One Coin Obverse and Reverse: Teaching and Research
© W. B. Allen 1998
We
stand now more than a decade into the national conversation about the “crisis”
of higher education. At this point it
is fair to say that something of a consensus has emerged around a few central
principles, namely: (1) excellence in undergraduate teaching requires to be
re-emphasized and deepened into a controlling norm of university community; (2)
teaching and research excellence need to be envisioned as reciprocal rather
than competitive; (3) shared governance must be redefined to safeguard its
centrality in the face of exigent standards of public accountability; (4)
demands for public accountability will increase rather than recede; and (5)
colleges and universities must accommodate an environment of evolving social,
economic, and technological demands without sacrificing autonomy.
In
the face of this impressive and well-documented orthodoxy may not a stray,
contrarian voice be raised in the defense of the ivory tower and its unchanging
central mission? I hope this may be so,
lest the consensus of reform refigures the details of higher education at the
cost of higher education itself. That
is the danger implicit in neglecting the fact that education’s central task is
to address ignorance, that is a more powerful rationale than the work of
assimilating to cultural expectations.
At the same time and unfortunately much of the evolved consensus aims to
accomplish the latter, albeit without disparaging but nonetheless imperiling the
former. To take the most powerful
example, Jonathan Cole’s “learning communities clearly preserve the work of
addressing ignorance as an organizing conception. At the same time, however, the specific reforms grafted onto this
stock do not clarify the continuing relevance of age-old concerns intrinsic to
this work.
The
following reflections invite reconsideration of what works and doesn’t work in
higher education. That goal leads to a
contrarian view of some practices that have been called into question in the
general discussion of the “crisis.” I
suggest that some expenditures now considered wasteful are not so, that some
conceptions of discursive community actually fall short of producing one, that
some organizational principles in the research university at least work to undermine
the goal, and that in some respects what is familiarly regarded as intellectual
arrogance is a necessary shield of inquiry.
Jean
de la Fontaine defended the moral fable as “making men better.” In the fable called “Education” he described
this as the work of cultivating their specific and intrinsic excellences as
opposed to the work of encouraging their inclinations (which are merely
responses to momentary temptations).
Universities address ignorance to the same end, to cultivate specific
and intrinsic excellences. For that
reason, the single, unchallenged piety of higher education is the ubiquity of
ignorance. Every learner presents
herself as ignorance awaiting assault.
The unique character of this piety is that it invites attack rather than
worship. Accordingly, the discursive
community it fosters will be characterized less by the saccharine
characteristics of tolerance and respect for others (though these belong) than
by the robust, negative values of skepticism, redundancy, and remoteness (from
the urgencies of generalized desire).
Although
we have come to describe the university exclusively in terms of positive
virtues (curiosity, intelligence, free inquiry, charity, etc), the negative
values play the critical role of directing its essential functions. They are the means to the ends that do,
indeed, give rise to more positive virtues as their consequences.
It
is skepticism about every piety – and all the prejudices with which learners
enter their vocations – that produces the motivation to penetrate to the
sources and true bearings of things. As
such the discursive community is better fostered wherever skepticism is
practiced as a right – expected – rather than as the mere force of an
extraordinary personality. To that end,
the university can not go too far in support of skepticism. If the United States is generally regarded
as the apogee of political progress, let it be challenged by radical inquiry
into its foundations. If Martin Luther
King, Jr. is universally embraced as a prophet, encourage every doubt of his
wisdom. These are the moments from
which universities crop their glories.
Nor
can such moments be so generally enjoyed without healthy doses of
redundancy. For it takes different
voices parsing Shakespeare to scare up meaningful discussion of the true
bearings of his work. Learners must
confront choices at every step of their inquiry in order seriously to feel the
challenge of skepticism. Where one
seminar in Shakespeare is good, two will always be better. The industrial model of reducing all
processes to the fewest productive motions is inappropriate to higher
education. Economies are imposed on
universities by necessities. But a
smarter choice is to calculate the fewer areas in which an institution can
concentrate meaningful redundancies rather than to seek universal coverage of
all areas of inquiry by unique iterations.
Better Shakespeare done well than everything done poorly! Our current consensus drives us in the
latter direction, thus universally sapping the soul of education rather than
heightening the excellences that could well be differentially accomplished in
different institutions.
So,
too, it goes without saying that the university that is not going to serve
every conceivable purpose (satisfy every putative stakeholder) – one that
recognizes that to “make men better” in a few ways serves than better than the
commitment merely to “serve men better” – must benefit from a shield against
the pressure to indulge every popular passion.
