If service is devalued so that no reward exists for anything beyond "involvement," what will be lost? Will passive involvement on some committees be sufficient? Of course we cannot know for sure until future P&T committees decide what the acceptable minimum is as it examines files over several years. But once that minimum is established, what incentive will exist for additional service?
We might suspect that faculty will continue to at least serve on USCA and departmental committees to keep the school functioning. Most probably community service is what will suffer the most. In P&T deliberations, some members suggested that faculty will continue to do community service anyhow. That conclusion flies into the face of a wealth of findings in social science that human beings respond to incentives. While some may continue to do community service for purely altruistic reasons, faculty are human and subject to well-established patterns of human behavior. Why does South Carolina have the highest percentage of nationally certified teachers? The answer is that the state provides significant incentives to seek certification. Some teachers in other states still seek certification, but most do not. Why do students work harder on projects that count for more in their grades?
So the question is what kinds of things will be lost that we currently do? What impact will this have on our relationship to the Aiken community, a relationship that is becoming ever more important as we get less and less state support?
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Maybe the word "active" just needs to be more clearly defined. Is there a concrete way for USCA to measure levels of "active service" for evaluative purposes?
ReplyDeleteOf course service is of high importance, both on campus and in our community. We should work hard to ensure that it is truly encouraged. I hate to think that people do it just for the incentives, but maybe they do. ~Jenni Rodin
I do not share Dr. Botsch's cynicism regarding community service. I think that faculty that do a substantial amount of service do so because it is important to them, not because they have boxes to check on a P&T form. I'd like to think that our faculty have a more responsible approach towards their profession than many students have towards their course grades.
ReplyDeleteI do not view the promotion and tenure process as a "grade". The process simply is a matter of evaluating fit. I have an approach to doing my job that works for me...if it works for the university, and I get promotion and tenure, then we are a good fit.
As I mentioned in another comment, I do not see the loss of the word "active" as devaluing service. At some level, "active involvement" is redundant, and at all levels, "active" is difficult to quantify.
I would like to speak here both from the perspective of a faculty member who has twice gone through the P and T process, as well as from the perspective of someone who recently served a three year term on the P and T committee, and was the P and T chair last year. In response to what Jenny Rodin said, it is difficult to concretely measure "active service" without narrowing and limiting the scope of what we do. Our faculty engage in many different kinds of activities, from serving on university committees to advising student organizations to writing articles for the local newspaper to making speeches to community groups. And so on. Perhaps, like lawyers and accountants, we should track every fifteen minutes of the hour that we spend on service, as though we were going to bill someone for our time. Or we can measure it by counting the number of activities in which we engage, something we do for the tables in the P and T summary files. But it gives an incomplete picture. Much of what we do under the rubric of service is qualitative, rather than quantitative. By looking at the entire picture of what a person does, and reviewing the departmental guidelines, which are not at this time part of the Faculty Manual, and in my view, should not be, one can readily see if an individual is engaging in active or even significant service. To me, "involvement" implies a third and lesser level of service that may be far more passive. If I were to serve on the P and T committee again at a future date, or if I were a faculty member who would be evaluated using these new standards, this is certainly how I would read it.
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ReplyDeleteI am most certainly concerned about the impact of the proposed changes on service. Just today, I've read an email about serving on a committee, been asked to help a colleague evaluate students, been asked to write a letter of recommendation, needed to prepare an attachment for faculty assembly, etc. I do many of these things because I believe they are the right thing to do. But if I'm told that I better make "significant contributions to my discipline" and have peer reviewed publications, and I care about tenure and promotion, I will make a choice because I will have to make a choice. And if I am an untenured assistant professor or an associate professor who wants to be promoted, I will be darned clear about which choice is the smart one, which one will be rewarded, and which choice will have me looking for a new job.
ReplyDeleteSo for me the proposed changes raise many concerns. Who is going to arrange all the events needed for students to meet the ICE requirement? What might this mean for search committees and search activities (anyone want to "waste" two hours driving to the airport to pick up the candidate?). Who will want to mentor our new faculty? Who will want to serve on something like the Gen Ed committee?
And what about the values that we profess to hold here? We are supposed to value our connection with the community (think the double knot), but we need to put scholarship first. We are supposed to value diversity, but if you find teaching and service to have greater value than scholarship, think again, because that won't be what is valued at USCA. And what about those disciplines that have a strong applied emphasis? If the requirement is to make significant contributions to the discipline, applied scholarship will not "count." Rather than valuing diversity, we will be marginalizing current colleagues and losing potentially great colleagues who won't even bother to apply once they hear 4/4 teaching load and the scholarship expectations.
Charmaine Wilson
Placing more value on one or two of the three expectations should not be grounds for ignoring the third.
ReplyDeleteSome food for thought on the relationship between scholarship and teaching:
"When we seek legal council, we have a right to expect that our attorney is knowledgeable about recent court decisions and does not relay solely on cases studied during law school. Analogously, students are entitled to assume that their instructor does not merely repeat stale ideas, but is able to provide an informed account of the most promising lines of recent thought. A Ph.D. signifies that, as of the date awarded, the recipient has mastered a discipline. The degree does not entitle the bearer to a lifetime exemption from scholarship. A professor who depends on tattered, yellow notes reflecting timeworn thinking is as guilty of malpractice as the physician who relies on antiquated treatments. Both are ideal candidates for early retirement.
While faculty members are obligated to keep up with their fields, need they also make original contributions? For those whose teaching is confined to the introductory level and who would typically hold appointments at two-year colleges, a requirement to publish is not justified on pedagogical grounds. Someone can be a superb teacher of calculus without having authored papers in the frontier of mathematics. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for those specializing in teaching a beginning foreign language, English composition, or other such courses. Indeed, a doctoral degree need not be a prerequisite for handling these assignments. Teaching prowess, along with up-to-date knowledge of the subject and the methodologies for presenting it, should suffice. In contrast, most members of a four-year college or university faculty are expected to be able to work with students at any level, including those enrolled in specialized courses, advanced seminars, or independent study. In the case of these professors, the writing of books or articles relates directly to their pedagogic responsibilities.
Such activity helps hone skills in formulating creative ideas with care and precision. Not every notion that sounds convincing in conversation can survive the scrutiny endured by the written word, especially when the readers are experts. Those instructors expected to provide original perspectives in the classroom ought to have their abilities to do so evaluated periodically in accordance with rigorous standards set and maintained by peers who referee manuscripts for publication and comment on materials when they appear. For scholars to submit their work for such review is the equivalent of pilots undergoing periodic testing. In both cases, professionals are examined to determine whether their skills remain at the level necessary for the proper fulfillment of duties."
- from "Saints and Scamps: Ethics in Academia" by Steven Cahn