Scholarship Unbound

Kerry Ann O'Meara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415762298
• eBook ISBN: 9781317849674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Examining a number of academic institutions, this book highlights how they have broadened their promotion policies in order to weigh faculty professional service equally with scholarship.

CHAPTER ONE

Answering the Call

INTRODUCTION

Dr. Molly Hourihan, professor of education, was asked by a women’s shelter to help design a “free university curriculum.” The shelter was looking for guidance in how to structure the classes, design the curriculum, and evaluate its success. The innovative aspects of the project involved curriculum development, the design of interview protocols to assess student interests and faculty expertise, and assessment of outcomes for a unique population of students. Professor Hourihan’s work required conceptualizing and drawing on understandings of adult student development, women’s development, college teaching, and the research on transformative learning in nontraditional educational settings.

After designing the “free university curriculum,” for the women’s shelter Professor Hourihan began to reflect on the project and what she had learned. As she tried to relate this work back to her career as a scholar in the College of Education she had many questions. How can I link this service with my research and teaching? What is it about this work that makes it scholarship? How is this scholarship similar and different to my other research and teaching activities? Will my department chair and the promotion and tenure committee be able to assess my work as scholarship? What responsibility does my institution have to support me in this work?

The vignette above describes a special kind of faculty work called faculty professional service. The work was done by a faculty member within a college of education, a discipline with its own history, culture, traditions, policies, and criteria for evaluating faculty work. When properly documented, this work may be considered a form of scholarship. Around the country, colleges and universities struggle to determine how they can encourage faculty professional service and the important role faculty can play in sharing their expertise with communities and schools. Most academic reward systems prioritize scholarship over teaching and service. This book considers how faculty professional service can be assessed as scholarship and integrated into the reward system of higher education. More specifically, this book examines how faculty professional service was integrated into four college of education promotion and tenure policies and processes. Findings from case study research in this book suggest that implementing promotion and tenure policies that assess service as scholarship can increase consistency between an institution’s service mission, faculty workload and reward system; expand faculty views of scholarship; boost faculty satisfaction, and strengthen the quality of an institution’s service culture.

Studying academic reward systems and how faculty professional service might be assessed and rewarded as scholarship is not unlike a person entering an intricate maze of interconnected rooms. In the smaller rooms, there are procedural questions about how to make connections with communities, how to find other faculty and collaborate on projects and how to apply knowledge to these diverse settings and problems. As you walk into the next room there are issues of faculty workload, reward systems, and still further inside a room widens into questions related to the discipline and what constitutes professional practice in the community. Beyond this lies the largest rooms filled with questions about assessment of faculty work, the characteristics of scholarship, and finally the values that are embedded in academic culture.

Consequently, amending academic reward systems to include a broader definition of scholarship is a “messy business” that throws together issues of institutional mission, leadership, external forces, faculty socialization, and the nature of faculty professional service and scholarship into one complex puzzle. For this reason, I chose case study as my method of inquiry. Case study method allows a researcher to explore the contextual conditions within which people, policies, and decisions fall together (Yin, 1994; Guba & Lincoln, 1989; Merriam, 1988).

This book begins with an overview of the broader issues surrounding faculty professional service and academic reward systems, and a brief description of the methodology employed in this research. The second chapter provides context for the study by further describing why reforming faculty roles and rewards is salient today, why colleges are attempting to assess faculty service as scholarship, and why this study chose to narrow its investigation to College of Education. The third through sixth chapters are the real meat of this book. In these chapters the four descriptive case studies of PSU, MWSU, St. Tims, and Erin College are provided. The seventh chapter presents common themes and differences across the four cases. Finally, in the eigth chapter the findings are analyzed and implications drawn for academic leaders and scholars of organizational change and academic culture.

