When faculty members talk about teaching, they speak of teaching “loads,” but when they talk about research, they speak of research “opportunities.”
I wish that observation were original with me. It’s not, but it certainly sounds right to me.
There are many reasons why lots of academicians see teaching as something they must do and research as something they get to do. (Of course, for others it’s the other way around, but that’s a tale for a different day.) But why are the schools that employ these faculty members increasingly pushing them to pursue active research programs — especially schools that have traditionally placed primary emphasis on teaching and little emphasis on research?
One obvious answer is that research can bring new resources to a school that’s looking to hold its own or move up in the world — major grants, new faculty positions, more graduate fellowships, even new buildings.
Of course, that’s more true in some fields than in others. In political science, the average NSF grant, for example, is peanuts compared to the average grant in the natural sciences, and there aren’t all that many NSF political science grants in the first place. More generally, the ability of political scientists (like that of many of their colleagues in other fields, especially in the social sciences and humanities) to bring in worthwhile, let alone big, bucks, is extremely limited. So why the big push for research in fields where the typical research project is more a drain on institutional resources than a money-maker?
In a recent paper (gated, abstract here; overview here), Dahlia Remler and Elda Pema consider several explanations of why more and schools are pushing faculty members to focus on research, often with tradeoffs involving teaching. Among the explanations:
bq. Institutional prestige. Ask a reasonably well informed American to name the ten “best” schools in the country, and chances are the list you’ll get will include Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Chicago, and a few leading state universities like Michigan and Berkeley. Does that mean that these are the schools that offer the best educational experiences for undergraduates? Well, maybe yes and maybe no. But if it’s high-quality undergraduate education you’re after, what about Swarthmore and Williams and Oberlin and Carleton and other leading liberal arts colleges? Increasingly, having a high research profile is being taken as an indication of the quality of educaitonal institutions and the opportunities they’re likely to provide for their students. So even if political scientists aren’t bringing in major grants, their research may be helping to boost the university’s profile as a high-quality academic institution.
bq. A belief that being actively engaged in research makes one a better teacher. This is widely believed,or at least frequently said. I guess I believe it, too, and I know I say it frequently — but I must admit that many of the best teachers I’ve known have not been active researchers and many of the most active researchers I’ve known have been lousy teachers.
Those are just two of the several explanations that Remler and Pema consider. I find their paper interesting not so much for the answers they provide, but rather because they’ve laid out a question whose answer so many of us take for granted — that research is simply a Good Thing that needs to be encouraged — that we don’t take the trouble to think it through. Should School X, a third-tier state institution best known for the quality of its football team, really be concentrating on building its research profile in a highy competitive environment where it’s decades behind scores of entrenched institutions and has little of the infrastructure it will need to catch up? Should the political science department at School X have a Ph.D. program and should it focus its faculty hiring efforts on candidates who seem likely to produce a lot of journal articles in a short period of time? What worthwhile purposes are served when institutions that have historically paid little heed to research jump onto the research bandwagon?