This is an experiment, sponsored by USCA AAUP. Finding time to meet to informally discuss and comment on important policy proposals is becoming ever more difficult, especially at the end of the semester. A blog might be a way this can be done so that it fits everyone's schedule. We shall see.
On March 25 the P&T Committee met for an hour and a half and finished composing a new set of P&T policies, which they had started working on last fall. In a 5 to 4 vote the committee decided to make major changes in the current system with respect to the balance between scholarly activity and service. These changes went well beyond what many had thought the committee was doing, simply adjusting wording to better describe current practices.
In the view of AAUP, these changes will have dramatic and profound implications for our identity and mission, for our relationship to the community, for how we spend our time as professors, and for the recruitment and retention of faculty. It is also likely to have significant spillover effects on the Post Tenure Process, annual evaluations, and on departmental guidelines for promotion and tenure. In short, much needs to be discussed and debated before we adopt such significant changes.
The P&T Committee did not schedule any open meetings to answer questions or consider alternatives, at least of this writing. So AAUP, which had an observer at the last two P&T meetings in which these changes were finalized, is creating this blog to allow all to see and comment on the proposal. Of course, you can also ask questions in your comments. Of course, you do not have to comment or ask questions, you may just want to consider what others are saying.
AAUP hopes that the members of the P&T Committee who supported these changes will take this as an opportunity to explain the reasoning behind their proposals and to clarify their intentions. Answering questions this way may save a lot of time at our last Faculty Assembly and also allows time for more reasoned responses.
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IMHO and with recent experience re: P&T judgments (2007) at
ReplyDeleteUSCB (though no recent experience at all at USCA re: P&T and as
a Professor Emerita, I wish to comment that the new language
proposed is in keeping with how, in fact, evaluations by committees
and the administration(s) are made. Therefore the language is clearer
for applicants for P&T and candidates for new positions. Since this is
de facto the case, i.e., service is not as important as scholarship why
not commend the committee for its work?
Blanche PH
I agree and disagree with Blanche.
ReplyDeleteI agree that these are the de facto standards, and I agree further that in a purely objective sense they are desirable standards. I am 100% behind the idea of truth-in-advertising in our Faculty Manual, just as I am also 100% behind a rigorous appraisal of scholarship/applied professional activity/creative activity being linked more closely to P&T decisions. This is a university: scholarship should be a high, high value.
But this also gets at what seem to me to be the two most important issues.
(1) By catching the policy up with the practice, we are pushing the cart with the horse. That is a terrible way to make policy. We are approving of years of failing to follow policy, somehow rectifying it post facto. This is a bad precedent. It says our policies don't matter, that the Assembly will eventually rubberstamp whatever practice exceeds policy for long enough in the name of "consistency." In effect, we are handing off our decisionmaking. This is much like how we approved changing the overload compensation policy at the March meeting...we made it okay that the administration has not been following policy when, in fact, we should be holding administration and ourselves closely to policy until we decide **deliberatively** to change it. That is not faculty governance. It is more like belonging to the old Supreme Soviet of the USSR--policy is made elsewhere, and we make it okay. Not good.
(2) I place high value on teaching and service, but I chose to teach at a university because scholarship is most important to me. I give no ground on that--my teaching and service are only as good as my scholarship. I am fully supportive of any rigorous standard...in the abstract. However, here on the ground at USC-Aiken, I see no reason to ratchet up the standard when our travel budgets have not changed in at least 15 years, our library acquisitions and subscriptions have been cut, when I pay for my own association dues, and--in short--I am entirely on my own to do the most integral part of my job. I have no help, really, at all. And, I'm not promised any more anytime soon, the budget being what it is. So, I say leave the standards alone, enforce them as written, and when we have some help behind us to help us be scholars, I'll be the first "Aye" vote to put this new language in place.
I don't see the proposed changes as rectifying unwritten changes, but rather clarifying interpretations of vague standards. The lack of clarification of the terms makes it impossible to "enforce them as written".
ReplyDeleteI also disagree with the contention that our scholarship is constrained by a lack of resources. I find the travel budgets reasonable, but then, I do not view presentations at meetings, no matter how many, as a substitute for a peer-reviewed publication. Even where abstracts are reviewed, this is not the same as an evaluation of a paper for publication. I understand that my attitude towards this might be a function of my discipline.
Cutting of library resources is an issue, but we still (at least for my work) have sufficient resources available to us. Interlibrary loans might not be as convenient as immediate access, but I have been very impressed with the ILL services.
In short, I find the scholarship requirements to be pretty minimal, and quite commensurate with the resources we have available to us.
