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Caption: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1944
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UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS I085 it is good institutional policy not to set up a rigid salary scale, and believes that it would be well to maintain a flexible salary scale in order to hold promising individuals of less than full professorial rank and to attract and hold distinguished persons. The Relative Importance of Scholarship and Teaching Ability The relative importance of scholarship and teaching ability among faculty members has been much discussed by educators. On the whole there has been a tendency to emphasize scholarly productivity to the detriment of undergraduate instruction. Younger men who early learn that their promotion lies only along the road of scholarly productivity, tend to bury themselves in these pursuits instead of interesting themselves in the improvement of instruction, or of providing for the changing educational and social needs of the undergraduate students. This condition, coupled with the fact that such matters of educational policy lie almost wholly in the hands of the full professors, is another factor in the younger man's dissociating himself from anything but a life devoted to scholarship and research in which his teaching, particularly at the undergraduate level, becomes simply a means to earn a living. The time has come when the University ought to find a place for the man who is interested primarily in teaching, and should make it possible for good teachers to achieve careers which are recognized by the administration and by faculty colleagues to be of as high professional standing as careers of teaching plus research. The Commission has no evidence which would justify the conclusion that the undergraduate teaching in the University is inferior today to what it was in 1934. At the same time it would be a dereliction not to call attention to the facts that teaching which was good in 1934 will not meet the instructional needs of today as well as it did at the previous date, and that one of the present pressing needs of the University is improvement in its undergraduate instruction. Factors Affecting Faculty Morale, Three factors of great importance in determining the morale of a faculty are: first, that members shall be able to carry on their normal work of instruction, research, and production [A.C.E. Report —67]
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