Inflation-Adjusted Scholarship

On the tension between respect and expectations

Another week, another Timothy Burke blog post that I need to carefully craft a reply to… I have a bunch of other stuff on my plate today, though, including the sudden cancelling of The Pip’s day camp leaving me with a childcare problem, so this will be brief and may err on the side of vague, but it did strike a nerve in a way that leaves me strongly wanting to respond.

The post in question is a defense of faculty scholarship as not a distraction from but an enhancement of the teaching mission:

Academia: Just One Cheer for Scholarship?

And generally speaking, I am on board with this. My previous quasi-administrative time sink was a four-year stint as Director of Undergraduate Research, where my job was to coordinate a bunch of programs meant to support and encourage professors doing research with students, so I’m obviously on board with that aspect of the idea of research at a teaching-focused institution. While we come from radically different disciplinary backgrounds, I also agree with him that digging into research can be very inspirational for classroom teaching (though my ability to teach courses on things that directly touch on my research background is way more constrained than it would be for someone outside of STEM).

That said, though, I do balk a little bit at some of the post, specifically this claim:

No, what I worry about more today is that smaller and less well-heeled institutions are just losing sight altogether of the value of research for all their faculty. That’s certainly measured in the amount of real financial support for research that many institutions are increasingly less willing to provide, but I think it’s more visible in the lack of engagement, intellectual excitement and situated knowledge that many institutional leaders and mid-ranking administrators have of faculty research both in specific and general. A lot of institutions know how to promote work that comes ready to promote, as it were, but not much else, and I really don’t think that used to be the case.

This is a common refrain in a lot of academia, to such a degree that the quoted paragraph could just about have been lifted from one of a dozen all-faculty emails sent in the last year. I’m less fully bought in on this, though, because of a phenomenon illustrated by another thing that crossed my social media feeds this week, namely this tweet from Kareem Carr, making an analogy between academia and the Olympics:

🔥Kareem Carr 🔥 @kareem_carr

getting into university now vs when your professors applied to university

In this specific tweet, the direct comparison is to college admissions, but I’ve seen this come around before as “Getting tenure now vs. when your senior colleagues were up for tenure.” And, in fact, that pops up very quickly in the replies.

There’s a lot of truth to that— a research record that would’ve been considered solid twenty-odd years ago is now in the “don’t even bother submitting the materials” category. And that’s what gives me pause about endorsing the assertion that respect for faculty scholarship has decreased over the last however many years. There’s a real tension between the claim that faculty scholarship is not valued and the empirical fact that research expectations for tenure-track faculty even at teaching-focused institutions have ratcheted up dramatically over those same years.

In fact, to some extent, I would say that I’ve had the impression of the exact opposite problem claimed by Burke and others, namely that faculty in particular are putting too much emphasis on scholarship, to the detriment of teaching and all the other tasks that need to be done to keep our institutions running. What’s being asked for, in some cases, feels less like a call for respect for faculty scholarship an more like a demand for an absolute deference to faculty scholarship, in the form of reductions in teaching and especially service and governance activity in favor of more time for research.

There’s a tricky bit of needle-threading here in the question of expectations vs. support, and a kind of adjusting for inflation— it’s entirely possible that the resources provided to faculty to do scholarly work have not kept pace with the expectations for hiring/tenure/promotion, and are thus inadequate to the level now expected of faculty. But I would note that this is not the same as a failure to value faculty scholarship in any absolute sense, and in fact the problem could be solved equally well (and more cheaply) with a ratcheting down of those expectations. That’s unlikely for a bunch of reasons, mostly to do with faculty psychology, but not wildly more implausible than the idea that we’re suddenly going to find a whole bunch more research money to throw at teaching-college faculty.

So, yes, I am 100% on board with the idea that faculty scholarship is not just a complement to but an essential part of the educational mission of academia. I am much less comfortable, though, with the claim that faculty scholarship is insufficiently valued or respected.

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I think I have successfully threaded the needle between “too vague” and “inappropriately specific,” but it’s hard to say. If you want to find out whether I need to walk this back or flesh it out, here’s a button:

If you’d like to take issue with any of this, the comments will be open:

(Please note, though, that I’m still catching up from my Covid isolation, and may also need to be away from the computer entertaining The Pip, so may not reply right away.)