To the Editor:
Much of the debate over “Syracuse’s Slide” (The Chronicle, October 2) seems to circle around the relationship among “scholarship in action,” educational opportunity, and academic excellence. Anthony W. Marx, writing in The Chronicle a few days before the article appeared, made a resounding case for the compatibility of access and excellence in the national’s most elite institutions (“The Economic Divide on Campuses Is a National Tragedy,” September 25). Mr. Marx is supported by a body of research substantive enough to convince me that concern about U.S. News & World Report rankings is not what is driving some faculty members’ discontent with Syracuse Chancellor Nancy Cantor’s leadership.
More to the point may be worries associated with departmental or school rankings, which come closer to the heart of professional identities. Lurking here are questions such as, Are the standards changing? Should they change? And who has agency in the process of change? The article about Syracuse suggests stresses around the question of excellence above all. “Excellence” is the term by which we index our achievements. It is associated with rigor, accomplishment, and reputation; it is genuine, if fuzzy, institutional capital. Policies governing judgments of scholarly quality are also mechanisms that enforce exclusion, inclusion, and, among the included, degrees of stature and influence.
This is a time of stress—indeed of crisis (an overused but warranted word)—in higher education. Such stresses get personalized around strong leaders but play out institutionally between normative processes and processes of experimentation and challenge. One of these domains of challenge is publicly engaged scholarship. Advocates for civic engagement take excellence seriously, even as they critique the epistemological premises often associated with it. There is poor public scholarship, and there is terrific public scholarship. In many fields, there are few traditions of assessment to tap when reviewing work of this kind. When excellence is defamiliarized, things get rocky. We find ourselves between two paradigms—the one strongly entrenched, yet under pressure; the other, emergent, untested at scale, yet responsive to changes in many fields.
As associate vice president for research for four years at the University of Michigan, I grappled daily with the question of excellence confronting publicly engaged scholarship, then new to us, in the form of the Arts of Citizenship Program. Indeed, the legitimation challenges we faced are what provoked the formation of the consortium Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. While I am an advocate for mainstreaming publicly engaged scholarship, I value it insofar as it is excellent. I believe in peer review. And peer review is a process managed by faculty members.
There is remarkably little reference in your article or in the online comments to the fact that Syracuse is a laboratory for faculty-led policy changes relating to publicly engaged scholarship. The Faculty Senate at Syracuse, after lengthy study and deliberation, passed changes to the university’s tenure and promotion policies that make it possible to assess the many forms of publicly engaged research, scholarship, and creative activity. The mechanisms for assessment are those of peer review, putting the evaluation process firmly in the hands of the faculty at Syracuse, and, through letters from external reviewers, elsewhere.
What, according to the Syracuse policy, is publicly engaged scholarship? It involves “partnerships of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors” and meets “common expectations” for “ways of doing the work, ... means of legitimating the work, ... connections to prior/current scholarship and to an intellectual community or communities, ... qualities of the work, ... and [the work’s] significance.”
The policy also specifies the conditions under which nonacademics may serve as peer reviewers, “chosen from the relevant publics and audiences for the candidate’s achievements” and selected on the basis of “institutional affiliation, academic rank, prestige in a nonacademic enterprise, or membership and knowledgeable participation in a relevant community of experts,” and in accord with “the conventions of the ... discipline(s).”
This policy was shaped by and approved through faculty governance. Now, and in coming years, it will be translated into the fine detail of individual tenure and promotion cases. In the process, candidates for tenure, department chairs, and promotion committees will tap qualified external reviewers, the overwhelming majority of them senior academic colleagues at peer institutions. In the case of a colleague whose scholarly or creative portfolio contains substantial evidence of publicly engaged scholarship, they will face the challenges anticipated in the tenure and promotion policy cited above. What standards apply? How is excellence measured? Who counts as a peer reviewer?
What a policy cannot express—and what your article understandably did not cover—is the larger context in which these promotion cases will unfold. There is abundant evidence of disciplinary and field changes that reinforce the necessity for policies such as the one in force at Syracuse—field changes that are bound up with larger social, cultural, and economic changes. Appreciating this context seems important to the faculty’s labor as responsible evaluators of public scholarship.
In my own areas of the humanities, there are a growing number of senior scholars who have impeccable credentials as evaluators of publicly engaged scholarship. They are important as individuals; they are also important as indicators of disciplinary and interdisciplinary change. Their work provides evidence of new methodological migrations to the humanities from other fields. Ethnography, performance, participatory-action research, exhibition, life writing: Such methodologies are making their way around the humanities. They are evident now in the research repertoires of (for example) English departments. Sometimes these methodological motions occur because of interactions with anthropology, information science, theater, the health sciences, or museum studies. Sometimes they are connected to the work that focuses on place and space, public culture, memory, or disability. But these changes also mark the extent to which, around all of these topics, faculty have pursued adventurous community-engaged, project-based scholarship and teaching.
Complex collaborative projects across sectoral boundaries, at their best, can yield complex pedagogies and both conventional and unconventional scholarly products. Careers and fields are mutually altered by such endeavors. Consequently, as publicly engaged scholarship diversifies, we find growing ranks of senior scholars capable of serving as external reviewers. There are seasoned peer reviewers for scholarship in action all around, if you know where to look.
There are also some useful resources available. In 2008, my collaborator, Timothy K. Eatman, and I published “Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy at the Engaged University.” Mr. Eatman is an assistant professor of education at Syracuse University and director of research for Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. This report, commissioned by Imagining America (now based at Syracuse) built on a background study completed earlier. It was followed by a working conference covered by The Chronicle and regional conferences on this topic with participants from 58 campuses around the country. It has led to an ongoing research program tracking tenure and promotion policies relating to engaged scholarship on individual campuses, as well as other multi-institutional efforts.
Our recommendations in Scholarship in Public were based on an analysis of 450 pages of transcribed, coded interviews with academic leaders. These included pre-eminent scholars such as Craig Calhoun, president of the Social Science Research Council; Thomas Bender, a professor of the humanities at New York University; George Sanchez, a professor of American studies and ethnicity and of history at the University of Southern California; Gail Dubrow, then dean of the graduate school and vice provost of the University of Minnesota and now a professor of architecture, landscape architecture, public affairs and planning, and history there; Earl Lewis, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs and a professor of history and African-American studies at Emory University; and many others. While there were lively differences among them, their collective judgment supported a scholarly continuum that incorporates public scholarship and points to “the middle ground” of the institution as the place where policy change happens: in the department, the center or institute, the school or college. In other words, the places where faculty are.
Public scholarship does not and should not have privileged standing. But it does have standing. The procedures for examining its rigor, excellence, and intellectual impact are mostly new, as they are at Syracuse. At a “Copernican moment” in higher education, to use David Scobey’s term, it is more important than ever that faculty, department chairs, and deans address themselves to the concrete processes and products of engaged scholarship.
Julie Ellison
Professor of American Culture, English, and Art and Design
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Mich.
The writer is founding director emerita of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life.