Month: November 2016

What if teaching and research, for all this support, do not necessarily reinforce each other? The link between research and teaching may be important to the identity of many academics, but might it not perhaps be better described as a myth? Certainly in terms of faculty time and money, as well as of university structures, many colleagues see research and teaching as in conflict. Who has not heard the claim that research consumes an excessive role at the expense of teaching? “University research,” write critics, “detracts from the quality of teaching” (Pocklington and Tupper 7). This view presents teaching and research as competing functions within a zero-sum game of resources. Members of the public are not alone in claiming that research has taken on an excessive role at the expense of teaching. The sheer volume of such indictments of university research is vast, and their tone is insistent. Martin Anderson calls most academic research “inconsequential and trifling” in Impostors in the Temple (85); Page Smith denounces in Killing the Spirit the “full flight from teaching” for the sake of research (6), “the vast majority” of which “is essentially worthless” (7); and Charles J. Sykes in Profscam deplores the “new vogue of specialization” (17). Such criticisms of the academy and of professorial commitments are not anything new; as James Banner writes, “criticism of universities for neglecting teaching in deference to research is probably as old as the modern university itself” (98). Even Sykes traces the beginnings of specialization back to the 1930s (17). Ronald Barnett, one of the strongest critics of the teaching-research nexus, takes a different view. Instead of suggesting that these are complementary activities forced into competition with each other, he makes the bolder claim that teaching and research constitute rival ideologies. He argues that in the twentieth century teaching and research, once in “reasonably comfortable relationship with each other,” have become “mutually antagonistic” functions (Beyond All Reason 157). They are, in his view, inherently different activities, different skills, and different approaches to knowledge: teaching is integrative, private, personally constructed, and process-oriented, whereas research is specialized, public, and results-oriented.

There is mounting empirical evidence that teaching and research are at best only loosely coupled. Such studies consider teaching effectiveness (judged by student evaluations, limited though they are) in relation to research productivity (judged by publication counts, inexact as that metric may be). In a meta-analysis from the mid-1990s, John Hattie and Herbert Marsh found a near-zero statistical correlation between teaching effectiveness and research productivity. Some scholars thus suggest that the link between teaching and research is an “enduring myth” (de Weert 134) and have called for abandoning the integrationist research ideal (Dierkes and Merkens).

To say that teaching and research have been torn asunder presumes that there was a time when they were closely linked: if they are now being driven apart, when, if ever, were they integrated? Any standard history of the teaching-research nexus points us to Wilhelm von Humboldt, who proclaimed at the founding of the German research university in 1810 that teaching and research are a unity: “at the highest level, the teacher does not exist for the sake of the student: both teacher and student have their justification in the common pursuit of knowledge” (243). Humboldt is, however, but one part of the model of American universities. With the adoption of graduate programs in the late nineteenth century, American universities grafted the Humboldtian model onto a tradition of liberal education that did not at all see teaching and research as a unity. Cardinal John Henry Newman, in his Idea of a University (1858), argued, for example, that the aim of the university was “the diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than its advancement” (xxxvii). Research was left to the research societies, learned societies, and specialist academies outside the university, since “[t]o discover and teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person” (xl). Teaching, not research, was the mission of the university.

The most distinctive aspect of American universities today is without a doubt the commitment to the utility of knowledge creation. Clark Kerr, the influential president of the University of California in the 1960s, characterized the modern university as part of the “knowledge industry” (66). This is a departure from both Newman and Humboldt, who believed that knowledge should be cultivated at the university for its own sake and not for its uses. In The Uses of the University (2001), Kerr identified a significant shift in the conception of the university in the twentieth century, as universities came to be drivers of regional and national (knowledge) economies. Kerr saw the resulting research funding as fragmenting the university, weakening the humanities, creating a competition for research talent, and downgrading teaching, thus creating a race toward reduced teaching course loads as markers of selectivity and prestige. University prestige, after all, tends to favor research. “When universities raid one another’s faculties,” notes Barnett, “they do not do it because they seek cutting-edge classroom teachers” (Improving Higher Education 40).²

Debates over the teaching-research nexus reveal the tensions that lie at the core of our institutions. Our universities are built not on a single foundation but on distinct philosophies of education that stand in uneasy relation to one another. American higher education rests on an integrationist view of the teaching-research nexus, but it also embodies a teaching-centric dedication to liberal education, a commitment to research as practical knowledge production, and a growing allegiance to the use-value of universities that drives research links to industry and economic development. These elements are implicitly, if not explicitly, at odds.

