JAC Volume 12 Issue 1

For at least the last ten years, I have become increasingly concerned by the disproportionate emphasis that many schools place on research and publication as criteria for promotion and tenure on the college and university level. I was one of the veterans of a foreign war who took advantage of the GI Bill to attend graduate school and to enter the profession of teaching in the early years just after World War II. When I first put myself on the job market as a teacher of English, the colleges and universities in this country were desperate for teachers to serve the great influx of veterans and other adults into the classrooms on American campuses. Although I was no great shakes as a graduate student, I managed, without much difficulty, to get a teaching job at a quite respectable university; and when the time came for me to stand up for promotion and tenure, I benefitted from a situation in which the demand continued to exceed the supply, and so I received an affirmative vote from my colleagues. Once I attained job security, I joined the other tenured members of my department in deciding whether to grant promotion and tenure to the young assistant professors whose time had come. The standards for promotion and tenure that prevailed at my university at the time—and, as I have since learned, at a number of other respectable colleges and universities—was demonstration of excellence in at least two of three areas: teaching, service, and publication. As a result of those standards, we were able to retain some colleagues who had not published very much but who were effective teachers and who rendered valuable service to the department, university, and community.

But the standards for promotion and tenure have changed alarmingly in recent years. Now, although professors and administrators pay lip service to the importance of excellent teaching and valuable service, the primary if not exclusive criterion for promotion and tenure is tangible evidence of scholarship and publication. We have not yet reached the point where we merely weigh the quantity of the published scholarship, but we do demand from the candidate evidence of significant research and a considerable number of publications—primarily the publication of a book within four to six years of the assistant professor's initial appointment. It matters not to promotion-and-tenure committees that the competition for publication has contributed to the difficulty that professors have in finding an outlet for their manuscripts, not to mention the depletion of our forests.

I do not mean to depreciate the value of research and publication. The publication of significant research pays handsome dividends not only to the author but also to the author's department and university, to the scholarly community in general, and even to the students exposed to that author. But we should not forget that good teaching and service also benefit the department, the university, and the students—and perhaps even the scholarly community in general. Besides, not all academics have the talent or the disposition for research and publication. Let us challenge those academics to make a significant contribution to the welfare of the university and the students in ways that better suit their talents and personalities. If they do not make a significant contribution in those other ways, then we may be justified in dismissing them from our ranks.

Furthermore, the point needs to be made that not every published article or book makes a significant contribution to the scholarly enterprise. In a paper delivered at the 1989 MLA convention and later published in the ADE Bulletin, Richard Marius, director of the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University, referred to a study of academic writing which concluded that eighty percent of the articles published in academic journals were never cited by anybody (5). An article in Newsweek in January of 1991 mentioned a study conducted by the Institute for Scientific Information, which made a count of how often articles published in the top 4,500 science journals were cited in later published articles; the study discovered that forty-five percent of those articles did not get a single citation in the five years after they were originally published (Begley 44). These statistics do not justify our deducing that these uncited articles were not worth the paper they were printed on, but they do make the point that a shocking number of published papers make little or no impact even on the scholarly community to which they are addressed. Some wag is bound to turn the familiar academic phrase "publish or perish" into "publish and perish."

We are now beginning to get complaints from many quarters in this country about the quality of undergraduate education. One of the reasons often cited for the depressed state of undergraduate education is that many professors are so preoccupied with the need to publish in order to prosper (or even to survive) in academia that they neglect the preparations necessary to conduct a fruitful class session. At the present time, six major research universities—Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts, and California-Berkeley—are participating in a federally funded Focus on Teaching Project, a consortium aiming to find ways in which universities can recognize, reward, and support excellence in teaching. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, for today teaching, especially in higher education, clearly occupies a position several layers below that of research and publication. In fact, as Scott Heller suggests in a 1988 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, getting an award for excellence in teaching could be the "kiss of death," because the award implies for some academics that the faculty member who won the award may not be as serious about research and publication as he or she should be (A14).

Lynne V. Cheney, Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, published in 1990 Tyrannical Machines: A Report on Educational Practices Gone Wrong and Our Best Hopes for Setting Them Right. For the title of that report, Cheney adopted a phrase from a 1903 essay by William James. In that essay, James said that when well-intentioned practices become institutionalized on a large scale, they tend to become "tyrannical machines with unforeseen powers of exclusion and corruption." Much of what Cheney's committee found wrong with American education on all levels was the product of these tyrannical machines. In the section on colleges and universities, pages 25 through 34 deal with the strained relationship between research and teaching. Because of the need to engage in research and publication in order to survive in academia, many senior professors make themselves scarce in the undergraduate classroom. Much of undergraduate education is conducted by junior faculty and graduate teaching assistants. It is not that students are shortchanged by these neophyte teachers. As a long-time Director of Freshman English at two universities, I can testify that some of the most conscientious, most effective teaching that goes on in colleges and universities is delivered by graduate teaching assistants, despite the fact that they are sorely tempted to devote most of their time and energy to their own graduate studies. But frequently it takes a seasoned teacher to inspire students to work extraordinarily hard at their studies and to become committed to a certain discipline. One of the telling statistics in the Cheney report about the effect of senior professors' retreat from the undergraduate classroom is that "twenty years ago, one out of six college graduates majored in the humanities. Today the figure is one out of sixteen" (33).

