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IN TODAY’S academic departments, defending research activity against the pull of competing loyalties is a significant challenge. We who are chairs not only struggle to find time for our own research; we also deal regularly with faculty members who for one reason or another must temporarily slow down or abandon their scholarly endeavors. Sometimes, especially if they have tenure, their abandonment of research becomes permanent. Before I turn specifically to that issue, I’d like to consider, in a general way, first, our shifting job descriptions, and second, the evolving role of research in our profession. A variety of competing new demands combine to challenge both faculty members and chairs.
First of all, our roles daily become more complex. We operate within an intensely competitive national environment that increasingly demands overtime of workers to the detriment of personal life. Faculty members and chairs must constantly master unfamiliar tasks and prove themselves in new ways. Resources, meanwhile, may decrease or stay the same, so that we are often required to do more with less. At the same time, anti-intellectual forces in our culture, exemplified by President Bush’s dismissive remark about the value of academic achievement at the 2001 Yale commencement, show hostility and even derision toward some of our more adventurous research projects.1 Legislators, too, get into the act, casting suspicious and accusatory eyes toward faculty workloads. Yet research demands in colleges and universities are constantly ratcheted up as institutions vie for funding and status. At many universities, today’s junior faculty must progress more rapidly in their research than was required of their senior colleagues at the beginning of their careers.
So what are some of the new tasks that have been added to the job descriptions of faculty members and administrators? I might find the following very partial list of five spheres of increased demand laughable if I weren’t considering our ever-growing workload at the end of a long and exhausting academic year.
1. We are exhorted to teach with technology. Although computers are more user-friendly now than in earlier days, new applications are constantly introduced. To be on the cutting edge, faculty members and departments must have not just Web pages but stunning Web pages. Additionally, the university encourages faculty members to involve themselves in time-consuming distance learning experiments and sometimes even coerces them into doing so. If most chairs are like me—blessed (or cursed) with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility—they try to stay current in order to set a good example for their faculty. Yet as Stanley N. Katz has observed, technological goals sometimes reflect administrative priorities, not academic ones, and universities seldom provide the assistance that teachers and students need, instead “leaving it to students and faculty members to educate themselves on how to use technology to best effect” (B9). In the rush for new technologies, much time is wasted. Faculty members may be recruited to develop distance education courses that they end up teaching only once or twice. Elaborate workshops may teach presentation skills, such as PowerPoint usage, before these are proven to be truly useful. Perhaps it is instructive that I heard a conference speaker recently characterize PowerPoint as “boring.” I can’t say that I disagree with him.
2. Assessment has become the new mantra. Though assessment, like technology, has much to offer as a useful tool, new assessment requirements have been added on top of already full workloads. Also like technology, which as Katz observes often becomes an end when it should be a means, assessment frequently takes on a life of its own, becoming an industry and an end in itself. At my university, a full-time administrator now oversees assessment. Surely programs and student achievement were evaluated before assessment became systematized and imposed by administrators. Are the formalized assessment procedures now in place really an improvement over the reflection on teaching and learning that is almost inherent to the educational process? Will we amass information but not have time to interpret or use it properly? Does formalizing assessment procedures enable us to progress, or are its categories reductive, limiting how we think about our objectives?2
3. We face information overload on a daily basis. I frequently receive from Anker Publishing Company a catalog with an ample array of reading materials just for chairs. The explosion of professional literature is a fairly new phenomenon (Anker, for example, was founded in 1990). At a conference in North Carolina this year, I received another hefty tome to add to my library of books on chairing. Administering a department has obviously become a profession in its own right. Although I genuinely welcome the availability of literature that will help me perform my duties, several of these how-to-chair books can regularly be found on my “wall of shame”— as a colleague of mine terms the piles of literature that accumulate (or, as Spanish novelist Carmen Martín Gaite would have it, proliferate)3 in his bedroom waiting to be read. Needless to say, the ever-growing piles of unread materials do nothing to decrease my daily stress level.
Much of the information we receive is indeed potentially helpful, but for that very reason it often inspires us to add new tasks to our already full workdays. On the ADFL electronic discussion list, a chair testified to the value of the departmental newsletter she had created. With the idealistic energy of the new chair and with the conviction that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I adopted the practice myself and, rising to the challenge of desktop publishing, have made each of my triannual newsletters more elaborate and professional looking than the last.
