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IN THE fall of 1994, in my hometown paper, there was an item about my university's hunt for a new president. The article carried the banner headline “CU President Must Back Research.” The piece quoted an assistant professor of linguistics, who said: “I think it's a mistake to separate research from teaching. You can't have good teaching without good research in a university like this.” That opinion from a member of our fold recognizes a relation between teaching and research but, like the article, seems to give priority to the r-world. The spring before that, while visiting a reputable western state university, I heard the dean of the school of social sciences say something similar but apparently more balanced. Teaching and research, he said, are complementary rather than contradictory activities. That synergistic combination is critical feature at major institutions. To be an excellent teacher you must be able to transmit the excitement of discovery to your students, and to be an excellent researcher you need the teaching experience to enrich your academic life. It is difficult to disagree with that neat formula, for it reflects the standard view, the justification for an entrenched system, our justification for what we do and administrators' justifications for rewarding us or getting rid of us. It is, moreover, a formula that we have of late been called on to defend with vigor and in discomfort against assaults from a society ever more hostile to the established ways of the academy.
The reality at many institutions of higher learning, as our towers are commonly called, is quite different from that ideal balance between teaching and research. We get paid for teaching. We get tenure and promotions and Guggenheims for research. Where we profess harmony, we live a schism, the schism that my title announces. Let me share with you the secret of my inspiration for that title. I'm sure you've discovered, as I have, that some of the best conversations at the MLA's annual conventions are not the ones you participate in but the ones you catch by eavesdropping. At an MLA meeting not long ago, I overheard a hallway exchange among a group of graduate students who were making what struck me as a remarkable distinction in reference to their daily activities, a distinction between “my teaching ” and “my work .” I didn't have to ask our young future colleagues which of those two engagements was a chore and which was the object of their dedication. Neither, as I was overcome with feelings of collective guilt, did I have to inquire after the origins of their values and attitudes.
As long as a hundred years ago, MLA members were deploring the way teaching and students' needs were being slighted by the emphasis on research, precisely what the burgeoning and vociferous far right has been attacking the academy for. It comes as no surprise that given the current political climate and economic stringencies, the doubts and tensions that trend us internally should make us all more vulnerable to censure, reproach, and derision from the popular media. When George Will joins the MLA in order to gather evidence for his barrage against it, we might tremble before such a powerful onslaught, or we might rejoice for finally having entered, willy-nilly, into a public dialogue. Apart from the spate of books and articles that question, among other things, the way college professors spend their time and taxpayers' money—most notably Charles Sykes's Profscam —a highly visible case in point is the segment of Sixty Minutes in which Lesley Stahl explored and exploited the University of Arizona to underscore universities' emphasis on research and neglect of teaching.
Sitting squarely on the left, George Levine also challenged our priorities in a recent issue of Profession , and his pungent words serve as a sobering reminder.
We have been behaving (whatever we claim) as though the research model of careers in English is a natural one. The evidence seems clear not only that it is unnatural or constructed …but also that it is full of contradictions. More important, the research model now seems to be damaging both to people who aspire to join the professions and to undergraduate students whose instruction depends on it; at the same time, it is, as we have recently found to our cost, extremely vulnerable to close scrutiny—fairly or unfairly. (45)
In a similar vein, Gerald Graff, tracing the history of our subject in Professing Literature , records dispiriting patterns and echoes. He points out that the research model has shaped our teaching, our curricula, and our departmental organization ever since it was imposed in the 1850s on the basis of European prototypes. From the time on, faculty members' accomplishments were measured by their publications. Graff then goes on to recall that in the late-nineteenth-century days of Matthew Arnold technified research, narrowly specialized fields, and quantitative scholarly production were attacked for undermining traditional humanism and for erecting barriers between literature and the student. “All the critics agreed,” Graff documents, “that there was a glaring contradiction between the research fetish and the needs of most students. In his 1904 MLA address, [Alexander] Hohfeld…doubted the wisdom of requiring all members of the now-expanding department faculties to engage in such research” (109).
