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From the General Secretary: The Discipline of the Disciplines
By Mary Burgan
Whenever reformers get together to worry about the failure of universities to engage students in the larger issues of citizenship, they have to deal with the fact that add-on and add-in programs on civic responsibility cannot be fostered without the devotion and activity of professors. The conversation circles back again and again to the fact that the academic value system rewards research. Faculty members maintain that aspiring deans and presidents are the villains in the piece; it is they who ratchet up standards, question academic work that has not yielded refereed publications, and second-guess recommendations based upon balanced contributions to service (or teaching) as well as research. The administrators’ lip service to a wider range of activity seems window dressing.
On the other hand, many university and college presidents who sponsor civic renewal as a mission on their campuses assert that the faculty is at fault. They maintain that the professors are so tied to disciplinary success that their own tenure and promotion committees will not reward colleagues who set out to explore beyond the settled boundaries. It is the faculty that impedes the university’s identification with the practical issues of our society by marginalizing the "practitioners" in their ranks.
The research-reward system is so central to the faculty’s status in higher education that discussions of changing it may shift into suspicion of the research enterprise itself. Under such suspicion, research tends to be seen as narrow in specialization, short on practical application, and intent on individual, personal advancement. So also, faculty who devote themselves to research can be seen as "the problem." I have heard one advocate of service learning, in a momentary loss of charity, castigate the faculty at large as "mandarins."
Another strategy, when the tensions become so personal, is to deflect blame from the faculty by seeking to redefine research. Since Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered was published ten years ago, there has been a strenuous effort to redefine service (and teaching) so that it can look more like research. Thus working with the community in planning open spaces, engaging with the public school system in setting up computerized instruction, and finding ways to get college students involved in local diversity initiatives might be classified as "field" research. This strategy is an intriguing one, but it can misfire by maintaining the need for the "deliverable" of paper currency to prove the worth of the activity. Thus in some institutions, credit will be given only if the faculty would expand their practices, count their effects, and write about them.
Call me a contrarian, but I must confess that I begin to grow restless with the trend of these arguments, even as I agree with their critique of the reward system. Applauding the move to expand the range of excellence in faculty work, I still want to put in a good word for research. The generation and interpretation of knowledge are as much our mission as are their application to our public lives. I have witnessed the bad results of efforts to reduce our teaching or service to texts that can then be weighed for proper reward. I have seen abstractification grow out of hand as disciplines of skill and practice make ever more overwrought efforts to legitimate themselves theoretically. I have seen presentations about teaching substitute for teaching itself. I have also watched some of the most critical university service departments—social work, criminal justice, clinical psychology, nursing—lose their grip on student loyalties as they have tried to become data-heavy enough to be acknowledged by sociology, political science, psychology, and medicine. Instead of redefining our practice disciplines, we need to become more adept at judging process as well as we judge product.
Meanwhile, we continue to work civic reforms upon our students. And once again, I feel a contrary impulse. I want to make sure that they know enough before we send them into the field. I look at the current call for teacher preparation to concentrate less on method and more on content, and I feel my impulse fortified. How can faculty teach the fact that citizenship requires getting to class, finishing the chapter, writing the paper? How can they lead students to think broadly and critically enough to analyze a political argument? I finally come to the answer that most faculty teach civic virtue when they teach their disciplines. It may be that a demanding course on Dickens’s Bleak House will teach a student all she needs to know about the imagination of an ordered polity, the tragedy caused by neglect and poverty, and the persistence necessary to remedy it.
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