Dean of the Faculty
Speeches & Articles
Teaching and Research at Reed: A Presentation to the Board of Trustees
February 9, 2007
As many of you know, this year Ken Brashier of our religion department has been named the U. S. Professor of the Year for all baccalaureate colleges by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, know as CASE. Ken’s the second Reed professor to have won this award. Bob Kaplan of our biology department, who is also here tonight, won it in 1996. In addition, Nigel Nicholson of our classics department won the CASE state-level award a couple of years ago. I should note that the national professor of the year award has been given out annually for 26 years. In all that time, only colleges with more than one winner are Williams, which has won three times, and Reed. We are immensely proud of great faculty members like Ken, Bob, and Nigel, though, without in any way denigrating their achievement, I think they’d be the first to agree that if CASE looked at things more closely, or if I wrote better letters of nomination, we’d be winning these things on a regular basis since we have lots of great teachers at Reed. Happily, Colin was able to attend this year’s award ceremony in Washington, D. C. and he thought you’d like to see it.
We also thought this might be a good time to say a few words about what might be called the vocation of being a faculty member at Reed College. I won’t be long; but it’s an important issue, and is very close to my heart.
Now, it’s no secret that one of the hot-button issues here is the question of teaching and research; and it seems certain that how we think about this question can have decisive implications for the very character of Reed College.
Let me begin with two facts. Fact number one: When I joined the Reed faculty in 1977, a senior, distinguished, and very powerful member of the faculty told me that I was publishing articles in learned journals – in what we call refereed publications – and that this was a bad thing, since it suggested that I wasn’t devoting enough time and energy to my students and my teaching. That was an interesting statement. I was indeed publishing articles; I was proud of that; I was also writing my first book; I was proud of that. I thought I was doing good. Now I was being told otherwise. This was very unsettling.
That’s fact number one. Fact number two – a somewhat different kind of fact – is that today several of our most highly regarded sister institutions now refer to themselves as “Research Colleges.” A few years ago, some of these places had adopted the phrase “mini-university,” but that seems not to have worked as well as they would have liked, so they’ve gone to the idea of a Research College. In either case, the rhetorical point seems pretty clear, namely, to identify themselves as basically smaller versions of the great research universities – the Harvards, Yales, Stanfords, and the like – hence, presumably, to adopt at least some of the underlying values and commitments associated with such institutions. That’s fact number two, and it’s a really important fact; for it is I think undeniable that scholarship and research aimed at publishing articles in learned journals or monographs with academic presses is precisely the life-blood, the principal preoccupation – I would say the raison d’etre – of the research university. So when some of our sister institutions identify themselves as smaller versions of research universities, one might presume that they place a roughly similar emphasis on publication. I myself am pretty sure that that presumption is rather more right than wrong. Clearly, then this represents a viewpoint that is the exact opposite of what I was told by my senior colleague in 1977.
So we have here two utterly different worlds, two radically opposed notions of the vocation of being a faculty member. And thus the question: where does Reed today fit in vis-à-vis these two worlds?
Well, one easy formulation is to say that we promote a “balance.” Balance is good, right? We should live a balanced life, we crave equilibrium, we are all – at least in some of our moods – Aristotelians who embrace moderation in all things. So the vocation of a Reed faculty member is to be a teacher who does research, or a researcher who teaches, and who does both pretty darn well, but doesn’t do either to excess.
I myself don’t much like this, for a number of reasons. As a good Platonist, I’m wary about things that are simply patched together as a matter of convenience, a little of this, a little of that, a little teaching here, a little research there. I think there’s a difference between a plain old stew – let’s just throw in a bunch of stuff and see what happens – and a carefully wrought, finely calibrated, and exquisitely harmonious ragout. I’m a ragout kind of guy. And I think that Reed is a ragout kind of place.