Whether research is demanded or decried, the problem is that the process has been confused and identified with its product, for what we have in mind when we say “research” is, of course, “publication.” That's the magic word. In the title of the ADFL Seminar session that prompted this essay, “Integrating Research and Teaching,” it is perfectly clear, though unstated, that “research” means—or at least includes—publications. Yet can we really say in all honesty and without a mite of humbuggery that we publish to be better teachers? Is the correlation so tight that if I published more, I would be a better teacher yet? Am I a better teacher in my present job at a research institution that I was in my salad days at a liberal arts college? Or am I perhaps a better teacher now because of that early experience, which gave me little time for “my own work”?
The interdependence between publication and teaching is easy to proclaim but difficult to determine. So let's confess why we publish. We publish partly because the system assumes that we will and because if we want to get ahead—or in some cases keep our jobs—we have to. We publish partly because of human frailty and vanity, because it feeds our egos to see our names in print, and as we rush to our colleagues' footnotes and indexes and bibliographies in pursuit of our legitimation, we forget that only a minimal percentage of work in the humanities is ever cited and that even that fraction is ever so ephemeral, quickly superseded. As Shakespeare put it, “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust” ( Cymbeline 4.2.262–63). Finally, we surely publish because we do sincerely enjoy the game—yes, the—and we end up believing in it; we end up taking ourselves very seriously. Domna Stanton evokes the historical flow of this activity of ours:
[A]ccording to Ursula M. Franklin, who conceptualizes scholarly publishing as a triangle formed by the considerations of the field, of the readers, and of the authors: “Initially the author really was inconsequential. The purpose of publication was to benefit the readers. Over time, the vehicle of scholarly publishing has become a measure of the author's productivity, the field's purity, an institution's voracity, or even of someone's capability in handling the English language. It has become principally a service to authors—a service to their careers—and to the journal and the publishing house.” (11n2)
Such is the truth if told. But what is our real identity? How do we define ourselves? Carribeanist? Modernist? Hispanist? Literary critic? I have two neighbors who are also on the Cornell faculty (I live in an academic ghetto). When the three of us are asked, “What do you do?” one of us answers, “I'm a physicist”; the second says, “I'm an engineer”; and the third—yours truly—replies, “I teach.” (Which of course always invites a follow-up question: “ What do you teach ?” To my answer, “Hispanic literature,” the best reaction I ever got was from a newspaperwoman in Anchorage, Alaska, who cooed: “Oh, how elegant!”) Don't you, too, identify yourselves as teachers? Isn't that your essence, your elegant essence? Deep down, I know what means most to me and where I seek my immortality: warm bodies that hold me in their memories, not my name in cold black print.
Much as I may enjoy entertaining myself in my research, in “my work,” I hold no illusion that my spectacular detection of the time and place in which the nineteenth-century Spanish fiction writer and critic Leopoldo Alas first used the pseudonym Clarín is going to shape and shake the lives of the enrollees in my courses. Even so, I distinctly recall the thrill of that discovery in a crumbling newspaper recovered from the bowels of Madrid's National Library, and I'm quite prepared to defend the importance of research not only in the sciences but in the humanities as well. I recognize the value of any expansion of human knowledge, no matter how minute. Only I keep in mind that no dictionary definition of the word research ever includes publication (“1: careful or diligent search 2: studious inquiry or examination…3: the collecting of information about a particular subject”). I fear that academic rites and expectations may have skewed our perception of the two-step process of research. Three articles get the graduate student a job. One book, or maybe ten articles, gets the assistant professor tenure. Two books get the associate professor that Guggenheim. And half a dozen books and being chair of a department get you into Who's Who. Mind you, I'm not inveighing against publication; I fully recognize the need to share and test our discoveries. What I'm stressing is that the research that's indispensable to successful college teaching is re-search , repeated searching, what others before me have correctly identified as “learning.” 1 In other words, if teaching—any teaching—is not accompanied by reading and experience outside the classroom, the classroom is impoverished. In order to help a student discover how the magic of fiction operates, I have to make that discovery myself. I have to read, investigate, analyze, correlate, interpret, evaluate, question, understand, synthesize, criticize, and theorize. Writing up the results of that learning, sharing it with others from the podium or the page, and gleaning responses do impose a useful discipline from which my classroom audience stands to benefit. But when I get home on Sunday after my convention performance, what should I do? Work on enticing my students to say “Wow!” the next time we read a novel together or rush out an expanded version of my paper in time for the next issue of MLN?
Whatever my own priorities, the likely answer is that we will-want to or have to do both. So how do we carry out this balancing act, and how do those of us who are more advanced in the ranks or in positions of administrative responsibility help our colleagues to help themselves in this regard? I'd like to offer a few practical—or impractical—suggestions.