In the opening vignette, we read about Dr. Molly Hourihan considering how to use her expertise to help the women’s shelter develop its free university curriculum. She considers this work part of her role as a faculty member in a university with a service mission, and a member of a discipline with a history of applied scholarship. At the end of this book, we will read about Dr. Hourihan’s university, and their struggle to meet the challenge her work has put before them. Can Dr. Hourihan’s institution live up to the rhetoric of their service mission, transform their academic reward system, and truly assess and reward her service as scholarship?

OVERVIEW

Community service has been integral to the overall mission of U.S. higher education since the later nineteenth century and the development of land grant and city colleges (Checkoway, 2001; Kennedy, 1997; O’Meara, 1995; Rudolph, 1962; Adamay, 1994). However, recent commentators both within and outside of higher education have criticized colleges and universities for neglecting the community service part of their mission, especially as it relates to helping partner cities develop effective solutions to the multiple crises they face (Gamson, 1997; Harkavy & Puckett, 1991; Bok, 1990; Levine, 1994). As a result of their lack of attention to the service mission of higher education, colleges and universities have missed opportunities to improve teaching, research, and service (Harkavy & Puckett, 1991; 1994; Taylor, 1997). Higher education institutions continue to represent potential resources for developing solutions to many of the complex problems of urban life currently facing cities (Checkoway, 2001; Levine, 1994; Boyer, 1990; 1995; Gamson, 1997). The increasing number of university-community partnerships, faculty service and outreach programs, and student volunteers represent a growing recognition on the part of colleges and universities that they should play a more significant role in confronting unmet social needs of their local communities. Concomitantly, mandates for colleges and universities to redirect their academic, physical, and human resources to aid their communities have come from internal and external constituencies.

Outside the academy, a growing dissatisfaction with the ivory tower along with mounting problems in education, public safety, health, and the environment are urging faculty to respond in applied, socially useful ways (Hirsch, 1996; Taylor, 1997). Ernest Boyer (1995) wrote in “The New American College,” “a commitment to service as well as teaching and research was never more needed than now…. Higher education has more intellectual talent than any other institution in our culture. Today’s colleges and universities surely must respond to the challenges that confront society” (p. A48).

Inside the academy, Boyer’s (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered, which challenged the academy to work toward a seamless view of scholarship which cuts across teaching, research and service, has become one of the most widely read and utilized documents for universities redesigning their promotion and tenure documents. The recognized importance of this document, along with the movement toward action research (Ansley & Gaventa, 1997; Schön, 1983), the service-learning movement (Bringle & Hatcher, 2000; Gamson, 1995), some of the changes in promotion and tenure (Chait, 2001), and university engagement (AAHE, 2001) make this a particularly generative time for developing the outreach mission of the university. Each of these movements has made higher education take a hard look at the relationship between theory and practice in teaching, research, and service. These external and internal pressures have caused much debate in the higher education community about faculty work and the nature of scholarship (Lynton, 1995; Driscoll & Lynton, 1999; Walshok, 1995; Sandmann et al, 2000; Glassick, Huber, & Maeroff, 1997; Schon, 1995). While the focus for some time has been encouraging greater attention to teaching, scholars are now turning their attention to the role of professional service in higher education.

However, this trend within some colleges and universities to reexamine scholarship and reward faculty professional service as scholarship is working against a dominant professional culture that elevates research over all other kinds of professional work. Schein (1985) defines culture as “a pattern of basic assumptions-invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and integration that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore has been taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to their problems.” Within graduate schools, within professional associations, within faculty reward systems, faculty are socialized into what Gamson and Finnegan (1996) have called a “cultural schema of scholarship” or research paradigm. This research paradigm is based on national rather than local allegiances, values research over teaching and service, and prizes pure over applied research (Gamson & Finnegan, 1996). According to Sewell (1992) this research paradigm operates through cultural schema and is reinforced and perpetuated through resources such as travel funds, released time, equipment, personnel lines, reputation and standing in an academic hierarchy. Research has shown that faculty who engage in a great deal of research make higher salaries than those who do not (Fairweather, 1991, 1993). However, it is not just individual universities that engage in self-perpetuation of a research paradigm. Research on institutional isomorphism suggests that there are social pressures that cause universities to compete against each other for resources (Jencks & Reisman, 1968; Milem, Berger, & Dey, 2000). For example, universities compete against each other for faculty with high publication productivity (Milem, Berger, & Dey, 2000). In order to gain prestige each university becomes increasingly more focused on research. The conflicting forces of a public call for more faculty outreach and the internal reliance on a research paradigm have created a strong disconnect between internal reviews of faculty work and external expectations of universities (Checkoway, 1997; Gamson, 1997; Sandmann et al, 2000; Lynton & Elman, 1987).

