Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 15:57:36 -0400
From: Germaine Warkentin <warkent@EPAS.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: Defending Scholarship
Early in June a former mayor of Toronto (a man who ought to have
broader views) wrote to the Globe and Mail ("Canada's National
Newspaper" according to its masthead) arguing that professors who seek
to protecyt tenure might do so if they would consent to a 40 hour work
week. Prof. James Estes (History, Toronto, and a frequent contributor
to FICINO) produced the following response, in the form of a "Forum"
article in the University of Toronto Bulletin. The article has
received so much comment that we thought FICINIANS (as well as
subscribers to HUMCAN-L, the list of the Canadian Federation for the
Humanities) might find it interesting, and its arguments helpful in
these trying times. We reproduce the article below.
========
Not to be reproduced except with the following acknowledgement:
By permission of the University of Toronto Bulletin and James Estes.
FORUM: If Only Sewell Knew
Many people have difficulty understanding the importance of
research. Perhaps we should talk more about scholarship.
By James Estes
Academic tenure is a perennially favourite target of
politicians, journalists and other pundits who have
persuaded themselves that professors are under-worked,
overpaid and spend too much time on research. To such
critics, tenure is a scam to protect academics in their
unwarranted and expensive leisure. The early election
campaign promise (subsequently reconsidered) of the new [Ontario]
provincial premier to abolish tenure if elected has produced
a fresh series of attacks on tenure in the press and
elsewhere.
In a letter to The Globe and Mail (Professorial
Output, June 5), however, former Toronto mayor John Sewell
argues that the critics of tenure have missed the point and
that tenure would be perfectly acceptable if only professors
were required to work 40 hours per week for 48 weeks or
after 10 years of service, 46 weeks per year. Sewell
suggests the following breakdown of a typical work week: 12
hours giving lectures or presiding over seminars; six hours
for meeting with students; 10 hours of marking papers or
doing "committee and university-affairs work" and 12 hours
of class preparation "or research on a topic and to a
schedule that's been agreed upon." Otherwise research is to
be done only on professors' own time, outside the 40 hours
of work expected each week, and only "for paying clients
outside of the university."
What would happen if these recommendations were
put into practice? First of all, contrary to Mr. Sewell's
assumption, we professors would not have to work nearly as
hard or as much as we do now. To be sure, the number of
hours of classroom teaching that he prescribes is a bit
high: in my department we're used to something like eight or
nine rather than 12. On the other hand we would only be
expected to spend one hour in preparation for every hour in
the classroom, a phenomenal saving of time and effort.
Similarly, having to spend only 10 hours per week marking
papers and going to meetings would constitute another
unprecedented reduction in our workloads. Finally, since no
research of any consequence could be done in the allowable
12 hours per week, since there are no clients outside the
university willing to pay for the kind of research that most
of us do (at least in the social sciences and humanities)
and since we could in any case collect our pay cheques in
return for teaching alone, we wouldn't have to do any
research at all if we didn't want to.
No more summers in hot, uncomfortable archives
and libraries reading old books and manuscripts (and getting
dust and mould up our noses), no more time trying to make
sense of our research for the benefit of our students and
colleagues. Instead we would just do our allotted teaching
and then have four to six weeks of complete freedom from
work, more than most of us have ever been able to permit
ourselves up to now. In return for all this relief from hard
work and stress, Mr. Sewell is willing that we should
continue to have tenure and he doesn t even demand that our
salaries be lowered!
So Mr. Sewell has unwittingly proposed the
softest deal that professors have ever had. But what would
be the effect on the university and its students?
Since it simply is not possible to prepare a
one-hour class in only one hour, we would have no choice but
to stop taking our teaching seriously. I would certainly
have to abandon such time-consuming activities as reading
lots of books to determine their usefulness as teaching
texts and translating documents from Latin and German into
English so that my students can read them, never mind trying
to digest the latest scholarship and incorporate it into my
lectures. Indeed my lectures and seminars would have to be
thrown together in such haste that I would at long last have
no choice but to follow the advice of the senior colleague
of long ago who observed that if you want to teach "an
excellent course," all you have to do is "select a field in
which there are two textbooks and assign the poorer of the
textbooks to the students." (Incidentally, he won every
teaching award in sight.)
