UC Adopts Policy to Place More Emphasis on Teaching : Education: New promotion guidelines are aimed at rewarding excellence in instruction as well as research.

Capping a difficult debate that touched on the very soul of academia, University of California officials announced policy changes Thursday aimed at encouraging and rewarding excellent teaching in the nine-campus system, where some critics complain that research overshadows pedagogy.

The new personnel rules are not as sweeping as those recommended last year by a faculty task force chaired by Karl S. Pister, subsequently named chancellor of UC Santa Cruz. But faculty leaders said the changes are a fair compromise on issues that have rankled other universities and led to similar reforms nationwide.

“The most important thing is the reaffirmation of the importance of teaching in the university,” said Pister, whose task force contended that too many UC professors are trapped in a “vicious circle” of chasing research grants and publishing research papers. On Thursday, Pister said he was generally satisfied with the guidelines issued by UC President David P. Gardner, even though he would have preferred more forceful ones.

The most dramatic change affects promotions to the highest salary steps in the complicated career ladder for a UC professor. Under previous criteria, such promotions required excellence in teaching, research and public service plus national or international distinction in research. Under the new criteria, the national or international distinction could be in research or teaching, while general excellence would still be needed in all other areas.

In promotion decisions lower on the ladder, the new policy allows more flexibility for professors who devote extra time to teaching or public service over research at various points in their careers and specifies rewards for good counseling of students.

UC is joining a national trend to give teaching, particularly of undergraduates, more emphasis at research universities, said Linda Ray Pratt, president of the American Assn. of University Professors. “This is generally the talk around the academy,” said Pratt, an English professor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

The movement is partly a response to public disenchantment with higher education on various issues, Pratt said. Emotions are focused on teaching because “teaching is one of the things the public understands about what we do,” she said.

Pratt contends that there is little conflict between research and teaching. “Often the same professor who wins the awards for scholarship is the same one who wins awards for the best teaching,” she said.

Among the many schools that have moved in recent years to reward good teaching more are Stanford University, Columbia University and the University of Colorado, according to Peter Smith, a spokesman for the Assn. of American Universities. A common challenge is that teaching is more difficult to objectively judge than research is, Smith said.

The new UC policies say that student evaluations of teachers must be supplemented by other evidence, preferably reviews by other professors. The fear is that the most popular and entertaining teachers may not be the best.

Formally called the Universitywide Task Force on Faculty Rewards, the UC group led by Pister concluded that many faculty members are so pressured for research results that they “find insufficient time and little encouragement” to pursue teaching and public service. The Pister report offended some professors who felt it was too harsh.

The resulting debate was healthy, said Martin Trow, chairman of UC’s systemwide Academic Council, the faculty self-governing group. “It started a discussion of what we do, what we want to do and what we want to reward. It touches at the heart of things,” said Trow, a professor at the Graduate School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.

Some professors feared changes in promotion policies might “undermine academic standards under the guise of reform,” Trow said. But he stressed that the new rules, which the council approved, will not diminish the quality of UC scholarship and “will not change the fundamental character of the institution.”

Annual salaries of tenured UC professors range from about $43,000 for young associate professors to about $100,000 for the most distinguished and experienced full professors. (Medical and law professors make more under special arrangements.) Merit raises at the scale’s upper end, which will be affected by the policy changes, can be about $5,000 a year, officials said.