4. We nominate more people for awards. Every year on my campus, new awards and prizes are added to those that already exist. I am eager to promote an atmosphere in which my colleagues encourage and take pride in each other, and, wanting to model the attitudes I consider desirable, I try to take advantage of opportunities to nominate members of the faculty when possible. Again, however, such efforts can consume enormous amounts of time.4
5. Students under stress require more of us. Many of today’s students juggle families, jobs, and studies. Large numbers, additionally, view learning as the teacher’s responsibility and something that doesn’t require much beyond showing up sporadically in class. Pressure on faculty members ranges from dealing with small children in the classroom to (in the ultimate extreme) students who are threatening or violent. In his book on chairing, Deryl Leaming suggests one reason for student attitudes that challenge us: many of today’s students grew up as so-called latchkey kids (250).
Reviewing my list of new “shoulds” reveals that most, if not all, of the new time-consuming activities that undercut research agendas are related to the “imperative of productivity and the discourse of excellence” and to the “invasion of the university by commercial procedures and values,” in the words Paul Delany used in discussing Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins (90, 93). I recognize that all the new priorities I identified earlier have their positive sides. My students and I benefit enormously from the ease of communication that comes with using e-mail and a Web page. The reflection and teamwork that assessment encourages also hold promise for improving our programs. Recognizing excellence through prizes fosters intellectual values. But although these and other new responsibilities indeed represent opportunities, taken together they can become impediments to the pursuit of intellectual goals. Ironically, the discourse of excellence and productivity (which often imitates corporate models) and the frenzy of activity that such discourse spawns actually undermine, in many cases, the sustained creation of meaningful scholarship.
For teachers in departments of foreign languages, the proliferation of new time-consuming tasks can be particularly distracting from research. This is because our institutions frequently do not support our research adequately or recognize it as important. Even in applied areas and in the sciences in general, research has often been suspect in society at large. The Golden Fleece awards, employed in the 1970s and 1980s to call attention to wasteful, esoteric research, were revived in 2000. Lip service paid to the value of research is often reserved for investigation that saves lives, or, increasingly, supports the so-called knowledge-based economy.5 President Bush’s lack of respect for science, even in applied areas, has led many experts to conclude that “science’s influence in public policy matters has not been at such a low ebb since before World War I” (Glanz 1). Scholarship in the humanities, not surprisingly, often goes unappreciated and is sometimes even ridiculed. One response within our profession has been to emphasize the economic usefulness, in a global economy, of the study of languages and to recruit business majors into our classes. This approach, though practical, unfortunately does little to foster appreciation for the intellectual disciplines housed in language departments. Moves such as Drake University’s recent abolition of language departments in favor of sending students abroad can only add, it seems to me, to the public’s confusion about the intellectual goals of our profession (see Schneider). Perhaps more constructive is the approach now being taken by the National Humanities Alliance. This group is creating a new database of significant scholarly achievements in the humanities that can be used to demonstrate how our research contributes to society (see Franklin).
We find support slim outside the academy, but we also face a lack of understanding for our scholarship within our institutions. Striving to enhance its research status, my university increasingly emphasizes outside funding. A $35,000 NEH fellowship—despite the level of intellectual achievement required to compete for it—may not particularly impress an administration avid for multimillion-dollar federal grants. Unlike scientists, who can buy released time and hire people to work in their laboratories, faculty members in language departments are regularly saddled with paying for publishing subventions, foreign travel, and other unreimbursed research expenses. If no summer grants are available, they must choose between teaching summer school, which means less time for research, or subsisting on their frequently below-par salaries in order to preserve time for scholarship. In addition to the often cited market forces that keep our status and salaries low, a demographic factor cited in the MLA’s recent study “Women in the Profession, 2000” may also come into play. The report suggests that “feminization” of English and foreign language departments—an increase in the proportion of women—may be contributing to our loss of earning power and prestige. Does this feminization also cause the devaluation of the profession as an intellectual discipline, leading in turn to the ever-increasing recruitment of part-timers and from there to such responses as David Maxwell’s at Drake? Statistics in the Anker newsletter The Department Chair showed English and foreign language departments as having more than their share of full-time and part-time non-tenure-track faculty when compared with other fields in the humanities (“Part-Time Faculty”). According to the figures provided, foreign language departments have the lowest percentage of full-time tenure-track faculty members among the ten humanities departments studied, with only “freestanding composition programs” having fewer.