There is no better shield than remoteness. Remoteness further serves the purpose of protecting the society
from the robust conversations that must characterize a properly skeptical
academy. Moreover, the faculty who must
engender these conversations benefit from being called to account only by them
that share in their vocation and are immediately affected by it. The true learning community distinguishes
among learners primarily by the length of their terms within the
community. Call them customers or
stakeholders if we must, but they are all really disciples, for whom a special
asylum – a gilded exile – has been created.
Most
of the questions raised in the current atmosphere of crisis challenge us to
defend the cost of conducting higher education in the manner it requires to be
effective. Rather than to embrace
cost-cutting as a principle (as opposed to a necessity), higher education needs
an articulate defense of the ivory tower – one that can make manifest why even
the ivory needs gilding.
To
this end we begin by noticing that the defense of tenure on the basis of
academic freedom fails to hit the mark.
While tenure may incidentally foster a degree of candor, insofar as we
mean by it to protect faculty from external accountability for opinions
expressed, it concedes too much – namely, that the audience of academic
discourse lies beyond the learning community.
And insofar as we mean to protect faculty from one another, not only
does tenure commonly fail to deliver, but it assumes a learning community in
which vocation – the moral relation in which disciples stand to one another –
inadequately structures their interactions.
On
the other hand, where tenure represents a specific economic trade-off in which
faculty opt for long-term gains over higher, short-term gains, tenure works
(functionally securing a desirable remoteness and a stable community of
discourse). That is, we must pay
something to entice the needed, long-term members of the learning community to
participate, and tenure is the price that we fittingly pay.
The
economic defense of tenure presupposes, of course, that decisions here are made
in the market place – at the margin – and that, accordingly, compensation ought
to reflect the price pressures that prevail in the market. Thus, not only ought faculty to be enticed
into the ivory tower, but that should be done by means of relatively
competitive and hence, richer, compensation.
As noted above, tenure is one element of that enhanced richness. Naturally, in such circumstances performance
reviews (every contract has two sides) would be normal.
Similarly,
if redundancy is a key value, it will follow that the cost must be
accepted. While it is true that one
person can teach Shakespeare to a single class of forty students, the gilding
that will offer two classes of twenty students more surely serves the mission
to “make men better.” It provides the
means more surely to constitute the learning community. The competition of
ideas within the academy is necessary apart from competition of goods within
the marketplace.
Finally,
the operational aspects of the university must perform consistently with the
goal in view. Since the university –
the learning community – is not designed as a place to repair for momentary
consumption or use, thence to return to the comforts of home, it must be so
built as to make it possible for people to be at home within it. Conversations that spill from class room into
“living room” do so only where adequate spaces for living are maintained. It requires capital expenditures and
conscious design to maintain such spaces – just as it does to assure that class
rooms harbor rather than obstruct conversations.
Auxiliary
resources will be no less affected. In
an era in which it becomes increasingly clear that the library must benefit
from clear-headed thinking to fulfill its central role in this large mission,
not only must money be spent on “information technologies” that capture the
function of libraries less dependent on central housing, but the evolving role
of the whole library as a “special collection” will necessitate more
spending. As the “circulating” function
of the library migrates more and more to electronic and bookstore forums, the
library will focus more and more on the unique uses that benefit from central
housing. Designed interactions with
specially valued text sources play a special role in higher education. More and more the entire library must serve
as only smaller special collections departments have served before,
intensifying the use but augmenting the costs.
This gilding is part of building the tower itself.
The
learning community built on the foregoing model offers a distinctive
characteristic in the context of current conversations: there emerges no viable distinction between
teaching and research. Teaching and
research are not merely reciprocal but identical in this model. For the particular discourse privileged in
this model demands the one no less than the other. To be sure, certain “industrial,” “assembly line” approaches
present in the research university are excluded form the discussion in these
terms (even in equipment dependent technological areas of research and
study). But that is just another way to
say that research universities must avoid the category error that holds,
whatever a university performs is intrinsic to the mission of a university.
When
we try to identify every component activity of the university – Therbligizing –
as a key to dealing with the present crisis, we end by demystifying teaching
(treating it as no more than one function among others). That is what leads us to imagine that it is
separable from research. When, instead,
we reason from the central mission, we gain indirectly the power to distinguish
essential from non-essential activities (which is not to say that non-essential
activities, from accelerators to zoospheres, are not of value). The upshot of this observation is modestly
to suggest that different management principles may be appropriate for
functions truly different. In the
larger business organization that is the university, it may be appropriate to
distinguish meaningfully the educational from the industrial endeavors. When we have done so, we will finally have
arrived at a true understanding of the distinction between teaching and
research in the university: obverse and reverse of the single coin, education.
W. B. Allen
James Madison College
Michigan State University
April 19, 1998