From the Editor: Rethinking Faculty Work
Lawrence Hanley
I hadn't planned this issue around any particular theme or focus, but reading and rereading these very good articles, I could sense some kind of shared object or interest. In her essay on assessment, for example, Sherry Lee Linkon efficiently summarizes our collective anxieties about new efforts to monitor professional work. She also offers several important arguments for why faculty need to engage more fully and strategically with assessment. As I read Linkon's essay yet again, an epiphany of sorts arrived. Most of the contributors to this midsummer issue of Academe are concerned about reexamining—indeed, with defamiliarizing—the most basic components of our academic work.
For example, from what mysterious founts do we learn how to write letters of recommendation for our students? George Felton's parodic epistolary advice underscores the anxieties and odd silences surrounding this most routine professional duty. Anthea Tillyer addresses yet another pervasive silence: academia's real failure to recognize our growing two-tier academic labor system. Tillyer offers a refreshingly materialist analysis of the institutional conditions that determine how new technologies are used, misused, and ignored.
I'm happy to note that two of this issue's contributions also manage to make strange Academe's usual essay conventions and forms. Dan Bernstein and Randy Bass offer sometimes dueling, sometimes harmonizing perspectives on the current state of the scholarship of teaching and learning. Any effort to draw classroom teaching closer to the center of the profession is bound to entail dilemmas, contradictions, and tensions. While Bass and Bernstein explore this rich territory, a group of faculty members at Bowling Green State University has spent the past several years in a very practical quest to find ways of resolving—or at least surviving—the tensions between teaching and scholarship. In this issue, Andrew Hershberger and his colleagues have assembled a montage that preserves the individual voices of these faculty members but that also points to broader insights and discoveries.
In her essay, Janet Galligani Casey trains a critical gaze on the shibboleth of "diversity." What she discovers is that some kinds of diversity are easier to promote and practice than others; as in many other things American, in embracing the language of diversity, we often talk our way around the uncomfortable realities of class.
Finally, variety is as important as neatness. Stephen Wu supplies this issue with a brief but tantalizing analysis of the market in academic credentials.
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