but I work year-round on teaching and on enhancing the level of my teaching."

Bogan, who estimates she spends 20 hours a week in office hours with undergraduates, also teaches WWS 307: Economics and Public Policy and leads four of the precepts for that class, in addition to two precepts for ECO 101: The National Economy. She holds weekly meetings with her other preceptors and a Friday review session for those students in her introductory class.

"I continue to study and try to understand how the world works using economics, and I like to communicate what I find with other people," said Bogan, who has also taught ECO 102: Description and Analysis of Price Systems, as well as junior seminars. "I am excited when students come in and disagree with something I said in class. I listen to them and then they listen back. I am participating in a lifetime process of learning and disseminating new ideas."

Professor Alan Blinder, who originally hired Bogan, said, "Bogan makes her first priority her mission in teaching. She spends so much time with undergraduates, students just flock to her."

During the summers, Bogan continues to work on her teaching by traveling and researching current events and economic dilemmas to teach them correctly to her students.

"I travel in the summers and meet with different countries' officials so I can get a better understanding of what the political and economic issues are in certain areas so I can teach them accurately," said Bogan, who has traveled everywhere — from Washington to Japan — to enhance her teaching skills. "I also do a great deal of reading so I can understand the changes in policy, whether it be in health care or education or environmental economics."

Bogan also will be teaching ECO 350: American Economic History, next semester — a course that hasn't been offered at the University since 1993. She plans on instructing all four precepts because she believes that the graduate program in economics does not adequately prepare its students to precept for an economic history course.

The presence of faculty members who can teach four precepts clearly enhances Princeton's reputation as a school focused on undergraduate education. Whether Princeton could ever go a step further — like the University of California — and offer faculty members like Bogan tenure without threatening its identity as a research institution is another question entirely.

One thing is clear, though: When it comes to the quality of teaching in her classes, the woman who waited half a lifetime to come to her first-choice school need not make any compromises.