Syracuse University is the latest institution pushing the bogus tenure criterion of “publicly engaged scholarship.” Faculty there should resist with all the self-respect they can muster.
Known also as “scholarship in action,” this bureaucratic move shifts us philosophically from I think; therefore, I am to I act; therefore, I think. Since it cannot clarify the line between thinking and doing, this politically motivated criterion makes the university safe for people who believe that community organizing represents intellectual productivity. Physically moving around talking to people (reciting your poetry, knocking on doors to get out the vote, teaching) has nothing to do with sustained mental reflection and its results: books, essays.
A Syracuse professor of political science notes that because this confusion lies inherent in what is essentially a social rather than intellectual gesture, the university’s official language proposed for the criterion is gobbeldy-gook:
[N]o one is quite sure what [Scholarship in Action] means. A University Senate committee spent two years trying to discern its meaning and came away uncertain. The current language to be added to the tenure criteria reads: “Scholarship in Action is not a traditional model of community service, but a robust framework behind public scholarship, which can take a variety of forms but engages a deliberative intellectual foundation.” I wish I knew what that meant.
Indeed the Senate committee should be ashamed of itself for producing the sort of meaningless verbiage any professor would slash through if she read it from a student.
The pathetic language gives the game away. The activity in question does not exist as a category, but rather an emotion, a hearty group grope into the heart of intellectual seriousness.
Every day in every way, as the dissenting professor points out, Syracuse University has been getting better and better. Don’t let it go all dumb on you.
March 25th, 2009 at 1:33PM
Inferring from some comments by our provost on her recent visit to my department, I gather that this kind of scholarship has two characteristics:
1. Brings in grant money to the university.
2. Gets university prof on local TV.
Articles and monographs don’t count.
Really Margaret, get with the beat!
March 25th, 2009 at 3:02PM
Hey, I’m on tv.
Not local. National.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec07/nobel_10-11.html
I got with the beat!