I used to follow a journalist who wrote occasionally about higher education. The writer had hoped to work as faculty and hadn’t gotten a position, so they knew a fair amount about academia. But one thing that drove me away from reading was that this author had a recurring obsession with the idea that the desire to do research was the main driver of the high cost of a college education, which seemed blatantly wrong and also had just a slight feeling of a grudge about it—e.g., striking at something that the writer knew faculty in most institutions really valued as a professional activity.
The thing is, this writer assumed that teaching and research are in tension with one another, and for an institution to underwrite or require the latter in any way required investing less in teaching. It’s true that it can come to that point, if your faculty have such minimal teaching loads that you have to effectively hire a second teaching faculty altogether to handle the classes. That is one of the ways that the road to the hell of contingent faculty was paved, though I don’t think it’s the main cause or the main justification. Today, worry about tenured faculty who have almost no teaching responsibilities because they’re understood by their universities to be researchers first and foremost is yet another case of making the Ivies and a handful of other wealthy R1s out to be typical rather than highly aberrant.
No, what I worry about more today is that smaller and less well-heeled institutions are just losing sight altogether of the value of research for all their faculty. That’s certainly measured in the amount of real financial support for research that many institutions are increasingly less willing to provide, but I think it’s more visible in the lack of engagement, intellectual excitement and situated knowledge that many institutional leaders and mid-ranking administrators have of faculty research both in specific and general. A lot of institutions know how to promote work that comes ready to promote, as it were, but not much else, and I really don’t think that used to be the case.
In any event, the importance of scholarship for teaching faculty is first and foremost in their teaching. That’s something of a shopworn cliche on the faculty side, but I honestly think it’s true. It’s where the emphasis that tenure and promotion processes make on quantitative production of scholarship can be such a mistake. Research pays off in what you teach and how you teach it.
I’m deep right now in one of the longest stretches of continuous work I’ve done in an archive for a good while—I honestly wish I’d understood before I applied to graduate school that research in my field was going to require me to be far away from home (expensively so in air fares and otherwise) every time I wanted to tackle a new project or continue an established one. But every time I spend time in an archive, the quality of my thinking as an intellectual and a teacher improves dramatically. I get new ideas for classes, I get clearer ideas about how to explain what I teach, and most importantly, I substantially update my knowledge of my field of specialization while also learning about new bodies of scholarship in an intense, focused way.
A wise person can teach from what they knew a long while ago and leverage their wisdom to help students think critically and well about that material. But you can really tell when a teacher (at any level) just has not had to think through their own area of knowledge in a live, active and open-ended way for a while, when they don’t know what’s going on right now.
Some people who’ve never taught think that walking into a classroom requires no effort—that the only work you do is in the time you’re in front of students, as opposed to in the hours of preparation and grading and design that every hour of instruction requires. Equally some people think that research is just a kind of playtime. I do know people who have a lot of fun when they’re researching, and there is something exciting about it always, certainly. Being a historian often feels a bit like I imagine being a detective might feel like (an analogy that many other historians have offered over the years): you’re putting together pieces of a puzzle, tracking down clues, trying to guess at things you don’t know and in many cases can’t know for certain. But it’s also work, frequently draining and sometimes wrenching. (Just look at my face at the end of one day’s work.) Whatever it is, it’s essential to higher education serving its central purposes in a skilled and generative way. That might be why some disruptors are so eager to see it “unbundled” from education—or killed altogether—because they have no interest in skilled and generative education at the university level.
But I do wish at least we could hear a more genuinely enthusiastic cheer for scholarship in particular and in general from the leaders of our own profession. Whatever we want to call the style of the moment—corporatized, managerial, neoliberal—it often seems very far from that kind of affectionate understanding of something that most faculty, whatever their labor status, take to be essential to their work.
Academia: Just One Cheer for Scholarship?
I kind of think that at a decent SLAC if they're giving start-up costs that's already a fantastic change in the status quo from when I was hired 30 years ago at Swarthmore, where no such funds where on offer for historians. (Nor has there ever been any acknowledgement officially that some faculty have travel costs totally different than other faculty, but that's because we believe, usually for the best, in equity.)
How does this play out with start-up funds for new TT faculty? In the 2-2 or 2-3 load small-college world, $150k+ startup for new STEM faculty is expected. This is often short-sightedly low, given the fact that it's a one-time cost for a person with a ~30+ year impact, but that's another rant. It's also maybe subsidized by the fact that startup packages for humanities / ss faculty are likely paltry. Is a new historian at an elite SLAC able to get access to whatever archives they want for the first ~10 years of their career? They should be!