If these competing conceptions and allegiances of the university have not always been apparent, I believe there are (at least) three pressures that are visibly redefining the teaching-research nexus today.

First, the changing value of education: the focus on the value of education is increasingly seen in financial terms, as return on investment. This emphasis gives impetus to the criticism of faculty research as a freestanding and self-indulgent claimant on faculty time and resources. Kerr noted the shift to the use-value of the university as a concerted part of collective economic development. Today’s emphasis on use-value calls attention to the career placement of graduates, the size of their student debt, and the return on investment that their degrees offer them. The stress on the pecuniary value of higher education puts particular pressure on graduate education, where the focus on research training continues. This is especially the case in the sciences, where student stipends, faculty salaries, and research costs are often only partly supported by universities themselves and thus require an influx of external research money. The effect of this changing value of education is to push research and teaching further asunder.

Second, the unbundling³ or fragmentation of the roles of teaching and research in the university: “Teaching, research and service specialists are emerging,” write Schuster and Finkelstein write in their study The American Faculty (232). The role of the scholar-teacher, or even “teacher-scholar,” is increasingly hard to maintain (Cassuto). In the university, we are developing teaching-only positions (particularly in the growing adjunct teaching pool) and, largely in the sciences, research-only positions. With the career administrator, we are forging service-only positions. Tightening of research monies and of the academic job market are reinforcing a pernicious stratification in which tenured and tenure-track professors are increasingly separated from a contingent workforce.⁴

Third, the professionalization of teaching and the movement of assessment are transforming how we approach teaching. I hear a lot from colleagues that we should shift the balance back to teaching by strengthening incentives for good teaching. Yet our professional identity is often understood as a function of our research identity, starting with the completion of a dissertation. Teaching experience and pedagogical training have often been ancillary. Indeed, teaching has often been assumed to be a function of research skill. Only recently has teaching at the higher education level become professionalized, with teaching certification and training, as well as with teaching and learning centers. Part of this shift has meant that more refined assessment models of learning outcomes are becoming widespread—at times against faculty opposition. While the focus on teaching and learning outcomes is invaluable, it has had a counterintuitive effect: the establishment of teaching-specific training and performance markers in effect disarticulates teaching from research. It suggests that research and teaching are different academic functions, with different preparation and different skill sets.

But there is a possible solution embedded in the way we have begun to talk about teaching. In the past three decades, we have moved from talking about teaching to talking about learning. In other words, we have shifted from teacher-centered teaching to student-centered learning models, in what some have termed the “age of the learner” (Sorcinelli, Austin, and Eddy 1). This shift opens an opportunity to redraw the boundaries between teaching and research. Student-centered learning is inquiry-based and problem-based: it combines research-based learning and research-based teaching. The shift from teaching to learning gives us the opportunity to be process- rather than results-driven, to redefine teaching and, in consequence, also research.

The shift from teaching to learning gives us an opportunity to redraw the fault lines of the teaching-research nexus. Here are some recommendations:

Let us redefine teaching. The redefinition of teaching has already started in recent years; it includes a wider spectrum of activities, including engaged learning or teaching with work-based components. The focus on student-centered, inquiry-based, and problem-based learning highlights the process of inquiry rather than the accumulation of knowledge. My first recommendation is to make at least parts of teacher training more disciplinarily specific, to bring some of it back from teaching and learning centers and integrate it into our graduate program curricula (as it still is in some language departments).

Let us redefine research: If we need to redefine teaching, we also need to redefine research. We need to look beyond publications as the marker of research performance. There is a fair amount of talk about expanding the kinds of research we accept, but focusing on publications—of any sort—reinforces an older sage-on-the-stage conception of teaching as research or knowledge delivery. David Shumway, in his contribution to this forum, traces by contrast the longer lineage of “[r]esearch as process,” in which faculty members “were assumed to be engaged in the process of research even if they were not publishing.” The National Science Foundation (NSF) made the integration of research and education a priority in its 2001–06 strategic plan (NSF GPRA Strategic Plan 1): its funding guidelines now include, for example, sections on the contributions of research to teaching and other human resources. Many humanities fellowships, by contrast, still ask applicants to show their project’s “original and significant contribution to knowledge,” with little explicit mention of the impact on teaching, curriculum, mentorship, or other forms of engagement (see, e.g., “ACLS American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships”). The new NEH Public Scholar fellowships, which support scholarship in the humanities for a general audience, and the NEH Next Generation Humanities PhD grants, which promote the integration of the humanities in the public sphere, are a step in the right direction.

