At research universities, the three main elements of the job are research, teaching, and service. For many of us, research and teaching each make up 40 to 45 percent of our work, and the remaining 10 to 20 percent is service.
I want to focus here on service. (Let’s save for another day the interesting question of whether the research and teaching components are truly equal.) I get a surprising number of e-mail messages from tenure-track faculty members with questions about service: What constitutes service? How do you know what types of service are worthwhile to do at various stages of your career? How much service is the right amount for you? When asked to serve on yet another committee, can you say no?
Some of the uncertainty about service duties stems from the fact that, even if a university has a specified ratio for research, teaching, and service, the time devoted to service may vary a lot depending on whether or not a faculty member has tenure. At some universities, assistant professors are assigned a lot of service work, perhaps on the assumption that they won’t say no. At others, assistant professors are not expected to do much, if any, department and university service and are instead encouraged to devote their time and energy to excelling at research and teaching. It was my just luck to start my career at the first type of university and later move to the second type.
I would divide service into three categories: institutional (service within a department, college, or university), professional (service to an academic discipline or to academe in general), and outreach (service to a nonacademic audience).
Institutional service. This typically involves committee work. In academe, there are committees for almost everything. At some small colleges, professors serve on committees that discuss the food served to students in the dining facilities and the organization of social events in the dorms. At universities, those issues may be handled by staff members or administrators, but there are still a wide variety of committees on which faculty members can serve.
During my years as a professor at research universities, I have served on departmental committees that advise undergraduates; oversee the graduate program; recommend faculty hires; institute policies and fees for labs with shared equipment; evaluate the introductory teaching program; review department policies on tenure and promotion; determine hiring priorities; administer an undergraduate research program; and conduct annual faculty evaluations.
I have also been appointed or elected to campuswide committees that determine faculty policies; select recipients of various awards; evaluate faculty members for promotion and tenure; select grant proposals or preproposals in internal competitions; and review requests for new courses or changes in instructional policies.
I was also briefly on a committee that spent a lot of time talking about various campus issues but that had no power to actually do anything. That one I quit as soon as I realized my time was not being well spent.
On that list, the committees that are most worthwhile, and a good use of time even for assistant professors, are the ones related to faculty hiring and to undergraduate or graduate programs. On both of those kinds of committees, you learn how things work within and beyond your department, and you have a chance to do something constructive. They are also, in a large department, a good way for you to get to know colleagues outside your field of specialization.
Some types of institutional service do not involve committee work. For example, you might be a speaker at a workshop on career options for graduate students and postdocs. You might serve as a mentor, or give a talk to alumni or other groups associated with the institution.
Advising students about courses or degree requirements is also institutional service. That’s not necessarily the case with advising them on research, which, in my experience, is usually either considered as part of a faculty member’s research or falls in a gray area between research and teaching.
How much service is the “right” amount? It varies, depending on teaching load, number of advisees, amount of travel, and other factors that change every year.
When deciding which service responsibilities to do and which to decline, I try to practice conservation of committee mass. That is a sanity-saving rule that states that I will only take on a new committee responsibility if I can resign from an existing one. Hiring committees are exempt from this rule, and a few others, but overall that approach works reasonably well for me.
I have tenure and, therefore, can easily say no when asked to serve on yet another committee. That’s more difficult for assistant professors, but if they are asked to do more service than they feel is reasonable, it would be a good idea to discuss the situation with the department chair or mentors to find the right balance.
Institutional service is a necessary part of a professor’s job. Even those of us who do not particularly enjoy it realize that professors need to be involved in some administrative tasks. Most of us wouldn’t want to be at an institution entirely run without faculty input, and committees are typically how we give that input. I have found some of my institutional service to be worthwhile, but I must admit that my preference lies with professional service.
Professional service. Also known as disciplinary service, it involves such things as reviewing manuscripts and proposals; editing a journal; serving on an editorial board; organizing conferences, workshops, or sessions at conferences; serving on committees that select candidates for scholarly awards; being the “distinguished” lecturer for an organization; or serving in some governing or advisory capacity in a professional society.
Reviewing manuscripts and proposals is a huge time commitment (if done with care), but even if the authors and editors ignore all of your suggestions and criticisms, reviews can be time well spent for tenure-track professors. Producing timely, constructive, and professional reviews may gain you the respect of editors (some of whom are important people in your field). Also, reviewing is a way to learn about your professional community and have a (perhaps nominal) voice in the publication process. If you are sent review requests every week or two by every journal in your discipline, of course you have to be selective and decline many of them, but it’s a good idea to do some.
When I am deciding whether to write a review, and figuring out how many reviews I can reasonably do at any one time, I consider the following factors, all of which are equally important: (1) my schedule over the expected time frame of the review, (2) my opinion of the journal and its editor, and (3) my personal interest in the manuscript’s topic.
I use a different rubric for deciding whether to review grant proposals: I consider a reasonable reviewing load to be two proposals for each budget cycle of a program to which I submit proposals (even if I don’t have a proposal approved or pending in any particular cycle). On top of that, as time permits, I review proposals for grant agencies in other countries and the occasional proposal from a U.S.-based agency or program to which I don’t submit proposals. Reviewing grant proposals is time consuming, but if you submit them, you should agree to be a reviewer.
Outreach. In general, there are (too) many opportunities for institutional and professional service. Outreach, however, may be more difficult to do in an effective way that is not unreasonably time consuming given all of our other responsibilities. For science professors, among the easiest outreach activities are judging science fairs or visiting a local school to do a cool demonstration.
It’s important for academics to interact with our local cities and towns, and use our skills and knowledge for something beyond our basic research. Furthermore, as some grant agencies have been increasingly emphasizing “broader impacts” or “synergistic activities” (to use the words of the National Science Foundation), we have to be more involved in communicating beyond our usual audience of fellow specialists. We need to pay more attention to sharing research methods and data sets with other researchers and with educators who can use the information to develop curricular materials. And we need to think more about encouraging a diverse group of people to be involved in science and related fields.
There are many ways that even the most specialized researcher could be involved in these broader activities. Given our limited time, however, it can be difficult to accomplish something that is not superficial or too far beyond our experience. And, given the limited experience some of us have with outreach, we may find it difficult to develop credible plans for outreach activities.
One of my most ambitious attempts at outreach was shot down by grant reviewers. My colleagues and I had a letter from a company that was going to make and donate a new kind of tabletop gizmo for science demonstrations that we would bring to schools. We also had a letter from a school-system superintendent expressing excitement about our proposed demonstrations. But reviewers were quite hostile to our outreach plan, noting that although we are professors, we knew nothing about “education.”
I think our demonstrations would have been quite educational (and fun), but I do understand that successful and innovative outreach requires working with people with a range of expertise and skills. Creating teams of people with such diverse skills takes a lot of time and energy. Those are rare commodities for many of us, perhaps putting outreach out of reach, even for tenured faculty members with an interest in nonacademic service.
For professors like me who are trying to balance research, teaching, and a substantial amount of institutional and professional service, our level of involvement in outreach (beyond judging the occasional science fair) will likely depend not just on whether we think it’s important, but also on whether such activities are valued and supported by our institutions and our grant agencies. Limited time will always be an issue, but I can always quit one of my other committees or decline a few reviews and find some time that way.
