As we’ve seen repeatedly over the past few weeks, there’s a constituency out there that wants to see greater differentiation of institutions in terms of research-intensiveness. In the vernacular, this comes across as advocating “teaching institutions” to complement “research institutions,” something which occasionally gets incorporated into government policy as it did in British Columbia vis-à-vis the new universities.
This kind of talk, of course, makes much of the professoriate go bananas. And they fire back with good stuff like Stephen Saideman, did, saying that universities aren’t about research vs. teaching, they’re about research and teaching.
But here’s the thing: do we really think both sides mean the same thing when they use the word “research”?
When professors pull out the “my life as a scholar means nothing without research” line, they aren’t necessarily trying to say they all need large research budgets and hordes of grad students and tri-council grants or their lives will be meaningless (well, some might be saying that, but they’re a minority). What they are saying is that research as a process of searching for new knowledge or construction of new meaning – which can be done through low-budget activities like editing journals, writing reviews, etc. – is inherent in the notion of being a scholar, and that institutions where the teaching isn’t done by scholarly people aren’t worthy of being allowed to grant degrees. Fair enough.
On the flip side, when governments say “we want teaching-only institutions,” they’re not saying they wish to ban professors from doing scholarly reading or engaging with colleagues at colloquia, etc. No one’s going to tell professors to give back their SSHRC grants or to stop writing articles. What they are saying is (a) that they don’t want to stump up big bucks for research infrastructure and (b) they would prefer a system that more closely resembles the U.S. public university system where at flagship institutions, professors essentially teach two courses a semester but everywhere else, they teach four. Also fair enough – unless one is prepared to argue that every non-flagship U.S. institution isn’t a “real university” because they don’t focus enough on research.
“Research” encompasses a wide variety of activities of varying intensities and time commitments. If we’re going to talk more about the balance between teaching and research, we need to stop making absolute statements about research and start treating the subject with the nuance it deserves.
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This is an interesting reading of the minds of the politicians, but it seems not to ring entirely true. It seems to me that the usual whipping boy in these conversations is the relatively modestly funded project approved by SSHRC and that the rather more expensive projects in NSERC get a free pass. The latter, of course, involve the costly infrastructure. The description of the U.S. system also misses an important point. Those flagship universities are primarily funded by state legislatures, unless one includes such private schools as Harvard, Yale and Stanford. Being so funded it is not appropriate to speak of them as if they constitute a conscious national, rational, system. They reflect, to a large extent, the best that the individual states can do. Those states with more resources and larger populations may have the advantage of state-wide rationality, but that case has yet to be made convincingly.