But there’s a deeper problem with balance. In many ways, the great glory of Reed College is, and has always been, the very unusual and distinctive atmosphere of the classroom. At its best, it’s an atmosphere that crackles with student engagement, with student excitement about ideas, with student passion for analysis, for hard thought, for what much of the rest of the world might regard as a nerdy, or irrelevant or just plain weird preoccupation with navel gazing. Our students are by nature intellectuals, and this intellectuality blossoms – indeed it often explodes, it is unleashed – in conference, in the lab, in the studio. To me, that’s largely what makes Reed Reed. But it also seems to me that this passion for ideas blossoms or explodes or is unleashed only when the students also sense that their faculty members share their enthusiasm not only for the material itself but for what is going on in the classroom, when faculty are truly excited about what is happening in conference, when faculty find their intellectual engagement with students to be a deeply enjoyable, professionally rewarding, and passionately important endeavor – and this means faculty members who get a kick out of reading and commenting on student papers, advising students, and participating with students in serious conversation, in what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott once called an “unrehearsed intellectual adventure.”
My worry is that a significant gesture in the direction of the research college model or the mini-university model – an ideology of balance – cannot but convey to faculty that, yes, they should try to teach well, they should be dutiful instructors, they should conscientiously fulfill their teaching responsibilities, but that we all understand that the real fun, the real payoff, the real joy and passion comes with research. The worry is that a research college model – even a balanced one – only reinforces what all of us have been taught in graduate school, namely, that teaching pays the bills but what really counts is publication. The worry is that if we adopt the idea of balance, it won’t be long before our students – an oddly sensitive group – could not but perceive that their professors, however dutiful and responsible, would in fact rather be elsewhere, that their passion – their vocation – is not for the classroom but for their “own” work. And this, I think, would be death to the Reed College conference. For there’s nothing that Reedies hate more than being patronized, than not being taken seriously, than being a kind of afterthought that pays the bills. The last thing they want is to used for ulterior reasons; and the worry is that the moment they sense that this is what’s going on, their own work will also immediately become ulterior – and there is the end of passion, the end of excitement, the end of the joys of study and of hard work, and the beginnings of a college having a very different character.
The fact is that to teach really well at Reed is breathtakingly hard work. To prepare properly for conference, to engage in constant intellectual exchange with students, to read their written work in detail and to comment on it in detail, to spend hours advising students on their curricula and their theses – this is incredibly labor-intensive activity. With rare exceptions, it is not likely to be done well if it is not truly a labor of love, something to which one is deeply and passionately devoted, something for which one has a vocation.
So I’m not too crazy about balance. At the same time, however, I absolutely believe that teaching well at Reed also requires serious scholarly engagement. Faculty must stay current, they must stay sharp, they must constantly be educating themselves; and – again with rare exceptions – this is likely to occur only by engaging with peers, not just students, in the rigorous, hard-nosed, critical, sometimes rough-and-tumble exchange of ideas. We want to instill in our students habits of mind, dispositions, skills, concepts, an intellectual apparatus that might be called “scholarly.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re producing professional scholars; Reed is not a graduate school. But it does mean that we want to produce people who, whatever they do after Reed – whether it’s grad school or professional school or business or the helping professions – whatever it is they approach it with the kind of analytic, critical, systematic, rigorous cast of mind that we could call scholarly. And I myself believe that, in order to instill this in our students, we must ourselves model scholarly behavior – constantly reminding ourselves about what it means to be a scholar, not content just to criticize arguments that others have made but constantly attempting to formulate original arguments of our own, hence constantly seeking to making our selves smarter, more perspicuous, more knowledgeable, more skilled.
I think that an institution like Reed – with a powerful ethos, a strong sense of mission, a deep commitment to its own historical culture – often has a way of naturally, unself-consciously generating institution-specific ways of dealing effectively with difficult challenges, like the challenge of celebrating and supporting faculty research in a college that is, in the end, all about teaching. So here’s what I think we’ve done – and what I’m doing here is rationally reconstructing, and making explicit, what I believe to be the underlying, generally unstated logic of our own practices as they have evolved in recent years:
First, we believe that everything we do needs to be justified in terms of teaching effectiveness. That’s an extreme statement: everything we do needs to be justified in terms of teaching effectiveness. I myself believe it to describe an ought – it’s what we should be doing – but I also believe it to describe an is – again, it’s what the underlying logic of our own traditions and practices actually demands.
