Controversies in Public Scholarship

 

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Because research and teaching serve as the main criteria in reviewing candidates for faculty or tenure positions, few academics have concerned themselves with much else. But as the notion of “public scholarship” takes hold in the academy, more and more faculty and graduate students are trying to find ways not only to serve the broader public, but also to make such service a weighted criterion in the review process. This push to reconceptualize the role of the professor as researcher, teacher, institutional servant, and public advocate raises a number of difficult questions with respect to the ethical considerations of social advocacy; the relationship between the professor, the university and the public; and the criteria for professional promotion.

 

Ethical Considerations

 

Many professors reject the claim that they have some sort of responsibility to the public good. Humanists in particular often prefer to ignore standards of social or public utility when it comes to their research. “Knowledge, they say, is important for its own sake. Any attempt to justify knowledge in terms of its social good undermines the purity of knowledge, undermines scholarship, and corrupts the primary purpose of academia and the university, which is to discover and preserve knowledge” (Karabell). By preserving and criticizing art, history, literature and so on, humanistic scholars contribute to the good of society because they protect the artifacts that define who we are. To this extent, professors serve a social good. To use knowledge explicitly for the ends of social advocacy, these critics contend, may disrupt the important work of keeping knowledge “pure.”

 

The sciences, on the other hand, tend to view knowledge as best when applied to some “real-world” problem. For this reason, science has tended to be more successful in producing public scholarship. Nevertheless, like the humanities, the world of academic science tends to be quite insular in terms of its hiring and promotion practices. Decisions for tenure, for example, are usually based on whether or not scientists have a certain educational pedigree, are publishing in the right academic journals, and can win grants that fund projects that may or may not yield broad public benefits.

 

In any case, it appears clear that some disconnect exists between institutional academic culture and the expectations of the broader public. Students go to college to learn from experts; parents pay rising tuition rates to ensure this happens; governments allocate billions of dollars to meet those expectations; and private donors endow institutions assuming that certain conditions will be met. Is it therefore ethical for scholars to ignore external interests and go on speaking with and to one another and nobody else?

 

This question raises a host of new questions over what constitutes “ethical” public scholarship. If it is important to serve the public, then who determines how it will be done? Which public is being served? If we assume advocacy for a particular cause, do we not sometimes implicitly oppose other causes that certain members of the public consider important? In short, how do we interpret the civic function of the university without appearing uncritically ideological? A number of public scholarship projects mentioned elsewhere on this page demonstrate ways in which scholars have appealed to broad, non-exclusive publics. Do we then make the principle of non-exclusivity a weighted criterion in our evaluation of a public scholarship project?

 

Academic Freedom

 

Controversies over just how “far” a professor is allowed to go in her/his public commentary before s/he suffers disciplinary action have intensified in the past few years. Most notably, Ward Churchill, a tenured Ethnic Studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, made inflammatory comments regarding the September 11th 2001 attacks in the northeastern United States. His comparison of 9/11 victims to Eichmann, an ultra-violent Nazi war criminal, raised public debate over how far first amendment rights ought to extend and, more specifically, how ideological a professor’s public presence should be allowed to get. These questions remain unresolved.

 

While the Churchill example is usually considered an extreme one, it underscores an increasingly universal concern over the relationship among professors, the university, and the broader public. As Karabell has noted, “the tendency is for professors and academic guilds to see society—in the form of legislatures, students, and pubic interest groups—as a threat to intellectual freedom and to the academic endeavor. Society is perceived as a danger to be resisted, not a community to be served.” Because scholars are typically evaluated based on the rather rigid norms of their specialized discipline, and because the university usually decides to promote a scholar based on his/her reputation within the given discipline, it is difficult for the broader public to exercise influence with respect to who is employed and promoted by a university.

 

Most scholars regard this freedom from public influence as essential to their ability to conduct true scholarship. If the research and teaching agenda is determined by the public, then it also becomes subject to the public infatuations of a given social moment. For this very reason, some scholars express distrust of academics who seek popular, commercial audiences. They also see alignment with “public interests” as a potential means to become puppets of the state. They do not want to be regarded as allies of nationalistic ideals or corrupt governmental policies (Karabell). The university, as they see it, is a sanctuary for ideas that may or may not have immediate public utility but are nevertheless interesting and potentially valuable.

 

The danger of this critique, according to Alan Wolfe, is that it embeds scholars in a world of academic trivialities, because they have “lost touch with the public they study” (or don’t study). The solution here, Wolf says, is not to push academics out into the “real world,” where they will likely not know how to engage the public in its own language and customs, but to raise the standard of scholarship they currently practice. For Wolfe and others (see also Rosen), the issue plaguing the academy is not its disconnect from the practical world, but its relentless diffusion of mediocrity across a virtually numberless span of journals and conferences. The implication is that scholars do the public no favors by offering it “expertise” of quality of the third or fourth tier.

