Taking Teaching Seriously: Institutional and Individual Dilemmas.
Taking teaching "seriously" in many postsecondary institutions would be forging new, unexplored policy territory. ' In many institutions, particularly more elite ones, teaching has long been an essentially private act, at least vis-'a-vis one's colleagues and superordinates. Direct evaluation, if it occurs, is often done only by students, whose dissatisfactions are either suspect or insufficiently puissant. For that reason, teaching inadequacies alone have rarely threatened faculty. Given recent interest in assessing the quality and effectiveness of teaching and learning within the postsecondary domain, however, particularly among politicians, improving instruction may become an important institutional issue [19]. As higher education institutions attempt to regulate or monitor instructional activities of their faculty, some will purport to couple more tightly classroom competence and such ultimatejob rewards as promotion and tenure. Insuring instructional "accountability" poses complex managerial problems, including the prospect of lawsuits. Although courts will normally defer to institutional judgment, a deference that universities have aggressively demanded in all employment matters [26], the inevitable instinct of individual faculty (or faculty groups) who are unhappy with processes or outcomes will be to assert academic freedom claims, either individually or collectively.