>
> On Mar 12, 2010, at 8:37 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> Among other things, the idea that research is important is fine and the
>> idea
>> that knowledge accumulation is inefficient is fine but to suggest that the
>> intensified demands on faculty to plow out completely mainstream, totally
>> pedestrian and intellectually uninteresting research in the humanities,
>> social sciences and natural and physical sciences is producing research
>> more
>> important than the damage it is doing to faculty interaction, pedagogy and
>> students' experience of the life of the mind is wrong.
>>
>
> Ok, so you're saying: "stop/reverse the corporatization of the university
> and the privatization of the public university"? I'm 100% with that. It
> makes me nervous, though, when I hear populist critiques of "research" as
> pointless and of profs as out-of-touch pointy-heads.
>
>
> Doug
>
>
Agreed and agreed. And Alan, I do see your point about researchers having no
real hope of doing their own work when they're tenured. Indeed, isn't it the
case that most scientists do their most creative work when they're younger?
I seem to recall seeing a study on this.
I was working on a response that was based on a misunderstanding of Alan's point, I think. It looks like we are on the same page, although it's not at all clear to me that the OP (Chuck) would be on board. I'm pretty well convinced that the crux of the matter from the point of view of humanities faculty at small (not elite) privates is a "business-oriented" emphasis on classroom efficiency. And this dovetails with your point, Alan. At least I think it does.
Part of the problem is that with cutbacks to humanities (especially at smaller institutions), we have to teach more and more outside our fields, even while there is increasing pressure to publish (which is always specialized). So we have conflicting pressures towards generalist-ism and specialization. Even while I'm trying to continue a research agenda in medieval mysticism, I'm having to teach myself new fields and sub-fields for courses I teach. In this case, I think the issue is not mainly the research pressure, but, on the contrary, the pressure to teach a broader array of mainly introductory courses (but also upper level courses) aimed at students meeting distribution requirements. And all of this is certainly a problem for pedagogy. I really enjoy learning the new stuff, but if we believe that content matters (and that's another topic), the truth is that all this work gets in the way both of my research and of my teaching the material that I'm really just learning. But the reason it's this way is that humanities departments -- especially religion and philosophy -- are "service" programs, but we have to have research agendas like faculty in programs with enough majors to build a curriculum around. Honestly, without distribution requirements, we would be completely dead program units at a lot of institutions, because our classes would be nearly empty. As it is, we are on the ropes, because none of the students see "the point." So in fact the best teaching situation -- classes with, say, 6-12 students -- are precisely what we are not supposed to have. Because teaching (and learning, as the new mantra goes), like research, is supposed to be "efficient."
I suspect this is especially the case at smaller privates (and I don't mean elite privates), which is most of my experience. But it makes sense for the big publics, too, right? Where the class sizes are regularly in the hundreds.