First, it is essential that we incorporate an initiation into these professional realities within our graduate programs. We define the PhD as a research degree, and we lead our graduate students, through a trail of term papers, seminar papers, and doctoral dissertations, to become researchers in perpetuation of ourselves. That is the goal even of those forward-looking programs that have teacher-training workshops. Too often we prod students into giving conference papers and sending articles off for publication when they should be spending their time learning deeply and broadly 2 ; and far too regularly we leave their teaching skills to materialize like flowers after a desert downpour. It stands to reason that preventing academic schizophrenia should be easier than curing it, so it behooves us to anticipate our students' dilemma. Perhaps our most pressing obligation is to realize, and to make our students realize, that, even in the best of markets, only a few of them will enter the profession through institutions like those at which they were formed and, for their practical purposes, possibly de formed. Few, therefore, are likely to receive the support and time necessary to achieve an ideal balance in their activities. The realities of placement will have most of them at liberal arts colleges, at undergraduate branch institutions, maybe at community colleges whose educational missions, conditions, and facilitates bear small relation to those of their graduate schools. To that end, graduate programs, in addition to providing appropriate flexible training, should early on encourage students to consider their employment options and to engage in a heavy measure of self-assessment to determine, on the one hand, the best possible institutional fit for them and, on the other, to make the requisite adjustments in their illusions and aims. To my student who recently named a prestigious western state university as the two schools where she would like to land, I gave my blessings and my encouragement along with a pair of shears for clipping her wings. No amount of talent will save the student who cannot adjust her or his priorities to the vast array of institutional priorities out there.
Second, the college or university that gives sanctuary to these freshly minted junior faculty members is normally obliged to conform its expectations to its mission and to emplace a system of evaluation and rewards commensurate with that mission. That perfect equilibrium between teaching and research becomes all the more mythic as the active individual participates in panels, engages in extramural assignments, organizes symposia, and serves on editorial boards, while at the same time tending to institutional and community demands—all of which need somehow to be evaluated and valued. The exclusive assessment of faculty merit on the quantified basis of publication, which is never a good practice, is even more unjust, for example, where the faculty members teach four courses a semester and bear heavy responsibilities for curriculum development, student advising, and community governance. Happily, the prevailing standards of faculty compensation are being widely discussed and reexamined in the professional literature, if not in actual practice (for useful overviews, proposals, and bibliography on the subject, see James). All institutions, whatever their character, should give their faculty members, and all faculty members should take, the time to think, to read, to grow; and some measures to gauge that development need to be devised. But the criteria will vary among schools according to their nature, and the expectations should be made clear to junior faculty members from the day of their employment. In some schools, research and publication will be a logical requirement for survival and advancement; in others, it may be a luxury and a personal goal. Administrators and older colleagues must offer the necessary guidance and diplomatic encouragement and show interest without exerting untoward pressure, and the institution must be fair. It is patently un fair to demand of the junior faculty a level of productivity that senior members do not meet. It's not cricket to hire a generalist and then to expect that person to become, in the magic six years' time,“the best available person in the field.” I question the rationale of the major university that lays down the law that for the gift of tenure an aspiring hireling must have a dissertation in print, a second book manuscript accepted, and a bevy of articles and conference papers to boot. I don't look back appreciatively on one piece of advice that received as an assistant professor: “The university prints an annual list of faculty publications, and it's a good idea to get your name into it every year,” I was warned. And I take retrospective umbrage at having been told that publishing a successful textbook didn't really count and that I shouldn't do it again. Such rigidity squelches initiative instead of nurturing it and fails to heed specific circumstances. The rules of the games should make good sense as a compromise between disciplinary traditions and institutional objectives; and if certain conditions are placed on our younger successors in the exercise of their profession, these colleagues should be given the proper conditions to exercise their profession.