The demographic factor of feminization, which keeps salaries low for both men and women, may also affect research productivity.6 Women working in so-called feminized areas may experience discrimination from within their fields as well as from outside them. When women who are trying to manage multiple roles are also faced with low salaries, finding the time and energy to maintain a research agenda can become extremely difficult.
In addition, faculty members may receive mixed messages about the relative value of research and teaching. Partly to counter misperceptions on the part of legislators and taxpayers about workloads and priorities among university faculty, my university publicly emphasizes our teaching mission and responsiveness to students. Yet in a university that is racing to become a Research Intensive institution, faculty members who do not maintain their research agendas will, in the long run, be at a disadvantage in comparison with their more productive counterparts. Published research still represents a significant value for academics—“the coin of the realm,” to quote a colleague. And successful research provides what is perhaps even more important than access to promotion and administrative positions: job satisfaction. Those who maintain a successful research program are, I believe, more contented with their work than those who do not. Not only does interaction with a scholarly community keep us intellectually alive but scholarship also makes us better teachers. If we want to challenge our students to reach their highest intellectual potential, we should serve as role models, engaged in the process of constant intellectual growth ourselves. But my academic experience over the years convinces me that in order to be successful in research and to perform all our other duties as well, we must be very creative at every stage of our professional lives.
It’s important for us to maintain our skepticism about new demands and in some cases to resist them, keeping a vision of our priorities clearly in mind. As chairs, we need to make sure that we counsel colleagues for whom time-consuming experimentation with technology has replaced service as the convenient escape from research. (Of course, when faculty research involves technology, we must find ways to evaluate that research with the same fair standards we apply to more traditional types of investigation.) At the same time, however, some of the new expectations I spoke of earlier provide us with opportunities to advocate for what we believe is basic to our mission—including rigorous and vital research programs. One of the purposes of my newsletter, for example, is to promote a research culture within my department and to publicize among our students and colleagues what it is we do in addition to meeting classes, teaching grammar, and grading papers. Nominating members of the department for prizes and awards serves a similar purpose. Even if our candidate doesn’t win, we have managed to present our best achievements to members of the university community. And the professional literature that lurks on my wall of shame has given me some excellent ideas about time management, which I have used to maintain a modest research agenda in the face of the odds with which all chairs are familiar. I have also shared these tips with junior faculty members struggling to establish their own research program. I particularly recommend the writings of Robert Boice, whose book First-Order Principles for College Teachers and other publications deal with procrastination, the juggling of multiple tasks, and the value of consistent, brief class-preparation and writing sessions.
As chairs, we can also adapt to our circumstances by finding inventive ways to stay involved in research. Our job entails fostering others’ creativity and promoting others’ careers. This generative role, combined with the constant fires we must put out, may mean we can’t devote ourselves to our research as intensely as before. But as that guru of productivity Stephen Covey would say, we need to sharpen our saw, maintaining our knowledge base and our writing skills. Achievement in research is frequently a condition of being hired as chair. We owe it to ourselves and to the profession to continue the scholarly development that many of us began more years ago than we would like to contemplate. We can thus continue to serve as positive role models for faculty members as well. The effort to stay active can also help make us more sensitive to the difficulties faculty members may experience in finding time for research.
I close with a few practical suggestions for chairs as well as for faculty members facing periods of extraordinary challenge. First, follow the advice of Boice and build into the day half-hour segments for writing instead of waiting for a large block of time to materialize. This approach allows the mind to work unconsciously on projects on an on-going basis. Second, find projects that lend themselves to being worked on piecemeal, possibly translations, editing, anthologies, or textbooks. Third, take advantage of projects that you have already started. Are there conference papers you gave but never turned into articles? In the case of junior faculty members, are there threads in the dissertation that could be further exploited? Fourth, maintain contact with research colleagues. (As it happens, many of my own long-standing collaborators and friends are now also chairs. One of them recently organized a conference session for a group of us. The scholarly exchange that took place revitalized our identities as reseachers.) And finally, establish a research forum in your department where colleagues can talk about their work and where experienced faculty members can provide newcomers with how-to information about publishing and time management.
In our role as chairs, we can help faculty members stay engaged in research during periods of increased demands in other spheres by mentoring them before these periods arise. Time spent helping junior faculty members develop consistent work habits and learn to manage multiple duties creatively will pay off in making them less vulnerable to stagnation later in their careers. We should encourage them to make writing a way of life. In evaluating faculty members, additionally, it might be helpful to promote a system that looks not just at a particular twelve-month segment but also at the individual’s long-term research profile.