 

Another dimension of the ethics critique focuses on how some scholars would use the university as their "personal engine of revolution" (Kuypers). Mixing personal partisanship with academic scholarship will lead down "a slippery slope to this idea: All education, all culture, is political, so it should be explicitly so" (George Will qtd. in Kuypers). This concern is especially popular with conservative groups, who have become increasingly vocal about the leftist political leanings of most academics in the humanities.

 

Depending on the nature of the institution and the interests of the critic, perspectives on the role of the scholar routinely change. While at major graduate institutions research dominates criteria for advancement, smaller colleges and universities focus on teaching. The emphasis on research and publishing is unlikely to change at elite private institutions, but many faculty at state institutions seek a return to the land-grant tradition, which suggests universities that are funded by the state owe themselves to the principles of egalitarian democracy. If the original purpose of the land-grant colleges was to offer equal opportunity to students and to train them to contribute well to the local communities, perhaps they should take up this mission again.

 

These critics argue that even at state institutions scholars have forgotten their obligation to the local community and have instead embarked on a misguided and ambitious attempt to be like the elite institutions. In their rush to gain prestige, the state schools have turned their backs on teaching and public service and sought “the tenuous rewards of professional accomplishment in which one is praised and promoted for publishing highly specialized research and implicitly denigrated, indeed often punished, for fulfilling the university’s end of the social contract” (Cooper). These critics tend to conceive of the role of the scholar as a composite of service, teaching and research. Ideally, in this view, a professor would use her/his teaching as a means to promote certain standards of social consciousness. A composition professor might ask students to write about a current social controversy on campus or in the local community instead of asking them to respond to a short story by Hemingway. Or that same professor might ask the students to take the themes of the Hemingway short story and apply them to a current social context. The professor of communication might require students to use the skills they have acquired in class to offer help to a non-profit organization in the community as a final project. So might the engineering professor, and so on. Ideally, the professor’s research would grow out of these interchanges and, in turn, serve to better inform his/her teaching. Public scholarship thus becomes a “fusion of research, education, pubic outreach, and community dialogue” (UW Draft Statement).

 

The role of scholars, in this sense, “lies in their capacities to bridge private lives and public obligations—the inner and outer worlds—and enrich moral life, while simultaneously shaping a personal identity responsive to the commitments and responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy” (Cooper). But this leads again to the question of ideology. Must all public scholarship build undisruptive bridges? Or is there a place for partisan activism? How does one determine what constitutes viable public scholarship?

 

Evaluation and Tenure Considerations

As public scholarship becomes more popular, many academics want to revise the tenure review system. Whereas tenure is currently based primarily on research, publication, teaching records, and, to a lesser extent, institutional service, public scholars and those who would become public scholars want to devise some means of making socially engaged scholarship a viable consideration of the promotion process. One organization, Imagining America, has devoted itself to this very goal. The group intends to develop alternative ways to evaluate faculty (specifically faculty in the humanities and arts) who engage in public scholarship.

 

One of the concerns over making public scholarship a potential area for review is the lack of any formal way to assess the rigor of the academic work involved. How much weight, for example, should be given to a publication in a popular media outlet? What about someone who devises curricula for literacy outreach in the local community? Perhaps a professor thinks the most effective way to collect and diffuse research is through a BLOG. Ignoring such contributions based on existing—some would say outdated—models of evaluation and review provides strong disincentive for scholars to use new communication technologies or engage social frameworks in interactive ways.

 

One way to respond to the problem, according to Imagining America, is to change the way we conceive of “service” in the review process. The argument suggests that it is no longer enough to sit on committees, advise graduate students, and take on administrative tasks within the department or even the university. Rather, the public scholar should seek to serve the local community by making intellectual contributions to certain causes outside of the academy. In turn, the community provides the scholar with new ideas and directions for research. If tenure review panels begin to conceive of “research” and “service” not as discreet categories (the former being far more weighted than the latter) but as potentially interrelated means to perform relevant work, then public scholars will likely be less reluctant to produce socially engaged scholarship.

 

But this step is hardly enough. It still does not fundamentally address the problem of evaluation criteria. How does a review panel accurately assess the quality of a public scholarship project? If the project is public, then should it not be evaluated by the public? If so, how? And how should a review panel determine whether or not a “public” review has demonstrated enough rigor in its assessment? These questions point to yet another concern for some critics both in and out of the academy. If public scholarship becomes a fundamental consideration in academic work, it may only further complicate the nature of the job they are supposed to be doing in the academy. Because a number of students and faculty still view academic work as confined to academic research and teaching, adding public scholarship to job descriptions might only take away from the attention faculty are able to give students.

