For a historian, it seems only yesterday that close observers of American academic life regarded the compatibility of scholarly research and teaching as an article of faith. No longer. An alphabetical list of recent agnostics includes William Bennett, Allan Bloom, Ernest L. Boyer, Lynne V. Cheney, Dinesh D’Souza, Edward Fiske, Roger Kimball, Everett Carl Ladd, Jr., Parker Palmer, Eugene Rice, Page Smith, Charles J. Sykes, and Bruce Wilshire. And recently, a Rutgers University administrator, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, declared teaching and research, heretofore the two central functions of the American university, to be “inescapably incompatible.”
How, one might well ask, have we come so far so fast? What has suddenly produced all these “incompatibilists”?
A provisional answer is that, like the poor, they have always been with us. The “incompatibility” viewpoint can be traced to the 1850’s and John Henry Newman, who argued in a series of lectures published as The Idea of a University that research, like theology, had no place in the university, which was to be devoted to undergraduate and non-professional education. Later and closer to home, the social theorist Thorstein Veblen, whose ideas about the American university took shape at the University of Chicago in the 1890’s and were later published in The Higher Learning in America (1918), asserted that, at most, “the work of teaching properly belongs in the university only because and in so far as it incites and facilitates the university’s main work of inquiry.”
Indeed, the idea of the incompatibility of teaching and research was commonplace among many of the founders of American universities, as well as among the first American-trained Ph.D.'s such as Veblen. But whereas many came to that opinion because they cared passionately about the cause of research and not a hoot about undergraduate instruction, today’s “incompatibilists” have reversed these priorities, believing that overinvolvement in research and publication has undermined the quality of teaching.
The “incompatibility” idea failed the first time around. By the time the Johns Hopkins University opened in 1876, its trustees had scuttled the early plans of president-designate Daniel Coit Gilman for an “entirely new university” that would exclude undergraduates and their attendant “distractions.” Clark University, at the insistence of its president, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, opened in 1889 to graduate students only, but five years later reversed itself and began accepting undergraduates.
Talk at Harvard and Columbia Universities in the 1890’s about sending their undergraduates to the country so that faculty members could get on with the “real business” of the university -- remained talk. Presidents Charles William Eliot and Nicholas Murray Butler opted for the tensions of a multipurpose university over neatness, relying on what the historian Laurence Veysey has described as American higher education’s historical “tendency to blend and reconcile.”
Thus, undergraduate teaching and research, if not wholly compatible, have coexisted on American university campuses for a century. Yet the past does not necessarily determine the future. Perhaps, as some now argue, the estrangement of teaching and research is already so far under way on some university campuses that only institutional acknowledgment is needed to effect a legal separation. The current of recent opinion seems to run strongly in that direction. Yet before junking once and for all the idea, or ideal, that research and teaching can be compatible, even mutually reinforcing, we should review the evidence supporting the incompatibilists’ argument.
Their argument rests on two kinds of evidence. The first is the observation of academic folkways as revealed at conferences, in disciplinary journals, and in public commentary. Most of those doing the observing are critical outsiders (such as Bennett, D’Souza, Kimball, and Sykes) or unsympathetic “participant observers” (such as Bloom, Smith, and Wilshire). Many bring to their observations distinctly conservative views that are highly critical of major research universities for being bastions of “politically correct” orthodoxies. Such political baggage does not make the observations of these critics dismissible, but it does qualify any claims to objectivity.
The second and seemingly more objective evidence upon which the incompatibility case rests are a series of national surveys of the American professoriate conducted in 1969, 1977, 1984, and 1989 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The most influential analyses of those data have been provided by Everett Carl Ladd, Jr., and Seymour Martin Lipset in their 1975 book, The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics, and, more recently, by the foundation’s president, Ernest L. Boyer. Mr. Ladd’s analysis of the 1977 survey of 4,383 respondents, published in 1979 as “The Work Experience of American College Professors: Some Data and an Argument” (Current Issues in Higher Education, 1979), anticipated many of Mr. Boyer’s conclusions in College: The Undergraduate Experience in America in 1987 and in Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate in 1990.
Their principal conclusions are similar in substance and sweep: Few faculty members nationwide actively engage in scholarly research or ever publish anything; many who do publish are in some measure coerced into it by tenure requirements; and most faculty members prefer to concentrate their energies on teaching, not research, and believe that teaching effectiveness, not publication, should be the primary criterion for promotion.
However impressive in its mass and careful in its presentation, the statistical evidence they muster to support these conclusions does not lead inevitably to them. A case in point: The often-linked statistics about faculty publishing patterns -- 55 per cent have never published a book, 22 per cent have never published in a professional journal, and almost 30 per cent “are not now engaged in scholarly research that will lead to publication” -- do not require the often-inferred conclusion that most faculty members don’t ever publish anything.
For these statistics to be argument clinchers, much disaggregation is necessary. For example, relatively few science-faculty members, even those most active in research, publish books. Yet science-faculty members made up a quarter of the Carnegie samples. Similarly, even faculty members who become prolific publishers need some time beyond completing their Ph.D.'s to reach print. Yet almost 40 per cent of all faculty members in the 1984 sample did not have Ph.D.'s in hand. Among liberal-arts-college faculty members, the figure was 50 per cent.
To borrow a phrase from the incompatibilists’ favorite professor, William James, the compatibility of teaching and research remains a “live question.” My own research into the scholarly activities of faculty members at two dozen selective liberal-arts colleges supports the conclusion that, at those institutions at least, the marriage of teaching and research is alive and well. Although the precise nature of the relationship varies from campus to campus, all have faculty researchers and “scribblers” -- in numbers, in a variety of disciplines, across generations -- who are attending effectively and energetically to their teaching.
Moreover, support exists for the cheering notion that faculty members who maintain research and publishing agendas are more likely to remain effective teachers. Senior professors who were identified by external reviewers as being among a college’s most active scholars also were more likely to be ranked among the most effective teachers than were senior professors with little or no scholarly record. (The ratings of teaching were made by deans who had not seen the rankings of scholarly productivity.)
To be sure, my research focuses on selective liberal-arts colleges, not on research or doctorate-granting universities or on less-selective four-year institutions. But given the traditional emphasis that selective liberal-arts colleges have placed on undergraduate teaching, their unmatched record in producing graduates who go on to become academics, and their recent success in attracting and retaining active scholars, these institutions are precisely where we need to look. For if faculty members in sufficient numbers are both effective teachers and productive scholars on these campuses, there would seem to be no inherent incompatibility in the teaching-research relationship.
Until we find conclusive evidence of incompatibility, we may regard recent reports of the permanent estrangement between teaching and research as premature, as localized phenomena, as the wishful thinking of administrators uncomfortable with ambiguity, or as jeremiads, well intended but wrong-headed.
Robert A. McCaughey is professor of history and dean of the faculty at Barnard College.