If most universities and faculty members are caught in the web of a research paradigm, then why is it that some universities have acted contrary to this culture and rewarded service as scholarship? A question, which framed this research was: how were four campuses whose faculty had been socialized within a research paradigm able to change or amend their institutional culture, to think of scholarship in new ways, and to reward service as scholarship? The question of how universities were able to do this is a question of both culture and implementation. Defining, documenting, and assessing professional service within the university is perhaps just as challenging as overcoming or transforming institutional culture. While rewarding service as scholarship does not require total abandonment of research culture, or a wholesale rejection of research, it does require significant changes to academic culture. This study examined the process by which academic culture was amended and/or transformed to include service as scholarship.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

The colleges and universities that are the subject of this study are organizations with long histories and complex cultures. Organizational theorists such as Birnbaum (1988), Bolman and Deal (1991), Schein (1985; 1992), and Senge (1990) have all studied how organizational culture impacts what people in an organization perceive and how they behave. Culture often takes the form of symbols, myths, rituals and “perceptions of reality that allow participants to establish consensus on appropriate behavior” (Birnbaum, 1988, p. 80). By providing “central tendencies” (Birnbaum, 1988, p.73), higher education culture is the stuff that brings faculty together to support such long held traditions as academic freedom, and intellectual honesty (Birnbaum, 1988). Senge (1990) discusses how mental models or “deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations influence how we understand the world and how we take action,” (Senge, 1990, p.8) and how individual actors come to act collectively and make decisions.

Colleges and universities are made up of many subcultures that interact and influence each other. One of these subcultures is the culture of the academic profession, where faculty work and make policy. Another subculture is the culture of specific disciplines, like colleges of education. In order for faculty professional service to be integrated into the reward system of a university, it must be accepted and integrated into the culture of the faculty. One assumption of this study was that the colleges and universities who had begun to integrate faculty professional service into their promotion and tenure systems and evaluate faculty service as a potential form of scholarship were doing something that most universities were not doing. In a 1996 Carnegie survey less than 20% of Provosts reported that applied scholarship was even being documented, much less assessed as scholarship (Glassick, Maeroff, & Huber, 1997). In a study of over 400 promotion and tenure guidelines, only about 6% had policies that reflected an effort in this direction (O’Meara, 1997). Yet evidence also suggested that faculty were reporting that they were doing professional service and there was a federal, state, and local mandate for it (Hollander, & Hartley, 2000). In addition, the dominant vision of scholarship on most universities had begun to expand to include teaching and professional service (Glassick, Huber, & Maeroff, 1997). Yet few campuses had taken the leap from encouraging this work to rewarding it through assessment as potential scholarship. The question became: Why is it so difficult for faculty members making promotion and tenure decisions to think of service as scholarship? What are the cultural assumptions, biases, myths, or central tendencies embedded in faculty training and academic culture that have kept faculty professional service from being considered scholarship?

