Let Summer Read 2016 Begin!

copyright 2016, U of Toronto Press

Happy July, true believers! As promised nine days ago, the shiny new Teaching Prof in Progress Book Club is launching an inaugural Summer Read virtual book discussion. And everyone who teaches (or cares about teaching and teachers) in higher education is invited… So let’s get this party started!

I promise that guy will not be there.

Our first Summer Read will be a discussion of Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (2016, University of Toronto Press) on the Goodreads social media site. And getting involved is super easy:

• To join the TPP Book Club, click here.
• To join the Summer Read 2016 event,click here.
• For additional background on the book and critical reactions to it, check out my last blog post here.

Participation will also be easy.  I will post discussion questions on the Book Club’s page, and we’re off! You can respond, post your own discussion questions, and engage one another throughout the month of July until August 8 as your summer schedule allows — flexibly, on your own time.

To give you a teaser of what we’ll discuss, here are the questions for the Introduction to the book — a tad provocative, if I do say so myself? [And sorry, but no page numbers for the quotations… I’m reading the Kindle edition.]

(1) The Introduction points out the familiar 1-2 punch that motivated the authors to write the book:

• “Flexibility of hours can translate into working all the time, particularly because academic work by its very nature is never done.”
• “When we look at studies of academic stress, we are struck by how many situations identified as sources of work stress are about lack of time.”

Let’s start the conversation by addressing the elephant in the room: is this problem, ultimately, unfixable? What have been your experiences with this dilemma? Thoughts?

(2) At one point the authors observe, regarding policy change at our institutions,

• “A surprising common thread in studies of the corporate university is an emphasis on change being in the hands of individual professors.”

Potentially empowering, sure, but adding to our stress? What kinds of related observations and/or experiences have you had? Thoughts?

(3) What else struck you as important in the Introduction? Observations? Questions for the group?

Intrigued???? Hope so!  Come join the club, tell your friends, colleagues and grad students about it (and the TPP blog, and the Facebook and Twitter platforms), and let’s meet in the salon!

Best outcomes for interdisciplinary goals: Double-down on silos?

I teach and research in Communication Studies, which has been described both as an academic discipline and an interdisciplinary field. Even those who insist on the “discipline” label as a matter of scholarly identity will admit that the discipline is internally quite “interdisciplinary”: there are not only numerous and diverse sub-fields (e.g., relational/interpersonal, organizational, rhetoric and public address, mass communication, cultural media studies, etc.), but numerous and diverse approaches to study (e.g., close textual analysis, qualitative ethnography, quantitative content and audience analyses, experimental design, etc.). One of the things I love about my discipline is the potential it has to put diverse scholars in conversation with one another in areas of common interest — for me, for example, political communication, media studies or visual communication. But like any discipline, it has its devotees of narrow research silos as well. And these folks are often accused of insularity and an unwillingness (perhaps an incapacity?) to speak to others outside their silo when cross-silo collaboration should be encouraged.

Moreover, some of my best friends are in interdisciplinary area studies! (How’s that for a backhanded compliment?) Fields such as gender studies, Africana studies, environmental studies and so on are rich with possibility not just for interdisciplinary research, but for teaching and public advocacy as well. And the growing economic and social pressures on colleges and universities have sometimes led to the encouragement of interdisciplinary collaboration for scholars in disciplines whose silos are having difficulty meeting market demand in areas such as student enrollment (he said with some distaste).

But while interdisciplinarity is enjoying a moment of seemingly uncontroversial approval in higher education, the champions of academic disciplines are pushing back… and with some compelling reasons. From my tomorrows-professor e-mail listserv (have you subscribed yet?), here’s a provocative piece originally in Inside Higher Ed (which you should also follow… details below).