The Cheney report makes the point that there are now hopeful signs of an accelerating pace on college campuses to make the kinds of educational reform that is underway on the elementary and secondary levels. The presidents of such prestigious research universities as Stanford, Princeton, Wesleyan, and the University of Pennsylvania have publicly acknowledged the need to place greater value on teaching (34). The Pease Report from the University of Maryland remarks that "undergraduate teaching is seriously undervalued by the present reward structure" and recommends that departments recognize that "there are several important ways of serving the university, and many years of outstanding teaching is one" (17, 61). The Cheney report designates the objective of this reform movement, an objective that I heartily endorse:

What most disturbs me about the undue emphasis that is placed on research and publication is that this emphasis is beginning to appear now in the area of rhetoric and composition. In her Chair's Address at the 1990 CCCC convention, Jane E. Peterson remarked with pride about the great progress we have made in elevating the discipline of composition:

The professional training in rhetoric and composition that graduate students are now receiving at many of our universities and their growing sophistication as teachers of composition and as administrators of writing programs are welcome developments indeed. Most of the composition teachers of my generation had to educate themselves in order to become sophisticated teachers and efficient administrators. In our trial-and-error period, we made many dreadful mistakes, but because we fervently believed in the importance of learning how to compose readable prose, we hung in there until we had devised strategies that were not just exercises in futility and that, in good conscience, we could pass on to aspiring teachers of composition. Nothing makes me more optimistic about the future of writing instruction in this country than to attend a national or regional convention of English teachers and to listen to the papers delivered by dozens of astoundingly erudite young teachers of writing.

But the pressures are now on these bright young teachers "to publish or else." If publication is the name of the game in academia, I suppose we can't entirely exempt these young teachers from playing the game. Despite the growth in the number of journals in the field of rhetoric and composition, however, the competition for space in these journals has become fierce. Moreover, some of the kinds of publication accepted in other disciplines are not acceptable in humanities circles. For instance, coauthored books and articles—the kind of collaborative efforts that have flourished for years in the sciences—do not carry much weight toward promotion and tenure in many humanities departments.

Textbooks—especially coedited textbooks—carry even less weight in promotion-and-tenure deliberations. In The Making of Knowledge in Composition, Stephen North names some of the most notable of what he calls "Practitioners" (that is, teachers) from the 1963 era and from the subsequent generation: Robert Gorrell, Walker Gibson, Ken Macrorie, A.M. Tibbetts, Hans Guth, James McCrimmon, Donald Hall, Elizabeth Cowan, Donald Murray, Elaine Maimon, Peter Elbow, Muriel Harris. These are just some of the notable Practitioners, but what is especially significant about all of those named here is that they published widely used and very influential textbooks. In other words, their textbooks were extensions of their teaching and were of great help to other teachers and to students. But according to the rubrics that prevail in the area of the humanities, textbooks are not regarded as scholarly enough to merit promotion and tenure. Because of the low esteem accorded to collaborative work and classroom textbooks, young teachers of writing are discovering that the rewards for publishing this kind of educational material are minimal.

I have also learned recently, much to my dismay, that the editorship of a journal does not, at some schools, rate credits for the editor at promotion-and-tenure time. Apparently, an editorship is regarded by some academics as a service activity rather than a scholarly activity. Many others of us, however, believe that a good professional journal probably educates more people in a particular discipline than a whole bundle of scholarly articles and books.

In his Editor's Note at the beginning of the February 1991 issue of College Composition and Communication, the same issue in which Jane Peterson's Chair's Address and other articles on the teaching of composition appeared, Richard Gebhardt says in the penultimate paragraph, "Implicitly, these articles argue that we must not allow our profession to be divided against itself by false dichotomies between research and teaching" (10; emphasis added). I vigorously second the motion.

Expecting a considerable number of publications from assistant professors in the first six years of their professional career is bad enough, but expecting a large number of publications from assistant professors commissioned to set up and supervise writing programs of various kinds—Freshman English, Basic Writing, Advanced Composition, Writing Across the Curriculum—is almost criminal. The directorship of such programs requires, in most cases, an eight-to-five commitment five days a week. It is quite an accomplishment for those directors just to preserve their health and sanity. It is a shame that for their service to the department and the university, they do not get several "brownie points" toward promotion and tenure.

It is understandable why publications have become in recent years the main ticket to promotion and tenure. Publications are objects that we can hold in our hands, that we can read and assess, that we can review the next day or next year. The evaluation of teaching and service, on the other hand, is more imponderable. There are ways, however, other than assessments by colleagues and students, of making those evaluations more reliable. Several academics by now have acquired credits toward promotion and tenure for publishing books and articles on those more reliable ways of evaluating service and teaching, so I will not prolong this article by discussing those ways.

But I will say in closing that we must redress the present imbalance in the assessed value of service, teaching, and publication. Presently, the scales are out of whack. And if we academicians do not redress the balance, we are going to lose a lot of effective teachers and hardworking factotums. On top of those losses, at a time when a big chunk of the profession is soon going to fall away because of mandatory retirement, we risk losing the respect and the allegiance of the students who need us in the classroom and of the parents, the taxpayers, and the benefactors who help pay our salaries. Let us not be foolhardy.

Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio

Works Cited