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

The purpose of this case study research was to understand how colleges and universities with exemplary programs for assessing service, assessed faculty professional service as scholarship within a college of education. The study described how these colleges defined scholarship and assessed faculty professional service as scholarship. The procedures through which faculty professional service was assessed for promotion and tenure and the outcomes of these procedures were analyzed. This study was concerned with how faculty within a single discipline assessed service as scholarship within their discipline. However, because this study explored promotion and tenure in four different types of universities, there were four different types of structures for promotion and tenure committees. Therefore, the study explored the assessment of service as scholarship in both college of education promotion and tenure committees and university-wide committees.

METHODOLOGY

A revelatory multiple case study method was adopted (Yin, 1994) in order to explore the process, procedures, outcomes, and culture of exemplary programs for assessing service. The case study method was particularly suited to this study of organizational culture because it was important to understand the contextual conditions within which people, policies, and decisions fell together (Yin, 1994; Guba & Lincoln, 1989; Merriam, 1988). Case studies are well suited for exploring cultural issues in higher education and to examining university governance structures and processes (Kuh & Whitt, 1988; Tierney, 1988; Rice & Austin, 1988).

Four institutions were chosen because they had revised their promotion policies to include an expanded definition of scholarship, consistent with Boyer’s (1990) framework. Each of the institutions claimed that they assessed and rewarded multiple forms of scholarship for promotion and tenure, including service as scholarship. The term promotion and tenure process is intentionally broad to encompass the decisions made by promotion and tenure committees and external factors such as voiced opinions and behavior of senior faculty, department chairs, deans, and candidates who influenced promotion decisions.

The Carnegie classification system was used as a tool to distinguish between university types in order to understand the values at play in four different types of institutions. A research, doctoral, master, and baccalaureate institution were chosen. The pseudonymous institutions-MidWest State University (MWSU), Patrick State University (PSU), Erin College, and St. Timothy (St. Tims)—were recommended by the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) and by the American Association for Higher Education’s (AAHE) Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards as exemplary for their attempts to assess multiple forms of scholarship for promotion and/or tenure.

Between 12 and 15 individuals from each institution were interviewed using semi-structured, open-ended question protocols. Participants included faculty members in the college/unit of education who were currently on the promotion and tenure committee and/or had been within the last two years, education faculty involved in service as scholarship and those who were not (tenured and untenured), and the dean, department chairs, provost and other academic leaders involved in policy decisions around this issue. In addition to interviews, promotion and tenure guidelines, applicant portfolios and materials, policy documents, institutional reports and memorandum, meeting minutes, descriptions of service projects, guidelines for preparing promotion and tenure applications, and both on and off-campus accounts (Yin, 1994; Merriam, 1988) were reviewed. The documents were obtained through primary informants, through meetings with campus archivists, and from searches of electronic databases.

From the collected data, case reports were drafted that included all of the relevant material from multiple sources (Yin, 1994). From each larger case report, a narrative describing the process to assess service as scholarship at each college was crafted. Yin’s (1989) explanation building process guided data analysis—pattern coding, memoing, and the development of shared and divergent theme statements, —first within each case and then across the four cases.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

Faculty professional service was defined for the purposes of this study as work by faculty members based on their scholarly expertise and contributing to the mission of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE: ANSWERING THE CALL
• CHAPTER TWO: UNWRAPPING SERVICE AS SCHOLARSHIP
• CHAPTER THREE: PATRICK STATE UNIVERSITY
• CHAPTER FOUR: MID-WEST STATE UNIVERSITY
• CHAPTER FIVE: ST. TIMOTHY
• CHAPTER SIX: ERIN COLLEGE
• CHAPTER SEVEN: MAPPING CHANGE ACROSS FOUR CASES
• CHAPTER EIGHT: DESIGNING CULTURES THAT REWARD SERVICE AS SCHOLARSHIP
• APPENDIX A: Interview Questions for Faculty on Promotion and Tenure Committees
• APPENDIX B: Interview Questions for Faclty within the College of Education
• APPENDIX C: Questions for Department Chair, Dean, President, Academic Administrator
• APPENDIX D
• REFERENCES
• INDEX