My second suggestion, then, is to ask in statements of research, whether in grants or annual reviews, not just for evidence of the projected scholarly impact of research publications but for their probable curricular effects. Ernest Boyer, in his influential 1990 report for the Carnegie Foundation, put forward an expanded concept of scholarship, suggesting we move to different categories altogether, by dividing academic work into discovery (this being roughly congruent to what is often—and narrowly—called research), and also integration, application, and teaching (16). In 2000 the Kellogg Commission similarly argued that we should shift from research, teaching, and service to “learning, discovery and engagement.” These models sought to move beyond teaching versus research, and the divide between theory and praxis, to rethink priorities in higher education. A number of universities have incorporated aspects of Boyer’s model of scholarship in tenure and promotion structures; such changes may be effecting modest change in the status quo of the publish-or-perish model. Recently Drew Moser, Todd Ream, and John Braxton, in an expanded, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered, made the case that Boyer’s ideas may prove to be “more relevant” in the next quarter-century than even in his day (xviii). Indeed, the continued advances in the scholarship of teaching and the upsurge of interest in the scholarship of engagement echo aspects of Boyer’s redefinition of scholarship: what unites these two ways of framing scholarship is a focus on inquiry-based and problem-based learning.

When we still speak of “teaching loads” and “research opportunities”—as when we prepare what are often separate teaching philosophies and research statements—we continue to reinforce a divide. While we are unlikely to leave the research ideal soon, redefining both research and teaching as parts of a shared process of learning may go some way toward setting them into a new relation.

The Age of the College: All Service, All the Time

To answer that question, we need to go back to the age of the college in the United States, before research universities were founded. Donald Light breaks the work of early-nineteenth-century American professors into a different triadic division: the disciplinary career, the institutional career, and the external career (2).

The external career was once more important than it is now. In the early days of American colleges, professors’ salaries were often insufficient to cover basic needs, so many of them maintained separate careers outside the institution—as clergymen, for example—to make ends meet. Today professors are more likely to have a substantial external career only if they’re already very well known—and, typically, well paid, too. Today’s professors may have the opportunity to do consulting work here and there, but external careers are rarely vital to their well-being. The necessary external career has become a relic—though the unfolding future of contingent academic labor could bring it roaring back.

That leaves the institutional and disciplinary careers, which are still very much with us. The institutional career is made up of the duties we perform at our institutions, while the disciplinary career encompasses the work we do as members of our disciplines. Teaching a course in history is institutional work, for example, while giving a talk at the American Historical Association conference is disciplinary work.

That division between institutional and disciplinary pursuits has animated the profession for many generations, but it didn’t always. The institutional career ruled during the American age of the college, before universities. If you were a faculty member then, you spent your time doing what the institution required—which meant teaching and whatever else that needed doing. Administration wasn’t pervasive because the institutions were small, and those responsibilities fell to the faculty. For example, the tutors (as they were called) at Harvard in those days “were with their pupils almost every hour of the day [that is, in classrooms, study halls, and at meals], and slept in the same chamber with some of them at night.” They were responsible for their students’ intellectual development, but also for their “moral and spiritual development” (Morison 53), like a professor, resident adviser, class dean, and pastor all rolled into one. Even though these tutors were doing service all the time, there was nothing in their jobs that was defined as service.

Service was inseparable from teaching in this scheme. Our familiar teaching-research-service division would have been unrecognizable to a college teacher two hundred years ago.

This brings me to the disciplinary career, which centers on what we today call research. To advance our disciplinary careers, we do specialized things of special interest to a few similarly specialized colleagues at our home institutions—in some extreme cases, to none of them. So instead, we share this work with colleagues at other colleges and universities who have a common interest in our specialties, and that sharing forms the basis for extramural community.

Those research-based communities became structured beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1820 only a few professors at a few colleges had what we would call a disciplinary career at all. Most were not trained in any one discipline. At four of the country’s oldest colleges—Brown, Bowdoin, Harvard, and Yale—only one faculty member was publishing in his field (Finkelstein 15–16).

American professors professionalized in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Many went to Europe to acquire disciplinary training and discipline-related credentials. They came back with newly forged disciplinary identities, and many of these newly credentialed scholars started publishing in their disciplines. This in turn created tension with the old guard, between the new purely academic concerns and the old-time version of 24-7 student care (Finkelstein 23). These prodigals loudly touted the quality and value of their foreign training, and so the first American research universities, created in the wake of postbellum national wealth, were inspired by German models (Veysey 125–33).

Research Culture and the First Incarnation of Service

The research university brought research culture. Research culture, as I refer to it here, is an ethos centered on the value of research not so much in terms of utility but for its own sake, for the value of the search for truth and the glory of the intellect that attended new discoveries in any field. Research culture cemented that sense of value by rooting it in the measurable currency of publication.