If it is essential for the graduate student to develop flexible attitudes, realistic values, and good working habits and for the young assistant professor to meet fair expectations and evaluations, for the established faculty member it is important to maintain balance and involvement. The looming cloud of tenure is soon replaced by other demands and pressures. As certain responsibilities increase—reference letter and reviews, consulting opportunities, speaking engagements, contributions to special volumes, alumni outreach, administrative tasks—the juggling becomes more precarious. If teaching is then regarded as an encumbrance, shortcuts may be sought that shortchange the student. A common one in research universities is to avoid lower-level teaching—leave that to the assistant professors and lecturers!—and to concentrate on the professional students, where the material gap between “my teaching” and “my work” can be reduced. My advice is to think back to your own student days, especially to your graduate seminars, and to profit from the experience. You may have been lucky. Then again, you may be overcome with the feeling that these seminars tend to be the site of the most egregious use and abuse of students. The moral is clear. Accept that if you're investigating the influence of the German Sturm und Drang movement on Paraguayan drama between 1870 and 1872, you're on your own and on your own time. That is, we need to recognize that some areas of research just are not directly reconcilable with our classroom obligations and that we have to organize our days and our priorities to avoid both dereliction of duty and the trauma of contrary allures.
Much richer and more practical, to my mind, is to take count of students' needs and, yes, preferences in the shaping of one's teaching and of one's research and to let one's research flow from one's teaching, not the other way around. Students help one from ideas more than one's publications help one form students. What takes place in the classroom and the library is, I repeat, learning. The ongoing search for knowledge, the discovery of new developments in the discipline, the expansion of one's intellectual horizons, the formation of fresh ideas: that's what research is about and that's the basis of the symbiotic relation between research and teaching. Senior faculty members do well to remind themselves, to begin with, that they are their junior colleagues' role models and, furthermore, that if their overall responsibilities take new turns, their trust as teachers and scholars should not. I would plant as an invariable Paul de Man's dictum: “Scholarship has, in principle, to be eminently teachable” (3). 3
No institution places on its faculty members burdens so heavy that we cannot, in one form or another, engage in the activity of acquiring an dispensing learning. If the institution also expects us, for whatever reasons, to give tangible printed shape to that activity, the institution is obligated to give us the time and the means to do so, and normally it does so. Whatever the conditions placed on our professing, they should correspond reasonably to the institution's character and purpose, and they should be spelled out clearly; they should be bolstered by a fair structure of compensation that avoids invidious distinctions among different sorts of benefaction. Accordingly, just as the evaluation of teaching has become an ever more important yardstick in the past decade or so, the system needs to devise ways to calibrate, esteem, and compensate the whole citizen, the contributor to the community and the contributor to the discipline. The trick, for both the institution and the individual, is to realize that the holy academic trinity of r, s, t—research, service, teaching—is a unit, even if its components get separate entries on our vitae. The trick is to realize that “my teaching” is “my work.” 4
The author is Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 22–24 June 1995, in Eugene, Oregon.
1 I recall in particular a lecture that John Brushwood delivered at the University of Kansas some years ago.
2 Patricia Meyer Spacks addresses this problem, without resolving it, in an MLA Newsletter presidential column that should be required reading for all graduate students and their advisers.
3 However, I disagree with de Man's categorical proposition that “teaching is not primarily an intersubjective relationship between people but a cognitive process in which self and other are only tangentially and contiguously involved. The only teaching worthy of the name is scholarly, not personal” (3).
4 I would like to thank Roberta Johnson for the initial stimulus that led me to articulate my thoughts on this highly personal and tortured subject. My thanks go also to Harriet Turner and to Elizabeth Welles for the opportunity to insert my feelings into the dialogue at the 1995 ADFL Seminar West and to David Goldberg for his assiduous encouragement.
De Man, Paul. “The Resistance to Theory.” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 3–20.
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
James, Dorothy. “Compensation and Rewards.” Chairing the Foreign Language and Literature Departments. Ed. Ann Bugliani. Spec. issue of ADFL Bulletin 25.3 (1994): 38–48.
Kronik, John W. “The Identification of Clarí. ” Romance Notes 2 (1961): 87–88.
Levine, George. “The Real Trouble.” Profession 93. New York: MLA, 1993. 43–45.
“Research.” Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. 1988 ed.
Sixty Minutes. CBS. 26 Feb 1995.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. “The Academic Marketplace: Who Pays Its Costs?” MLA Newsletter 26.2 (1994): 3.
Stanton, Domna. “Editor's Column.” PMLA 109 (1994): 7–13.
“Survey: CU President Must Back Research.” Ithaca Journal 31 Aug. 1994: 1A.
Sykes, Charles. Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education. Washington: Gateway-Regnery, 1988.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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