Moreover, since the average essay or examination
takes anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour or more to mark
and since a meeting that lasts only an hour is an unusually
brief one, 10 hours per week wouldn't be nearly enough time
for both activities. One would have to assign papers that
don't take much marking (e.g., true-false exams instead of
essays) and either skip a lot of meetings or show up without
having done one's homework. And since we would only be
obliged to put in a 40-hour week, we would have the perfect
right to refuse to mark any papers or go to any meetings or
do any kind of work for the university that couldn't be done
within the 40-hour limit. The result, of course, would be
chaos in the conduct of the university s business, the
collapse of quality instruction for the students and the
disappearance of research, which has always been a primary
concern of the best universities.
This brings us at last to the real crux of the
matter. Mr. Sewell's recommendations are more than just a
shocking display of his ignorance of what would happen if
professors couldn't be expected to put in considerably more
than 40 hours a week. The essential point is his hostility
to research.
As he and many others see it, research is
something that professors do for their own amusement instead
of doing their proper job, which is teaching students. In
this view a scholar in Rome reading priceless manuscripts in
the Vatican Archives is on holiday and doing nothing of
sufficient importance to be reckoned as part of his or her
routine obligation to the university. And, the thinking
goes, professors should not have summers off from teaching
for this sort of thing, nor should they be allowed to devote
any portion of their regular work time to it except by
special agreement concerning topic and time limits. Enough
of this wasteful and time-consuming pursuit of personal and
probably "irrelevant" intellectual interests instead of
teaching all the time!
This question of the relationship between teaching and
research is an exceptionally difficult one. It arouses
scepticism in most laypeople, including undergraduate
students, and is answered in a variety of ways by academics
themselves, depending on their particular field and assigned
role in the academy. I can only try to explain why the
assumption of a dichotomy between teaching and research
seems false and dangerous to someone in the humanities and
social sciences.
The issue would be clearer, I think, if we were
to talk less about research and more about scholarship, of
which research is a part. Scholarship is the attempt of
qualified professionals to come to terms with the results of
research (their own, that of others or both), to grasp the
significance of that research for their discipline and to
communicate to others the knowledge they have acquired as a
result. They communicate this knowledge to colleagues in
monographs, articles and papers read before learned
societies or to students via classroom teaching or the
writing of textbooks. In other words scholarship is by
definition a form of teaching based on research.
It is quite possible to teach an excellent
university course on the basis of someone else's research,
though in order to do so, one needs to have the kind of
critical judgement that only experience as a research
scholar can provide. It is absolutely impossible, however,
to teach such a course if no one else has done the necessary
research and written it up. My most popular undergraduate
course (on the Thirty Years War) deals with a topic and a
period in which I have no standing whatever as a research
scholar. But I have such standing in a closely related field
(the German Reformation) and there is a substantial body of
research literature by university professors on the basis of
which I have been able to offer a course that is
academically respectable. That is scholarship, which is to
say it is research and teaching in their proper relationship
to one another.
Mr. Sewell and many other well-meaning but poorly
informed pontificators on the running of universities have
figured out that it is professors and others with teaching
appointments who teach the students. What they apparently
haven't figured out is that it is also professors, the ones
who do research and write it up, who teach the teachers.
Lectures and seminars don't come out of nowhere, they are
based on books and articles. Books and articles don't write
themselves; they are written by people who have acquired
knowledge that is worth passing on to others. And knowledge
doesn't invent itself; it has to be found by researchers,
most of whom are employed by universities and hold the rank
of professor.
Without research there is no scholarship, and
without scholarship there is no teaching worth anyone's
effort or expense. Those who rightly want universities to be
centres of excellent teaching should think about this and
draw the appropriate conclusion.
=======
James Estes is a professor in the Department of History and
at Victoria College. In 1995-96 he will be on research
leave, wasting six months of it as a visiting fellow at All
Souls College, Oxford.