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Folks:
The posting below offers a counter argument to the emphasis on interdisciplinary research in higher education. It is by Scott Jaschik and it appeared in the February 26, 2014 issue of Inside Higher Ed, an excellent – and free – online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education. You can subscribe by going to: http://insidehighered.com/. Also for a free daily update from Inside Higher Ed, e-mail <scott.jaschik@insidehighered.com>. Copyright 2014 Inside Higher Ed. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,
Rick Reis  (reis@stanford.edu)

A Call to Embrace Silos

Everyone, it seems, wants to promote interdisciplinary work. College and university presidents love to announce new interdisciplinary centers. Funders want to support such work. Many professors and graduate students bemoan the way higher ed places them in silos from which they long to free themselves, if only they could get tenure for interdisciplinary work.

Jerry A. Jacobs, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, wants to end the interdisciplinary love fest. His new book, In Defense of Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity and Specialization in the Research University (University of Chicago Press), challenges the conventional wisdom that academe needs to get out of disciplines to solve the most important problems and to encourage creative thinking. The most significant ideas (including those related to problems that cross disciplines) in fact come out of specialized, discipline-oriented work, Jacobs argues. Further, he says that the idea that disciplines don’t communicate right now is overstated — and that such communication can be encouraged without weakening disciplines.

[more after the jump]

Bursting the bubble by going public: Scholarship and civic engagement

At Augustana our students (and often our colleagues) refer to life in our small, residential liberal arts enclave as “the Augie bubble.” It’s a safe, comfortable space in which one may live, work and play free from any annoying connection to what is often described as the “real world.” While bubble existence can have its advantages, it can also stifle optimal learning and engaged citizenship — goals we have for our students as lifelong learners, and goals we have for ourselves as teachers, scholars and citizens.

I ran across this article in the January/February 2014 issue of Academe  by Nicholas Behm, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Duane Roen on the tomorrows-professor e-mail listserv (which I highly recommend to your diet of regular development reading).  It’s a call to action for academics to get more engaged by finding ways to intersect our scholarship with our public lives. We just might find ways to inspire our students, too.

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The Case for Academics as Public Intellectuals

Talking only to one another is never enough.

College and university faculty routinely communicate ideas to colleagues in their field when they publish articles and present papers at conferences. However, unless they pursue interdisciplinary work, they do not often share ideas with colleagues in other fields. They engage with the general public or policy makers even less frequently, and when they do, they sometimes fail to translate their research into language that is accessible to audiences that lack familiarity with disciplinary discourses.

As science writer Dennis Meredith has noted, academics have been criticized for their inability to make their research on critical topics, such as climate change and evolution, understandable to lay audiences. Harry Boyte, codirector of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, and Elizabeth Hollander, senior fellow at Tufts University, note in the 1999 Wingspread Declaration on Renewing the Civic Mission of the American Research University that communicating only to disciplinary audiences rather than to the public at large has reinforced “increasingly competitive, individualist” silo cultures. The lack of interaction with academics in other fields and with the public causes important research to be obscured in translation, encourages public skepticism, and intensifies negative perceptions of higher education.

Such views are evident in recent national surveys. Squeeze Play 2010: Continued Public Anxiety on Cost, Harsher Judgments on How Colleges Are Run, the report of a joint survey by Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, stated that 60 percent of survey respondents said that they believe colleges and universities value their financial strength more than the educational experiences of students. In Is College Worth It?, the Pew Research Center notes similar findings: 57 percent of respondents said that they believe higher education does not provide value commensurate with cost; 75 percent said that obtaining a college degree is too expensive. These findings may be affected by lingering public perceptions that higher education is elitist and unresponsive to contemporary social challenges. Renowned educator Ernest Boyer’s lament in “The Scholarship of Engagement” that higher education lacks the public’s confidence and seems detached from the integral work of the nation is just as pertinent today as it was nearly two decades ago.

Engaging with the Public

Although many colleges and universities have developed productive partnerships with local communities and invested considerable resources in what Boyer called the “scholarship of engagement,” these institutions need to place greater emphasis on becoming “more vigorous partner[s] in the search for answers to our most pressing social, civic, economic, and moral problems.” Academics specifically and higher education generally must collaborate with constituencies to make the country more just and equitable.