Take the following two thoughts/statements:
1. “At our institution, research and teaching are inseparable, two sides of the same coin”
2. “At our institution, if you are a good researcher, you get more money and you get teaching leave to do more research”
Both these statements can’t be true. Which do you think is false?
Back in pre-89 Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel liked to tell a story about a shopkeeper who displayed a sign saying “workers of the world, unite!”. The shopkeeper did not believe this slogan; rather, the shopkeeper displayed it because not to do so would be seen as disloyal. Displaying the sign was a sign of submission to the regime, not a sign of support. It was a lie in which the shopkeeper had to live in order to maintain his or her position in society.
“At our institutions, research and teaching are inseparable, two sides of the same coin”.
This is a lie. It is a lie whose purpose, fundamentally, is to obscure actual work practices in universities and to obscure actual institutional priorities and the consequences of those priorities.
That’s not to say professors don’t care about teaching. It’s not to say that they aren’t good at teaching (some are great, other less so). It’s not to say that some institutions aren’t doing some truly stellar work on teaching and learning (give UBC some love here for its many initiatives in this area). It’s not even to say that research and teaching can’t be informed by one another. It’s just to note that universities do not even act as though the two acts are even remotely equal in importance or prestige.
We need to remember that systems – even ones that on the whole are relatively beneficial – usually require at least some lies in order to work. And if we don’t want to be utterly controlled by those systems, it’s good once in awhile to remember Vaclav Havel, and stop living the lie. Talk about the lie, and what it means and what it makes us do. And think about how we might be able to do better by the undergraduates that pay everyone’s salaries if things were different.
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No comment this? Not even a yawn? Wow… We are in one of two camps in the academy- tenured (or the about 95% of tenure track people who will be) fat cats who don’t really care how the sausage gets made, or those (contract teaching faculty) simply too ground down to speak out.
The reason that teaching is separated from research, IMHO, is that we increasingly rely on quantitative measures for both.
And while research can be (sort of) measured as publication success or grantsmanship, and teaching can be (badly) measured with student surveys, grade tracking or high-stakes exams, how the two fit together cannot be reduced to a metric. Unfortunately, we live in an age which increasingly confuses what can be counted with what counts, so the relationship between teaching and research is treated as though it doesn’t exist.
The results are deleterious in many ways. The separation of teaching and research creates a two-tier system, it empowers a body of professional managers, it deprives students of access to researchers, it creates a winner-take-all system of funding. Most fundamentally, however, it extinguishes what a university is all about. A pure research institute is not a university and neither is a pure teaching institute. The Soviets had lots of both, and the corporate world still does. Only an institution in which teaching informs research and research is presented in the form of teaching is worthy of the great tradition, stretching back through North American liberal arts colleges and their Oxbridge forebears, to the German research universities and the medieval schools.
We need not live the lie. We can live the life of the mind, instead.
Agreed, Sean-