 

Currently, standards by which to consider public scholarship projects are often articulated using phrases like “democratic citizenship”, “social literacy,” “free expression,” and “personal empowerment,” but few people have managed to create reliable definitions for these terms. Imagining America’s Tenure Team Initiative (TTI) seeks to shape these terms into more identifiable categories for evaluation. The initiative intends to generate a report that provides:

 

• An analysis of the key concepts and premises inherent in pubic scholarship and arts production.

• A clear definition of the diverse forms of public scholarship in the cultural disciplines.

• Recommended tenure and promotion policies suitable to publicly-engaged humanities scholarship and artistic creation. (Inside Higher Ed)

 

These three goals highlight the relative newness of the current public scholarship debate. Although scholars have been engaging in what might be called public scholarship for many decades, even centuries, little accommodation has been made for such work in the modern research university—or even in the teaching schools. Once the “premises,” “concepts,” “forms,” and “recommended policies” are ironed out, if ever they are, the TTI seems to think a legitimate review process will be quite viable. One example cited by the initiative is the field of architecture’s use of a portfolio model for “presenting and reviewing complex collaborative projects.” TTI also suggests a peer review of the “exhibition,” “performance,” and “cultural spaces” of the given project might serve as grounds for tenure review.

 

In response to the general uncertainty about how public scholarship should be assessed at the macro level, some departments within institutions have begun to establish their own criteria for evaluation. The University of Washington, for example, prepared a draft statement on public scholarship outlining its standards for evaluation: Pubic scholarship “must be related to a scholar’s area of research” and “assessed in terms of its (a) public impact, (b) reach across diverse publics, and (c) opportunities for active pubic involvement.” Here is the University of Washington’s public scholarship draft statement in its entirety. Controversies remain, however, over how much public scholarship is submissible in place of traditional academic work.

 

Although arriving at consensus on how to evaluate public scholarship may be a difficult endeavor, proponents are quick to remind critics that establishing grounds for review with respect to publication records, teaching ability, and institutional service was not easy either. Over time, reliable rubrics were established and implemented. Furthermore, committees routinely face gray areas when assessing the quality and substance of work done by scholars. Just because something is difficult to evaluate does not mean it should be ignored.

 

Summary

 

Public Scholarship remains a controversial issue for the modern day academy. First, because today’s college or university affects such a broad range of public participants (students, parents, legislators, academics, and even businesses), socially engaged scholarship is fraught with questions about the ethics of social advocacy. Where does scholarship end and partisan activism begin? In what ways is knowledge limited by its grounding in social arenas? Many critics, both in and out of the academy, have begun to question the limits and virtues of academic freedom as a result of scholars who volunteer themselves for the public arena.

 

Second, since undoubtedly there is a tradition of community orientation in the history of American universities (particularly since the Morrill Act of 1862), proponents of public scholarship believe socially engaged research ought to be weighted as a fundamental criterion in the review process for hiring and tenure. There remain questions, however, over how public scholarship should be assessed. How does a tenure committee determine the value of a public project? How does one assess the academic rigor of a scholar’s public work? How much public scholarship is appropriate in place of traditional academic scholarship? As noted, some critics suggest that public work taints the otherwise pure enterprise of true scholarship, which is to gather and assess knowledge independent of contingent realities, such as social publics. Other critics believe that the standards of current academic scholarship need to be raised before scholars begin to impose their expertise on public audiences.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Academics' forays into public scholarship certainly can have negative consequences for the individual academic. For example, the time commitment needed to rewrite for broader public consumption (as opposed to that demanded by scholarly standards), to give community workshops, offer consultation services, create and maintain informational websites, or any number of other public scholarship activities requires a significant time commitment -- time taken away from academic scholarship pursuits. This could pose a particular hardship for non-tenured faculty who must publish numerous scholarly works if they hope to win tenure.

 

 

 

Sources

 

Ad Hoc Committee on Pubic Scholarship. (2004), March 4)Draft statement on upblic scholarship. Department of Communication, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

 

Cooper, D.D. (1999). Academic professionalism and the betrayal of th eland-grant tradition. American Behavioral Scientist, 42, 776-785.

 

Huber, M.T. (2006). Evaluating outreach: Scholarship assessed's approach. Penn State Outreach. available at: http://www.outreach.psu.edu/News/Pubs/Monograph/eval.html

 

Imagining America (2006). The tenure team initiative: Valuing public scholarship in the cultural disciplines. Available at: http://www.ia.umich.edu/tenure-team-prospectus.html

 

Inside Higher Ed (online). (2005). New approach to tenure. insidehighered.com/news/2005/10/03/public.

 

Karabell, Z. (1998). What's college for? The struggle to define American higher education. New York: Basic Books. chapter 6: Professor's and Society.

 

Kuypers, J.A. (2001). Must we all be political activists? American Communication Journal, 4:1. Available online at http://www.acjournal.org/holdings/vol4/iss1/index.htm

 

Wolfe, A. (1997). The promise and the flaws of public scholarship. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 43 (18), B4.