If one reads the current standards in the Faculty Manual, there have always been certain minimum levels of both scholarship and service. That would be at what we currently describe as "active" service. But the standards do allow individuals some flexibility as they go through their career, both in terms of promotion and also in terms of the descriptors used for post tenure review now. Some individuals gave a greater focus to scholarship and some to service. No one was expected to be outstanding or significant in both, although certainly some people were and are. As I understand it, at larger research universities, scholarship is the primary focus. Faculty there have far fewer service obligations, and teach fewer classes. They also have graduate assistants to mitigate some of the time consuming obligations of teaching and to help with many of the tasks involved in research. I served in both capacities as a graduate student and I suspect that many or most of my colleagues did as well. Like my colleague Steve Millies, I find that resources for scholarship are limited. But I see my scholarship as a critical party of what I do and it certainly informs my teaching. Every policy has consequences, both intended and unintended. I hope we will look carefully at all the potential consequences of any changes we decide to make.
ReplyDeleteCarol Sears Botsch
I might be misreading the previous comment, but there is absolutely no comparison to the level of scholarship implied by the proposed changes and that which would be expected at an R1 institution.
ReplyDeleteThe proposed guidelines do not state that faculty are expected to fund their scholarship through external means, which is a primary requirement at an R1, in many cases associated with a specific dollar amount.
The proposed guidelines have no requirement for the quality of journal in which a portion of our work must be published.
In order to qualify as scholarly, a piece of work must contribute in some way to the discipline. The universal currency for judging that contribution is peer-reviewed products (journal publications in my discipline). Given the current scope of opportunities for peer-reviewed products, and the absolute lack of restriction on what "quality" of publication we are expected to produce, I cannot help but fall back on my view that the proposed clarification of the requirements is more than reasonable given our resources and responsibilities.
I don't know much about what the process of research in Derek's discipline is, but in the humanities where I live the presentation of papers at conferences is a necessary step along a very long and tedious road. Unlike the professions and the sciences (hard, and social), our qualitative investigations take longer, proceed at a more uncertain pace.
ReplyDeletePeer-reviewed articles are a goal. So is a book. A person could reasonably toil on a book in political theory for over a decade and still be doing creditable work. Articles come more quickly, of course, because they are shorter. Still, that reasonably can be a work of years. But the "scope of opportunities" for publishing in political theory is growing smaller by the year. As political science turns more toward the social sciences, people like me are getting squeezed out of the journals. As a result of that, and the fact that I have virtually no colleagues in the state, I depend on travel to get feedback and have conversations that lead in new directions. I don't know where the conferences in other disciplines are held, but $400 doesn't get me very far. It has cost me a fortune since arriving here to keep my agenda moving forward, going to exotic locales like Grand Rapids and Poughkeepsie.
I'll restate: I have no problem with the argument that merit is the only acceptable standard, and peer-refereed publications are a valuable guide to merit. To ready a manuscript for peer review, however, requires some preparation along the way--meetings, in my case. This is their purpose, and they have a cost. So also have the mountain of books I have bought had a cost.
But I do agree with Derek this far: our resources are minimal. They're also static. And so long as they are both, the standards ought also to remain static, enforced as written. When the institution demonstrates that it values research, we should set a commensurate standard.
Just so we're clear, what I said was that the scholarship requirement is minimal, and that the resources are sufficient to meet those requirements.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, I was referring to the resources available for travel only as a means of disseminating information by presenting at meetings.
My research does require travel and equipment, and the extent of the work I can do is contingent upon the money that I can acquire through grants. I do not have any expectation that the university will fund my research, nor would I have that expectation at an R1 institution, where bringing in sufficient external funding is a requirement for promotion and tenure.
I also would not hold the expectation that I should receive promotion or tenure, should I not be able to garner enough funding to conduct publishable research.
It may be worth investigating the scarcity of external funding in the humanities, as opposed to the sciences, to appreciate my earlier points.
ReplyDeleteROP is available to both, and both share the same underfunded federal source (NSF).
ReplyDeleteThe argument that it is so much harder to produce peer-reviewed products in one discipline that one should not expect them as a requirement for P&T does not hold any water. Show me an institution where the timeline for P&T is different among the disciplines, and I might change my mind.
The only objective way to determine whether someone has the potential to produce peer-reviewed products is to see those products. That is a reasonable requirement.
If the problem really was about the time-frame, then the focus should be on the time-frame, but I have yet to see that brought up as an argument.
As I said in another comment...tenure is about the fit between faculty and the university. If I simply could not be productive with the resources that were available, I would seek a position with more resources. I also would not be surprised if I was not granted promotion or tenure if I could not adjust.
Some of the best scholars I know are at small schools with heavy teaching loads and limited resources, because they have to solve problems using ingenuity, and not by throwing money at them.