Does tenure evaluation "undermine" teaching? Is it the administration's fault? Is it because it is truly difficult to evaluate innovative teaching? This is a brief "back and forth" between Michael Brown and Mary Churchill in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Mike: Education departments have been denigrated for a long time, often based on the claim that they make a fetish of process and do not adequately take substance into account. But there is a different reason for the defensiveness that often accompanies that judgment: It is primarily in education departments and rarely in other disciplines that faculty are most likely to discuss the relationship between teaching and learning.

Mary: This is related to the fact that so many academic departments seem to devalue teaching. We actively recruit and hire junior faculty members who are able to teach in innovative ways: utilizing global outreach, service learning, and new technologies. But we fail miserably at promoting and retaining these faculty members. We hire them for the “differences” they bring (significantly, many of these new hires are women and/or racial/ethnic minorities), but then we can’t deal with their innovations — particularly when it comes to evaluation.

And so forth.