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> >It seems to me that such a scorecard for some professors might include: the learning of students in his/her class, the research conducted by his/her students, employment rate after graduation (a *shared* measure), completion rate from programs, and citation indexes, among other things. > >What gets measured, counts, so they say. Perhaps part of the reason for bad academic writing is that increasingly, academics are responding (rationally) to the wrong reward system. > >Jamie MacKinnon I'm not sure that the academy doesn't value teaching, especially these days when the supply of unemployed or underemployed academics so far exceeds the demand. (In the US there is a lot of public pressure to improve undergraduate education; I'm no longer familiar with the Canadian context,though I'm interested.) In fact excellence in teaching seems to be a basic requirement for being hired. I can attest to this from reading MLA advertisements and from the placement record of recent graduate students. The best-placed students have the best teaching-evaluation records as well as the best publication records. It seems that young academics can't very well get hired or promoted without *both* teaching excellence and intellectual productivity. I agree that writing textbooks, trade books, newspaper editorials, and generalist journal articles should be valued, and I think rhet and comp is better than lit in this respect and will remain so. But I am wary of anti-intellectual backlash. I don't think that academic writing is any more specialized than legal, medical, or technical writing for example. Bridging the gap between expert and lay discourse is, in fact, a major focus of many undergraduate professional writing courses. (By fourth year my science students are already thoroughly indoctrinated into the jargon of their future professions). I guess I'd like to see a lot more generalist writing without simply reversing the current hierarchy of value.