The first research universities proliferated in the United States from the 1880s to about 1910.¹ Private research universities were joined by public ones to form this country’s distinctive higher educational landscape. The formation of professional societies followed the birth of the American research university. Groups like the MLA institutionalized the value of specialization that research brought. At least two hundred similar groups were formed during the 1870s and 1880s, the decades that coincide with the earliest American research universities (Bledstein 85–86).

The creation of these disciplinary societies shows how the pursuit and organization of knowledge joined the emergent academic professionalism in the United States to form a newly professionalized ideology of higher education. Advocates of academic professionalization—like the philosopher John Dewey—believed that “the influence of institutional imitation and rivalry” and “the informal exchange of experience and ideas” helped sustain the very institution of democracy (148).²

The consolidation of professional identity in disciplinary associations marked a shift and laid out a template for the university to grow and complicate its workings. A great deal has been said about this development, but I want to mark one particularly important change: the professionalization of the university helped plant the prestige economy and give it deep roots. We all know how the prestige economy works: universities and faculty members mark their professional positions by the amount of knowledge that they create. The more publication, the more prestige; the more prestige, the greater the possibility of a move up the food chain.

This professionalization of the professoriat led to a consideration of what a professor’s job should look like. The founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915 is rightly seen as a watershed in the history of academic freedom, but the association was likewise dedicated, said Dewey, its first president, to “developing professional standards” (qtd. in Schrecker 17). The AAUP sought not just “independence” for its members but also “dignity” in the university workplace (American Association of University Professors 294).

Such professionalization contributed to the conditions that link the idea of service to administrative work, but not right away. For one thing, the new research universities remained relatively small. It’s easy to imagine them as behemoths because we’re so used to seeing large research enterprises, but Princeton, for example, enrolled 1,374 students in 1904. Stanford had 1,568. Columbia and Yale were bigger, but tiny by today’s standards. Public universities were proportionately larger, but their numbers were also puny compared to now: Berkeley had 2,699 students in 1904, Illinois 3,222 (Geiger 270). Mostly because the university still operated on a small scale, teaching and service were still folded together in concept.

But service did emerge during this period as an idea that was opposed to research. It centered principally on public service: what role the university ought to play in society at large. This question was galvanized at the turn of the twentieth century by the founding of numerous state universities. Given that the public was funding these institutions, it seemed fair to ask what they were going to do for the public—and these early discussions centered on that idea. Indeed, the Morrill Act of 1862 that authorized land-grant institutions focused on their mission to serve the public by providing “liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.” This idea of public service was linked at first to teaching, especially in “agriculture and the mechanic arts” (7 USC sec. 304).³ Land-grant colleges would also serve the public directly through cooperative extensions and continuing education courses (Christy and Williamson 108).

The founder of one such land-grant institution, Ezra Cornell, asserted in 1868 a democratic—and notably utility-minded—ideal of the university as a place “where any person can find instruction in any study” (qtd. in Veysey 68). This idea that no one subject is better than any other provides the background for the most important version of public service of this period, which arose at the University of Wisconsin at the turn of the century. It came to be called simply the Wisconsin Idea, which, in Lincoln Steffens’s much-quoted 1909 articulation, was that the university should “teach anybody—anything—anywhere” (qtd. in Veysey 107). This was one of the most expansive ideals of higher education as a public service, in which the university reaches out into the community at large.⁴

This idea also resounded outside Wisconsin. The president of the University of Illinois, Edmund J. James, wrote in 1906 that the state university should be “a great civil service academy, preparing the young men and women of the state for the civil service of the state, the country, the municipality, and the township.” He called this “an ethical crusade” (qtd. in Veysey 79).

The coming of the American research university brought with it the idea of service as a distinct aim, then—distinct, that is, from research. But this new thing called service was still bound up with teaching.

The Coming of Teaching-Research-Service

The teaching-research-service triad first appeared in the 1920s. A 1927 article in the University of Michigan alumni magazine reported on a speech by the recently deceased president of the university, Marion Leroy Burton, in which Burton said that “teaching, research, and service were concrete examples of the things that a university should make its chief aim” (“President Burton”). This early invocation of service as an “aim”—and these early instances to the triad tend to refer to it that way—still points service outward, as something aimed at the community in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea.

