Me and My Friend Bill

Me and my friend Bill have a lot in common. When Bill was a kid, he wanted to be a professional baseball player – until he got to be a teenager and figured out that he was never going to break the 5’5 barrier. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional jockey – until I got to be a teenager and figured out that I was going to come within a few hairs of hitting the 6’ mark.

Bill and I both love to talk about ideas. We talk about teaching – a lot. We talk about far-flung things like whether there might be life somewhere else in the Universe and whether Bill O’Reilly is stupid or evil. We talk about close up things like campus politics. Mostly we agree in our conclusions although we arrive at them via different routes.

Bill and I are both interested in the fact that apparently contradictory claims can be simultaneously true. Bill and I have almost nothing in common.

Bill likes to teach and he’s good at it, but what he really wants to do is to sit in his office and think about complex mathematical problems. And what Bill needs is time to do what he wants to do. I would rather take out my intestines and play with them than sit in my office thinking about complex mathematical problems (or any other kind of mathematical problems, for that matter). After Bill has thought for a long time, he wants time to write down what he thinks of; he wants to be paid for his hard thinking and he wants to publish cool articles about the things he thinks of.

I like teaching best of all. And I like to write too, but I like to write about teaching. I like to be alone to reflect and write and reflect some more. But almost everything I write has to do with teaching.

The work Bill loves to do the most has nothing to do with teaching and teaching gets in the way of the work Bill most loves to do. I want to be really clear: it isn’t that Bill doesn’t like teaching and it isn’t that he doesn’t care about doing it well – he does like it and he does care about the quality of his teaching. But, teaching is not the professional activity from which he derives the greatest sense of satisfaction.

My question is this: is there room for someone like Bill at a regional comprehensive university with an emphasis on teaching.

Historically, Bill’s scholarship of discovery has been more highly valued (and rewarded) than the scholarship of teaching. There has been, I think, an understanding across the professoriate that scholars teach in order to pay for their research. The scholarship of discovery has led to remarkable strides in understanding across the disciplines. In the sciences, in economics, history, political science, philosophy, literary studies, the scholarship of discovery has transformed what we know about the world and why the world is the way it is.

At the same time, however, there is a significant body of research demonstrating that there is no apparent relationship between the scholarship of discovery (or any other scholarly tradition) and the quality of teaching. In the short term, the results of this kind of research typically do not change the content of undergraduate courses and this research has no demonstrable effect on pedagogy.

Earnest Boyer’s pivotal book, Scholarship Revisited, lays out a more expansive model for understanding faculty labor. Boyer names three scholarly traditions in addition to the scholarship of discovery (the scholarship of integration, the scholarship of application, and the scholarship of teaching) and argues that all four forms have their place in the academy and need to be accounted for in evaluating faculty labor. Boyer does not seek to overturn the hierarchy by putting the scholarship of teaching on top. Rather, he suggests that faculty might work in any one of these traditions and make significant contributions to their institutions and to knowledge in their disciplines.

Boyer’s model offers institutions and faculties a way of understanding and evaluating faculty labor that is more honest in the sense that we might use the model to more accurately describe what we do and evaluate what our colleagues are actually spending their time doing. Boyer’s model is also more egalitarian than historical academic evaluative practices have been. It does not excuse teaching faculty from doing research, writing, and publishing, but suggests to institutions the value of labor demanded by the scholarship of teaching, in particular. It is important to note here that the scholarship of teaching is distinct from excellence in teaching. I can see no evidence, for example, that I am a better teacher than Bill because I write about teaching.

For SCSU to take up the Boyer model in any meaningful way, we would have to see our faculty’s individual and collective strengths through new lenses. We would need, I think, to recognize that people like Bill make this teaching university a better, more interesting, more lively intellectual community. We would need also to stop behaving as if we are not a teaching university. When faculty are engaging in the scholarship of teaching, we would need to recognize the value of that work too. We would need to see the variety of scholarly practices in which our faculty engage as complimentary and overlapping rather than as competing practices in a zero sum game. And, finally, we would need to stop the institutional practice of seeing faculty labor (or any other labor for that matter) in simple binary terms. We would need to acknowledge in some rich way, the complexity of the everyday working lives of faculty and find ways to value and evaluate faculty labor that account for the complexity.

Finally, we should, I think, as a faculty and as an institution make a more deliberate and responsive effort to talk publicly about the value of all of the scholarly traditions to the quality of the University. Rather than subscribing implicitly if not explicitly to the popular notion that research has no value to students, communities, or the State and is not the proper work of the professoriate at a regional comprehensive university, we should begin to explain why and how all of these traditions do, in fact, have value. We would need to make the case that the value of a University education is derived not only from what happens in the classroom, but also from the intellectual liveliness of the institutional community, the quality of mentoring, of social, athletic, leadership opportunities, and a plethora of other factors.

My friend Bill tells me I have a tendency to go to the holier than thou place. He may be right. He says I fill too many screens on this Blog. He is certainly right about that. So I submit this entry with apologies both for my sermonizing and long-windedness.