Assume that the more prolific the researcher, the better the teacher. Then, assume that the harder we try, the more we excel. Last, assume that the higher we aim, the more we accomplish.
Now adopt these goals -- more quality articles, more research dollars, more funded graduate students, plus improved, high-tech teaching producing brilliant graduates. Insist that Penn State create world historical knowledge, become a beacon community of cultural diversity and promote greater international understanding.
Push the faculty to publish more articles in the most eminent journals by setting high quotas for promotion and tenure. Tie merit increases, released time, research support and other perks to outside research dollar yields. Pressure untenured faculty with outrageous demands. When they fail, hire new and desperate candidates from the glutted market.
Admit and fund more graduate students. Keep them longer so they can do the faculty's grunt work and teach more introductory and general education classes; then get them prestigious jobs.
Increase teaching loads. Get more senior professors into classrooms. Teach the most recent knowledge, train crisp clear writers, and develop students' critical reasoning skills. Get students involved in collaborative learning and research.
Do all of this at once and with no increases in resources -- personnel or funds.
Those who swill this rhetorical potion can walk through fire, write world class memos and purchase research parks. What do we call it? My distinguished colleague, James Eisenstein, labels it, "voodoo academics."
Voodoo academics is the cure for the public clamor about the corruption, absurd costs and incredibility of higher education. Having promised the public economic development, moral uplift and artistic delight, only to fail; universities are turning to voodoo to make even more astonishing promises.
Faculty members would love to be great teachers and create important knowledge. Administrators would delight to cut tuition and provide more and better services.
Academic voodoo provides the courage to try without the pain of priorities. The mind-numbing, stumbling, face-in-the-mud results are caused by the lack of knowing how, knowing costs and knowing how such efforts can interact to produce appalling effects.
For example, we talk about "research" but we mean publication. Julius Getman distinguishes among publication, scholarship and research. "Publication" is academic writing that restates other people's ideas. "Scholarship" is writing that introduces new or challenges old principles of academic disciplines. "Research" is the effort to discover something important about the way the world works. Getman says the three activities conlfict.
We want to believe that academic publishing promotes exciting classrooms. It makes sense. A professors who ransacks the library for ideas and quotes ought to be able report the latest stuff to students. But if that were true then top publishers would be the best teachers.
They are not. No clear empirical evidence links prolific publication with effective teaching, states Kenneth Eble. John Gamble of Penn State Behrend surveyed the research on publishing/teaching and found the most frequently reported relationship was zero.
If faculty are to publish much and teach well, they should be evaluated by their performance in both. But we all know that you can reach pinnacles if you publish promiscuously and teach poorly. We know that you rarely get tenure if you teach brilliantly but publish slowly.
This can happen only if the system is rigged. Faculty aren't rewarded or punished for teaching because they aren't evaluated. Administrators proudly say that they can't assay teaching. They then prove it by not trying.
Think what that says. Teaching must be the only craft in existence without quality standards. Penn State's annual teaching awards must be frauds. The claims made to parents and students must be lies.
I won't cite again the elephantine numbers and rodential triviality of academic publication but professors can produce it on demand. The clever person who can publish repeatedly the same idea in different forms, the scientist who parcels out laboratory findings into the smallest publishable pieces, the social scientist who runs each variable through every analysis of variation and co-variartion in his statistical software and the humanist camp follower of clique and fad all win in this game.
Of course, a teacher must do scholarship -- read widely, contemplate basic principles, and keep up with the latest controversies. A scholar should, in publications, critique inconsistencies, integrate disparate findings and generally further the coherence of her discipline.
Good teaching is not only compatible with good scholarship, in this sense, but it promotes it. Scholarship, however, cannot be produced under the gun.
Excellent research and teaching inevitably conflict. Reseach requires intensive concentration over years. The teaching of intellectual skill and discipline requires class time, preparation time, grading time and the time it takes to patiently let students fail and learn from mistakes. As Steven Samples notes, Einstein would have made a poor teacher and Socrates would have never made tenure.
Both scholarship and research are high risk activities. Years of work can produce nothing but the knowledge that an approach to the problem was wrong. What professor laboring to publish his yearly quota can afford such failure?
Penn State is playing catch up, trying to become a top research university of the 1980s under the different conditions of the '90s. That's impossible, so we resort to voodoo. Despite the high hopes, I fear that the sorry products of voodoo academics will turn out sticky and stinking.