Print sources might be considered a trailing indicator in this case. The grouping of teaching, research, and service probably started appearing in academic conversation before the triad made it into print. We might hypothesize that the tricolon made its appearance in academic culture during the years leading up to the 1920s, in sources that may be found in university archives. That hypothesis gets some support when we search Google Books using what is called an N-gram, which graphs the frequency of the appearance of words or phrases in millions of books. Figure 1 presents a 4-gram that traces the four words teaching, research, service, and university as they appear together. It’s quite a striking picture.

Two big jumps in this graph need interpretation: one from 1900 to 1920, and the other from around 1958 to 1975 or so. That first jump correlates with the creation and rise of departments and the institution of the credit-hour system.

The rise of the credit hour marked the growing bureaucratization of higher education. As universities grew, administrations needed a way to quantify the work that was being done. Colleges and universities borrowed the idea of the credit hour from the rapidly growing system of public high schools—which developed the system in part to enable colleges to efficiently evaluate high school students’ work. Research funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching during the 1900s sought “to measure productivity in higher education.” The result was called the student hour. As an “administrative, reporting, and external monitoring device,” the student hour affected the development of the higher educational bureaucracy that defines not just student work but also the work of their teachers (Shedd 8, 9).⁵ Put simply, the rise of the credit system in the early twentieth century enabled a standardization consistent with dividing professors’ work into categories.

The rise of departments contributed similarly to this new bureaucracy. Before about 1890, all faculty members reported directly to the university president. As universities in this country found their shape, discipline-based departments formed. “The history of academic departments before 1920 has few fixed points,” as historian Roger L. Geiger puts it, but we know that “by about 1910 most appointments of junior faculty members at research universities were made on the recommendation of academic departments” (36, 37). That jump in the graph coincides with a time when departments were gaining controlling authority over the areas of their expertise: teaching, research, and personnel—and when they became sizable structures within a growing bureaucracy.

Departments altered the nature of academic society because they became worlds unto themselves. They offered a space in which individual professors might exercise their ambition to rise, and they also drew the lines of competition for control of resources in the university. Which department would statistics belong to? or the study of Middle Eastern culture? The departments that won such turf wars got more support. And the departments also became units in the prestige economy: being the best in one discipline or another created a new basis for competition among universities. The consequence of all these pressures, says the historian Laurence R. Veysey, was “continual department expansion”—which went along with a steady rise in student enrollment as well (323).

The teaching-research-service triad became visible at the same time that departments were contesting the landscape of a growing, diversifying, and standardizing university. It seems fair to assume that the triad answered some need created by this new organizational structure—and it’s pretty easy to identify such a need. Once the department became its own workplace, it had to meet its own structural needs. The new departments were run in their early days by autocratic heads, who were like mini college presidents with nearly absolute authority in their domains. The heads needed administrators just as university presidents did.

So we can say that the category of service came into being because service was needed by department heads to make departments run—and because the new bureaucratized system encouraged the creation of such neat category divisions. But that didn’t mean that the need for service was met smoothly. In 1939 a group of faculty members in the AAUP chapter at the University of Michigan reported their views of how they should be judged for tenure and promotion. “Since a university should be a co-operative organization,” they said, “it is recommended that faculty members be given proper credit for performance of necessary administrative duties” (qtd. in Wilson 103). This call to recognize service by faculty members has a familiar ring. So does the writers’ observation that extramural service is “of secondary importance” compared with “services [provided] directly to the university.” We see these faculty members identifying a palpable need for intramural service work—and we see them privileging it over the community work that was originally given the name of service.

The need for service—and the invocation of the teaching-research-service triad— expanded along with the university. Enriched by foundation money (as opposed to government money, which became a major player later on), universities continued to grow between the world wars. “The dominance of the graduate research model,” says historian Martin Finkelstein, “was clearly established” by the mid-1940s. As a result, “specialized expertise” became the definition of professorial authority (25; see also Ward). The Cerberus model of the professor as the three-headed performer of teaching, research, and service firmly buttressed this authority.

But that model was not comfortably in place. As the sociologist Logan Wilson observed in a 1942 study of academia that was widely cited at the time, “Teaching, research, miscellaneous administrative and public service functions are recognized everywhere as essential parts of the academic man’s work” (106). But if we close-read this quotation, we see a glaring tension: service is seen as “miscellaneous” but also “everywhere as essential.” How can something be ubiquitous, essential, and miscellaneous at the same time?

We still feel this discomfort today. Wilson went on to observe that “the most critical problem confronted in the social organization of the university is the proper evaluation of faculty services” (112). Cerberus, you could say, had one lagging head—and he still does.