Second, and again, teaching effectiveness requires, overall, a faculty that is seriously and broadly engaged – one way or another – in real scholarship.
Third – and here, I think, is where the rubber hits the road – we evaluate faculty scholarship principally – I’d be tempted to say solely – in terms of the contribution that it makes, whether direct or indirect, to the teaching of our students. And that means at least five things:
First, in evaluating scholarship at Reed, quantity counts for very little, indeed perhaps nothing. We’re interested in quality. We don’t much care how much work there is, as long as it’s really good work. That’s actually pretty unusual in a world where the criteria for promotion are typically described in amounts, often involving a strict formula such as “either one book and two articles or else six articles.” We don’t have anything like that. We really are very different.
Second, in evaluating scholarship at Reed, we’re not especially interested in the prestige that it brings to the college. In part, this is because the relevant prestige of Reed is apt to be primarily a reflection not of who publishes what and where but of the quality of our students and the impacts that they make after graduation. And in larger part, it’s because, again, we’re interested above all in how we’re educating those students. That’s what we want to be known for. Believe it or not, that helps make us different.
Third, in evaluating scholarship, we encourage, support and celebrate faculty publication not because of the contribution that it makes to the world of knowledge out there but because of its impact on our classrooms. Of course, if faculty research does make a positive impact on the world of knowledge out there, that’s wonderful, and we celebrate it, we cherish it. But it’s a happy by-product of what we do. For some places, it’s primarily what they do, it’s the central part of their mission, and it should be. The world needs institutions devoted primarily to production of new knowledge. Those are the great research universities, and civilization depends on them. But their mission is not our mission. Again, our mission is to train young minds.
Fourth, in evaluating scholarship, and assuming it to be of high quality, we’re looking for credible evidence that this scholarship is – directly or indirectly – having a material and salutary benefit on the education of our students, enriching their academic experience, strengthening their analytic capacities, elevating the quality of the unrehearsed intellectual adventure. Unlike so many other places with which I’m familiar, we don’t evaluate scholarship apart from teaching; we’re looking for some kind of direct and tangible evidence of a sustained and systematic interconnection, indeed, and if at all possible, a kind of internal organic connection where teaching and research are inextricably intertwined with one another to produce a single intellectual life.
Finally, in evaluating scholarship, we’re looking for evidence that the kind of pattern that we want – this kind of sustained and systematic interconnection – will likely continue for a very long time indeed, that a faculty member’s fundamental commitment to teaching and love of the classroom is apt to be not undermined but reinforced and inspired by a restless thirst for knowledge and self-improvement, that the faculty member’s scholarly persona – the way he or she thinks about research – is of a sort that is, over the long run, apt continually to nourish the teaching program.
In describing this model, it will of course appear that I’m criticizing other places. But we should be very careful about that. There are, without any doubt, great teachers everywhere – at places like Yale and Pomona and the University of Kansas and Southwest Missouri State and Mt. Hood Community College and so on. There are wonderful students to be found everywhere. And of course, ours is not the only model; there are many other plausible ones, and it’s obvious that they often have fine results indeed. I do like – indeed, I do prefer – our model. But the main point is not that this model is better but, rather, that it works for us, it is well-suited to continuing the best traditions of the college, and it does a great job of educating our students.
So I’m really offering two hypotheses here. The first is that what I have just outlined really does describe the underlying, tacit logic of what we actually do. The second is that what we actually do really is different, and different in a good way. The result is an idea of a faculty member who is inspired by his or her students to learn more, to know more, to become smarter and more perspicuous, to become intellectually stronger, but who does so in large part so that he or she can teach those students better. It’s a model that is wonderfully embodied in people like Nigel Nicholson and Bob Kaplan and Ken Brashier, and I think it’s an important part of what makes Reed Reed.