The word in the North Carolina university system is that chairs will be facing even bigger challenges as college enrollments increase dramatically. Even so, we owe it to ourselves to keep up our research if at all possible. Should we go on to become deans or other upper administrators, our research record will be a distinct asset in terms of the respect we will command from the faculty and in our ability to encourage faculty excellence. And although some chairs will indeed rise to higher levels of administration, statistics show that 65% of us return to faculty status instead.7 Keeping our hand in with research will help us find satisfaction in this postchairing phase. It’s a challenging task for sure, but one that I believe is unquestionably worthwhile.
2Two related areas are student evaluations and the chair’s annual evaluation of faculty members. In my department, in the name of amassing objective data, we dutifully collect student evaluations, but I question how profound their effect on teaching is and whether that effect is uniformly positive. What is more, in examining the use of these evaluations in my own department, I found long-standing practices that were clearly unjustifiable from a statistical point of view yet that had been used to determine salary for years. The expansion of assessment activities and time devoted to them seems to have infected the process by which chairs evaluate faculty members as well. The amount of documentation I received from faculty members this year amounted to probably 200 pounds of paper.
3“Decía una señora, que en paz esté, que en cuanto dejas un libro encima de un radiador, en seguida cría” (16; “A certain woman, may she rest in peace, used to say that as soon as you leave a book on top of a radiator, it immediately begins to reproduce” [my trans.]).
4Last year I carefully revised a nomination for our department for the provost’s award for teaching excellence. It was our third try, and we won the award. I believe we deserved the recognition, but I wonder if we succeeded because we were outstanding or simply because we had persisted in making our case.
5A recent editorial in the Charlotte Observer (“Importance”) pointed out a connection between the area’s lack of preparation for dealing with the “new economy” and the deficiency in local research facilities.
6At my university an “unexplained gender gap” (unexplained because the gap remained even after explanatory factors were taken into account) of about six percent was recently discovered. The administration concluded that the gap was caused not by discrimination against individual women but by conditions affecting fields disproportionately populated by women. So societal devaluation of women means lower salaries for men as well as women in our field.
7These statistics were presented by Walter Gmelch, dean of education at Iowa State University, at a leadership conference for University of North Carolina system chairs.
Boice, Robert. First-Order Principles for College Teachers: Ten Basic Ways to Improve the Teaching Process. Bolton: Anker, 1996.
Covey, Stephen R. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. New York: Simon, 1989.
Delany, Paul. “The University in Pieces: Bill Readings and the Fate of the Humanities.” Profession 2000. New York: MLA, 2000. 89–96.
Franklin, Phyllis. “A Database of Scholarly Achievement in the Humanities.” MLA Newsletter 33.2 (2001): 5.
Glanz, James. “Sure, It’s Rocket Science, but Who Needs Scientists?” New York Times 17 June 2001, sec. 4: 1, 5.
Gmelch, Walter H. “Department Leadership and Team Building.” UNC Leadership Institute’s Leadership Development Workshop for Chairs. U of North Carolina. Chapel Hill. 4–5 June 2001.
“The Importance of Academia: Strong Universities Propel Metros into New Economy.” Charlotte Observer 30 Apr. 2001: 14A.
Jacobson, Jennifer. “Many Professors Stay Home as Yale U. Honors President Bush at Commencement.” Academe Today: The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Daily Report for Subscribers 22 May 2001 http://chronicle.com/daily/2001/05/2001052203n.htm.
Katz, Stanley N. “In Information Technology, Don’t Mistake a Tool for a Goal.” Chronicle of Higher Education 15 June 2001: B7–9.
Leaming, Deryl. Academic Leadership: A Practical Guide to Chairing the Department. Bolton: Anker, 1998.
Martín Gaite, Carmen. El cuarto de atrás. Madrid: Destino, 1988.
MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession. “Women in the Profession, 2000.” Profession 2000. New York: MLA, 2000. 191–217.
“Part-Time Faculty and How They Are Treated, Selected Disciplines.” The Department Chair 11.4 (2001): 13.
Schneider, Alison. “A University Plans to Promote Language by Killing Its Language Department.” Chronicle of Higher Education 9 Mar. 2001: A14.
© 2002 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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