The Cold War Research University and Its Value System

It gets worse. Let’s put service aside for a moment and look just at research. The 2-gram shown in figure 2 tracks the frequency of the word research as it appears in the same source with the word professor:

We see a sharp uptick around the 1940s. This increase coincides with the onset in 1947 of the Cold War, which transformed academia for both better and worse. It also roughly coincides with that second sharp upward turn on the earlier graph that includes service—and that’s no coincidence.

This result points to the effects of the Cold War on the academic profession. The culture of intervention and paranoia that the Cold War spawned has been well documented. It included loyalty oaths, hearings, and the dismissal of more tenured professors than at any time since academic tenure became a feature of the academic landscape (see Schrecker). But even as the Cold War interfered with the workings of academia, it also led to huge increases in university funding—and the mushrooming of research.

The exponential growth of research in our time was essentially a Cold War bargain: the university became the research and development lab for the Department of Defense and, indeed, for the whole country. The government started funding all kinds of academic research, with special emphasis on the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Professors in those fields were given extra money to do research and were allowed to teach less. To prevent intramural rivalries and tensions, and also because research culture had always encompassed all fields, other disciplines were given the same deal: teach less and publish more (Lewontin).

This change was both gradual and inexorable. For example, the teaching load at Stanford during the 1950s was four courses per term, at least twice what it is now. Government investment in the university changed our value system within a generation. Research, which was already king of our world, was given an even higher throne, and it continued to rise. Both professors and universities are now measured according to what is sometimes called knowledge creation or productivity, both of which equal publication.

The system is top-heavy now, and its lack of proportion deforms a lot of lives—including those of graduate students, who have to train to be everything to every possible employer. Even though the Cold War has been over for a generation, we are who we are today because of it. As David Shumway notes in his essay in this cluster, professor and researcher are substantially overlapping identities, and universities fight for their places in ranking systems driven by that fact.

The expectation that professors do more and more research—that they work harder and harder on their disciplinary careers, while maintaining their traditional institutional careers―mirrors the traditional bind faced by many working women. Indeed, some commentators have noticed how institutional service is a feminized form of labor in academia (see Massé and Hogan). Academics are still better rewarded for the research that they do.⁶ The intramural call to service stands at distinct odds with the value system that surrounds not only the faculty but also their institutions—and not just research universities.⁷

So why teaching-research-service? We might look at the order of the terms. In the 1920s, teaching appeared first—but it’s obvious from what I’ve been saying that it does not rank first. Why put teaching first, and why put service there at all? Because the triad elevates subordinate items to a semblance of parity. It’s a rhetorical ruse that denies that teaching, research, and service are in competition—and that research has a big lead. Christopher S. Jencks, coauthor of The Academic Revolution, a still-quoted 1968 sociological study of academia, points out that “[s]uch three-word descriptions tend to imply equal importance and hence that they should get equal time―a fabulous rationale for expanding faculty time committed to administrative work, as has indeed happened.”

This value system is with us until a seismic higher educational event occurs. But let’s be honest with each other. If institutional service needs to be done—and it does—let us not pretend that it’s equivalent to research. The university promotes research for many reasons: that’s the nature of the world in which we live. But the institution, and all of us in it, can reward service, too, if we’re up front about it, and fair. Priorities may contradict in ways that are difficult to reconcile—but we need to discuss them openly if we are to meet our own needs as professionals, teachers, and cohabitants of the same institutional house. Let us honor the work that we do by treating it transparently and truthfully.

This professional identity is not merely the way others in our field recognize us but the way we understand who we are. As I have argued elsewhere, “disciplines produce an identification between the inquirer and the object of inquiry”; “To be a Shakespearean doesn’t just mean to know the works of Shakespeare; it also means to adore them. And as the name ‘Shakespearean’ implies, one derives part of one’s identity from the object of study” (104; 102). Graduate students do not just learn history or English or physics; they learn to be historians, literary scholars, or physicists. The discipline we learn in graduate school defines who we are, and that discipline is a research practice.

Moreover, disciplines also define our audience. We learn how to write for that audience and that we should write for it. It is true that tenure requirements usually specify that publication be in peer-reviewed venues, but it is not clear that this fact inhibits academics from writing for a larger public. Rather, their sense of their research is the inhibition. The insular character of most academic publication contributes to the sense that such writing is insignificant, as Menand illustrates. He publishes constantly, but not usually in academic venues. Thus his writing is exempted from the “indifference and hostility” he believes most people hold toward “academic writing.” He asserts, “I can’t think of a single person I know who entered college around the time I did, in 1969, and who did not go on to become a professor, who has the slightest interest in . . . what goes on within university humanities departments.” Menand blames “credentialism”—in effect, training in research―for creating “a wall . . . between academic intellectuals and everyone else.” In this reading, the activity of research actually inhibits interest in the research product.

