by
Christopher Meyers, Impact of Social Sciences:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/09/public-scholarship-promotion-criteria/
Scholars
are increasingly expected to consider the wider public in their
teaching and research activities, but with little to negative promotion
incentive.
In fact, finds Christopher Meyers, much of what academics do does not fit into the standard boxes of teaching, scholarship and service.
Perhaps it’s time to replace these categories with a single holistic and qualitative standard: high quality teacher-scholars, wherein all of
one’s professional activities are judged per their contribution to the
academy’s mission of educating, advancing ideas, creating an
intellectual environment, and bettering the lives of others.
Writing this essay is a luxury that an untenured colleague likely
could not afford. Unless a positive review is already a lock, she would
be far better served by devoting her scarce research time to landing a
peer-reviewed essay, grant, or book contract.
And that’s a real shame:
if circulation estimates are even reasonably accurate, this blog entry
will be read by a good 100 times more people than will the
original peer-reviewed article
that motivated its invitation.
Circulation is not, by any means, the
only or even most important way to judge a work’s academic value; peer
review, prestige of the publication site, and future citations are all
at least as significant.
Peer review historically has been, with good
reason, the gold standard; it is the most objective mechanism we have
for judging quality.
Lacking such, blog entries are among the many faculty activities that
fall into a kind of tenure void - they are generally not recognized as
scholarship, but neither do they qualify as teaching or align with
typical service duties.
Thus they are frequently ignored come review
time, even though many play a major role in fulfilling the academy’s
mission of educating, advancing ideas, creating an intellectual
environment, and bettering the lives of others.
In fact, many do a far
better job of fulfilling that mission than, say, publishing a minimally
read essay in an obscure but nonetheless peer-reviewed journal, or
serving, often in name only, on yet another campus committee.
I must stress, though, that I am
not arguing for a reduction
in research and scholarship; without it, universities are little better
than trade schools.
Further, the corporatizing pressures are wholly in
the other direction, pushing faculty toward heavier teaching loads,
burgeoning student/faculty ratios, and demands for accountability and
evidence of added-value.
Thinking, though, about examples like this essay and hearing stories like the one out of Columbia University from
a few weeks ago
should motivate reconsideration of the ways academic work has
traditionally been classified and valued.
It turns out, in fact, that
much
of what we do does not neatly fit into the standard boxes of teaching,
scholarship and service.
Some examples: Is a lower-division textbook
better deemed teaching or scholarship? Where should a well-reviewed but
unfunded grant proposal get placed? What about working closely with a
colleague - cleaning up arguments, assisting with writing, challenging
data sets - to help them land an eventual publication? Doing the same so
a student’s paper gets accepted at a conference? Acting as a campus
grievance officer to mediate disputes between faculty and
administration?
All of these are vital to a university’s mission but even a cursory
consideration of the abilities and intellectual work involved reveal how
each could be included in at least two of the three standard
categories, or none of them.
And yet, come review time, candidates are
told to arbitrarily pick one of those boxes, or include it as some kind
of tacked-on ‘other’.
These categorization problems apply all the more to
public scholarship. Despite
increasing awareness of its importance,
the academy has not determined how to count it.
Per reports from
colleagues all across the United States, it is most often placed under
“service,” where, given that category’s relatively lower tenure weight,
it is at best marginalized.
And yet such work is often incredibly
demanding and deeply mission fulfilling: consider, as but one example,
the intellectual rigor, multi-disciplinary knowledge and communication
skills needed for clinical ethics consulting.
Despite this, such work
likely won’t be counted toward tenure (unless, of course, it is one’s
primary job assignment), and thus junior colleagues are (wisely)
encouraged to minimize their involvement until they receive tenure and
promotion.
Again, while public scholarship is the exemplar, the argument here is
that the traditional categories are in fact arbitrary, with
artificially delineated distinctions that do not rationally align with
much, maybe even most, of what faculty do day after day.
Given this,
people are increasingly calling for a scrapping of those categories,
replacing them with a single holistic and qualitative standard:
high quality teacher-scholars, wherein
all
of one’s professional activities are judged per their contribution to
the academy’s mission of educating, advancing ideas, creating an
intellectual environment, and bettering the lives of others.
Hurdles assuredly abound in making such a change, not the least of
which is that faculty are deeply conservative, loathe to tinkering with
tradition.
Conservatism, though, is of course not a good reason to
resist change, especially not if, per the argument above, the existing
system cannot effectively account for the range of important faculty
work.
Better reasons for resisting include that much of public scholarship
and other non-traditional faculty work is tough to quantify and even
harder to externally review.
While quantification can become a crutch
for avoiding the challenging - intellectually and emotionally
challenging - task of qualitatively evaluating a colleague’s work, it
also serves as a guidepost for candidates and it discourages vindictive
or resource-driven reviews.
But such quantification is wholly possible:
How many consults did one perform? How many op-eds or other popular
works did one get into press? How many students were placed in good
graduate or professional programs or landed high quality jobs? Were
one’s efforts successful in changing corrupt or outdated policies?
External review is tougher, especially when one the public
scholarship occurs in an environment in which such review is not a
cultural norm.
But, again, it could be managed: decades of effort
committed to standardizing the faculty evaluation process have produced
procedures and practices that could be easily enough tweaked to acquire
valid (e.g., confidential, even anonymous) external reviews.
See also
the range of excellent suggestions produced by the
Imagining America coalition in Ellison and Eatman, 2008,
“Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University”.
I would close by noting that one of my academic mentors, many years
ago, suffered by the lack of a clear mechanism for valuing his
non-traditional work.
Hired by one dean on the (verbal) understanding
that he would do extensive public philosophy, he was nonetheless
released when a new dean deemed he did not have enough publications.
Surely we are smart and creative enough to come up with procedures to
make sure future public scholars do not experience the same fate.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the
position of the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of the London School
of Economics. Please review our Comments Policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.
About the Author
Christopher Meyers, PhD, is a tenured full-professor of Philosophy and Director of the
Kegley Institute of Ethics
at California State University, Bakersfield (USA). He thus has the
luxury of status to be able to devote time to this kind of public
intellectualism.
