During my six-year stint as an assistant professor, I somehow allowed my service responsibilities to increase at a rapid rate, year after year. Incrementally and inexorably, I morphed by year six into a person without any time. I discovered that if I wore comfortable shoes and really hustled, I could reach any campus locale in four and a half minutes and answer roughly seven e-mail messages before leaving my office. Fastidious about grammar and punctuation earlier in my career, I began to litter my e-mail messages with sentence fragments and truncated words like “terrif.” Once affable, I turned into someone who greeted students’ rhetorical query “Do you have a minute?” with a pregnant exhalation or, during moments of particular strain, with the response “Not really.” Buckling under the weight of service responsibilities, I turned into a person I didn’t particularly like.
My experience as an assistant professor probably sounds familiar. As the adage goes, 10 percent of faculty members perform 90 percent of a department’s service work. I had always thought that if I were ever in a position to combat that inequity on behalf of overworked junior colleagues, I would certainly do so. But things haven’t worked out that way. I’ve been chairman of my department for more than a year, and I’ve been as guilty as anyone of overburdening a disproportionate group of schnooks like me. In short, I’ve become part of the problem, which has impelled me to reflect on the whole messy business of academic service.
When I accepted the chairmanship, I planned simply to assign service equitably across the department, thereby forcing more-reluctant faculty members to assume a greater share of our growing service needs. That policy made sense in theory, but it never panned out, for a couple of reasons.
First, although professorial types are good at giving assignments, we often recoil at the prospect of accepting them. We come up with ingenious evasive measures. Research projects suddenly reach a sensitive stage of development; dependents -- human, feline, canine -- develop chronic illnesses; e-mail accounts develop debilitating viruses. If, as a chairman, you manage to break through this first wall of defense, you soon discover, upon assigning an important service activity to someone heretofore disinclined to serve, that the department would have been better off had the faculty member shirked the responsibility in the first place. Interestingly, many faculty members exhibit a practiced incompetency, not unlike certain spouses (usually male) who may perform challenging tasks by day but -- to escape their share of domestic labor -- can’t quite figure out how to separate whites from colors in the laundry room at night.
It doesn’t take too long to identify which faculty members are both willing to take on service assignments and capable of carrying them out. That wouldn’t be so disconcerting if the less-capable artful dodgers were the ones churning out the most exciting and important research. But I have found that the most productive and insightful scholars often turn out to be the most energetic and able committee heads, internship directors, Web-site designers, graduate-student mentors, and so on. Consequently, the faculty members to whom I would like to extend research leave time are the last faculty members whom I can spare.
Conversations I’ve had with other department heads suggest that the situation I’ve described is not unique to my department and discipline. In fact, my department seems to be more functional than most. It became clear to me that distributing service responsibilities equitably and assessing and rewarding service performance constructively are among the thorniest challenges that my more-seasoned peers have faced for years.
The solution to this pervasive problem is self-evident. To solve, or at least alleviate, the service inequities beleaguering the talented tenth, as it were, academic units need only expand the pool of faculty members willing and able to perform crucial services. To achieve that goal, departments and colleges must collectively revisit and redefine the academic ethos we wish to cultivate. Specifically, we need to take a hard look at our ludicrous overvaluation of academic research at the expense of service. To be honest about it, much of the research published these days -- in my own discipline at any rate -- does little to advance knowledge.
I attribute the glut of uninspired writing in an ever-increasing array of minor-league periodicals not to any defect in faculty members’ intelligence or creativity but to an overemphasis on quantity in criteria for promotions and tenure. By contrast, we place much less emphasis on the quality of research. True, justifications exist for the quantity model. Quality, the logic goes, is difficult to, well, quantify. It somehow seems fairer, come promotion and tenure time, simply to count up books and articles rather than attempt to assess quality. Of course it’s also easier.
But our culture of quantity utterly depletes the energy of faculty members that might be channeled more productively in the service of individual departments. Exacerbating matters, service usually is a throwaway category in most tenure and promotion criteria. The criteria by which departments gauge service performance are typically lax: To achieve an “excellent” service rating for a given year, faculty members simply are expected to serve on a certain number of committees. In this sense, our culture of quantity defines service expectations in the same mechanistic fashion that the culture defines research expectations. In contrast to research criteria, however, the quantity of service officially required of professors often is low. If an “excellent” service rating can be obtained by serving on just two committees, as it can in my own department, why should faculty members take on additional burdens?
Moreover, the quality of one’s service counts for even less than the quality of one’s research. Departmental and college bylaws rarely broach service quality in any substantive way. Professors who perform most of the heavy lifting on their respective committees seldom receive more credit for the quality of their performance than their colleagues who might sit through a committee meeting or two during a semester but let it be known that they otherwise can’t be bothered. Even more disconcerting are the faculty members who receive more credit for their service because they “participate” in a greater number of committees. After all, if you’re not really doing much, why not join all the committees that will have you? In any case, the way in which faculty members currently report their service tells us little about who actually serves with distinction.
We need to restructure our assessment procedures and evaluation criteria to give department workhorses their proper due and begin addressing the system’s inequities.
To move toward a qualitative assessment of service, and to gauge quantity of service more reliably, faculty members might provide narratives annually that detail the actual service work they have performed for their departments. Further, department heads might request annual reports from their committee chairmen that describe the work accomplished by the committee as a whole and the contributions of individual committee members. With that added element of accountability, department heads might be able to assess the service performance of their faculty members in a meaningful way; earning an “excellent” for service might come to reflect exemplary performance.
It is odd that most departments pay so little attention to service, given the crucial role it plays in our efforts to build more coherent, dynamic, and innovative academic programs. To be sure, it’s nice to be able to say that a member of your MFA faculty has recently published book X with publisher Y. Yet it’s equally, if not more, important to have a solid MFA program, and programs are built and can be sustained only through engaged, continuing faculty service. Moreover, faculty members who perform such vital service for their departments should be rewarded in tangible, visible ways. Acknowledging the service accomplishments of colleagues during department meetings, in much the same way as we display recent faculty articles or books, might begin to change our academic culture. But recognition is not enough. We must reward our service heroes with course releases, merit-pay increases, and promotions.
If faculty members see that they can reap substantial rewards from performing valuable service to their departments, more of them might develop a yen for it. In my more optimistic moments, I allow myself to imagine a day when faculty members across the disciplines agonize even half as much over their service as they do over their research, and when committees don’t need to be “charged” with specific tasks but take ownership of the responsibilities and opportunities associated with their service areas. In short, I look forward to a day when faculty members consider service to be their own work as much as their teaching and research. But that can only take place in an environment that reinforces the importance of service in ways both great and small.
Beyond implementing the external incentives I’ve mentioned, we might also reflect on the legacies we wish to leave behind after we retire. I was fortunate to have a positive role model in the former chairman of my department, Howard Pearce (who died unexpectedly last month). He defied the culture of quantity throughout his long career by dedicating himself, in equal measure, to his research, his students, and his department. The energy he devoted to service certainly limited the number of articles and books he produced over his 35 years at Florida Atlantic University, but the quality of his scholarship on Henry James and modern drama was first-rate. Whether consciously or not, my former colleague sacrificed a book or two, and probably a handful of articles, to his students and his department. I like to think that he believed it was a sacrifice worth making.
Andrew Furman is chairman of the English department at Florida Atlantic University.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 11, Page B20