Research as process is one of the chief requirements for academic discipline. It was originally rooted in the assumptions of the scientific revolution and in a simple positivism that held all knowledge as valuable. The research university, with its disciplinary divisions and its principle of covering the universe of knowledge, was founded on it. Both the MA and the PhD were originally conceived as culminating in the production of a contribution of original research, differing mainly in the scale of said contribution. Thus, even though as late as 1969 nearly half of all English department faculty members above the rank of instructor did not hold the doctorate (Wilcox), it still does not mean that these faculty members were untrained in research.

University faculty members have always been trained mainly as researchers, and not directly as teachers. Back when publication was not demanded of most professors, there may have been a significant disjunction between training and career. Yet teachers trained as researchers were assumed to be experts in ways that those without such training were not. The extent to which university faculty members have been understood as professionals has depended on this expertise, which schoolteachers, who have been largely deprived of professional status, are not assumed to hold. Professors were assumed to be engaged in the process of research even if they were not publishing.

In theory, the link between teaching and research goes back to nineteenth-century German educational reformers, who, according to Jürgen Habermas, “were able to think of the scientific process as a narcissistically self-enclosed circular process of research and teaching because the philosophy of German idealism by its very nature required a unity of teaching and research. . . . Schelling, in his Lectures on the Methodology of Academic Study, demonstrated that the form in which a philosophical idea is transmitted pedagogically arises out of its construction” (110). It is unclear, however, just how influential this theory was in the United States, although its influence is often taken for granted, as it is in Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins. As Laurence Veysey shows, “German higher education, however incompletely understood, became the focus of extravagant excitement and admiration. . . . An insufficiently differentiated Germany, partly real and partly imaginary, became the symbol for all scientific claims upon American education” (128). This invocation of Germany largely ignored the idealism of German theorists and instead emphasized the “painstaking investigation of particulars, both in laboratories and in such areas as historical documents” (127). Germany conceived in this way served as the model for the research vision of university reform in the United States.

Americans were much more likely to think of teaching and research as practically linked through new types of instruction that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the laboratory, the lecture, and the seminar. These new forms of instruction displaced the recitation, which had been dominant in old colleges with curricula rooted in classical languages and the theory of mental discipline. While the lecture was at best a report of research previously conducted (and, as Veysey observes, it could be used by any professor regardless of personal involvement in research), the laboratory and the seminar were understood as spaces in which research took place. They “became the most characteristic methods of instruction for the future scientist or scholar” (153). Keith Hoskin argues that modern academic disciplines owe their existence to the laboratory, the seminar, and the classroom, all of which date to no earlier than the late eighteenth century (280–95).

The vision of the university as defined by pure research was only one of three such regimes of reform current in late-nineteenth-century America. According to Veysey, only the newly created Johns Hopkins University and Clark University were primarily envisioned in terms of pure research, and even Hopkins’s first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, resorted to broader goals in explaining his institution’s mission. In addition to pure research, educational reformers envisioned the new university in terms of utility on the one hand, and liberal culture on the other. Those who championed utility advocated for universities that would serve the public good, whose orientation was toward “real life,” and were themselves “democratic” (Veysey 60, 62). Cornell and Stanford were both founded on versions of this vision, and it was the primary rhetoric used by Harvard’s transformative president Charles W. Eliot. It lay behind the elective curriculum, which Eliot pioneered, and behind the famous Wisconsin Idea, popularized by Lincoln Steffens in 1909, “to teach anybody—anything—anywhere” (qtd. in Veysey 107). Those who advocated for liberal culture as the model for educational reform opposed both the practicality of the utility model and the minute investigation that the vision of research entailed. They rejected the scientific model as too narrow and the utilitarian one as debased. Strongly influenced by Matthew Arnold’s ideas of culture, proponents of liberal culture urged a curriculum built around great works and the study of past civilizations. In the early twentieth century, liberal arts colleges emerged based on this model, but Yale and Princeton also adopted it (Veysey 209, 233–47).¹

It is easy—indeed, a bit too easy—to see how these three visions cashed out in different types of institutions. The Morrill Act, which created the land-grant institutions, required instruction in agriculture and mechanical arts, defining these institutions as practical. Liberal culture was the dominant model behind the liberal arts colleges, which were often what the smaller old colleges became, while research would seem to be the model that informed the research university. But Veysey’s point is that the American university as it developed in the twentieth century was influenced by all three visions. His focus is on elite private and public institutions, almost all of which today would easily be classified as research universities, but those include nonetheless elements of utility and liberal culture in their missions and curricula. In the humanities in particular, it is clear that the vision of liberal culture remained influential even though research was dominant.

Utility, research, and liberal culture also seem to line up with other divisions that characterize contemporary American higher education. James Sosnoski has observed that within departments, utility manifests itself in basic skills (or service) courses such as freshman composition or elementary foreign languages, liberal culture in the content of the humanities majors for undergraduates, and research in graduate education, where what is taught is “a mode of inquiry.”

Utility, research, and liberal culture also seem to line up with service, research, and teaching, service being another word advocates of utility used to name their goal, and teaching being at the heart of liberal culture vision. But utility does not fit very well with service as a requirement for tenure and promotion, since such a requirement is almost always for internal service—though as Cassuto observes, earlier invocations of “teaching, research, and service” did treat the latter as something aimed outward. Moreover, the vision of pure research does not correspond exactly to publication requirements, and teaching even less to the vision of liberal culture. The visions of service, research, and liberal culture in the end made themselves felt across the spectrum of different types of institutions and in many different practices within them.

The idea that the university should be a site of knowledge production, fundamental to the research vision, eventually became dominant, even if the value of that knowledge was understood primarily in practical terms. Veysey notes that liberal culturists, who often styled themselves men of letters, tended to be found primarily in English departments, but they were not usually in control of them (183). Philology, which understood itself as a science, was the dominant method of literary study at the turn of the century, and most English professors at elite institutions thought of themselves as researchers. The requirement of the PhD for most university faculty members assured that they would be trained in research regardless of whether they continued to be active researchers.

Under the assumptions of positivism that governed philology and literary history, all contributions had value. In principle, then, there was no limit on how much research might be needed. However, one of the conditions for the emergence of the New Criticism and the shift from literary history to interpretation was a widespread sense that new contributions to literary history were often not valuable. Still, the absolute quantity of publications in the 1930s was relatively small. After the war, as faculties expanded, the number of literary publications did as well. But many of these new contributions were no longer literary historical but hermeneutical. While they may have continued to use a positivist rhetoric, the number of competing interpretations of major works illustrated that there was no agreed-upon method for determining a single correct meaning—which implicitly raised the question of what kind of knowledge was being created.

By 1958 Harry Levin could already remark that the investigation of Moby-Dick might almost be said to have taken the place of whaling among the industries of New England (vi). By the late 1960s it was clear that industries had grown up around major works and authors, and that the value of new interpretations of them was ambiguous at best. While whaling had produced commodities that had significant exchange value, most of the products of literary research were not commodities in this sense. They were produced without direct compensation and did not in general generate profit for their publishers―which were usually nonprofits. And, under the new hermeneutic model, it was harder to justify the value of all new interpretations. In practice, an interpretation’s value lay in its teachability, which in this context is a kind of utility, showing again how in the American university, categories are hard to keep apart. The value of some of these interpretations has been demonstrated in the same way that the value of literary works typically is, by their being read and reread over an extended period. Texts such as Norton’s critical editions are evidence of the continued value of many different interpretations of the same work.

When fewer scholars published, those who did achieved a greater distinction as a result. Publication is still the chief means by which departments can improve their reputations, but with so many more scholars competing, success has become so much harder. The problem with the research product today is that there is far more of it than there is a readership. While the increasing demand for publication means that published research continues to be cited, a great percentage of it is never cited.² Moreover, there is a difference between citing something and actually reading it. While writing in academic journals has never had an audience beyond the academy, books of criticism by academics were at one time reviewed in magazines and newspapers and did have a more general readership. Menand’s complaint about the isolation of academic intellectuals is a recognition of this narrowed audience, but his explanation does not hold water. Earlier PhDs were not inhibited by their research from communicating more broadly. The problem rather has been cultural anti-intellectualism and the continued dumbing down of journalism. More recently, however, other challenges have occurred. The exchange value of all writing has declined as authors have become content providers. There is now less of a professional future for academics writing for the public than for those writing for one another.

There is no easy solution to the problems that beset research in the humanities today, but there are measures that might help. For one, the value of our research needs to be explained and defended to those outside our disciplines, a task we have historically neglected, perhaps because it has been perceived as service. For another, an effort might be made to tie research more directly to undergraduate teaching, making the connection between the two a matter of practice rather than theory. Finally, given the dubious worth (judged purely in terms of reach or influence) of much that is published, perhaps it is time to question the significance of publication statistics. Maybe we should be encouraging faculty members to write less, but more consequentially.