Inside Higher Ed has an opinion piece today in which a a provost and a professor talk about service, which is the catch-all category of faculty activities that aren't teaching and research. As the title of the piece says, this is a particularly unloved area:
Yet this is the area that is least discussed in graduate school, for which no training is typically provided, and that the interview process rarely brings up. Furthermore, while tenure and promotion evaluations pay homage to the trinity of "Teaching, Scholarship and Service," service surely gets the least amount of attention. It is very rarely rewarded either monetarily or in terms of prestige. In fact, the view of some faculty is that service is to be given grudgingly, if it all.
In liberal arts colleges, advising, club sponsorships, determination of academic policy and the execution of that policy require deep commitments of time from faculty. Many tasks, such as organizing pre-law advising or guiding students through graduate applications -- assignments many large universities fill with a staff member -- are elements of service for faculty at smaller colleges. Organizational realities may encourage this on the one hand, but on the other, there may also be better student outcomes in having a teacher-scholar actively engaged in these roles.
Many faculty feel pulled in multiple directions by trying to balance teaching and scholarship, but most recognize that both elements of the academic life offer unique rewards. Too often, the rewards for service are overlooked.
This struck a chord for local reasons that I'm not going to talk about here. I will note, however, that while this piece contains many lovely words about the personal and institutional benefits of service activity, it backs away from making any constructive suggestions. Or, more precisely, it backs away from making the one suggestion that would actually be constructive.
It's all well and good to speak of the benefits that accrue from service on an institutional and moral level, but the plain fact is that, as the authors admit in the first quoted paragraph, tangible rewards for service in the form of pay and promotion are hard to come by. And in the absence of tangible rewards for service, it will continue to be difficult to get faculty to serve on committees and interact with students.
The problem with getting faculty to do service is not, as the authors seem to think, that faculty aren't aware that these roles are important to the insitution. The problem is that, particualrly for junior faculty, these roles are no benefit to individual careers, and in many cases can be actively harmful. Doing college service will not make up for deficiencies in teaching or scholarship, and "too much" service activity can be actively harmful for a tenure case.
If college and university administrators want faculty to be more willing to do service activities, they need to put some resources behind it. This is a lovely op-ed, but it's really no different than the guilt trip that gets laid on every faculty member who's asked to be on an unpleasant committee. If you want to actually change the way things work, you need to start providing some material reward for service activity. That means merit raises for doing service, and a more serious consideration of service in tenure decisions.
Anything else is just useless talk.
Lest people get the wrong impression, let me note that I am not anti-service. In fact, I probably did more college service than most junior faculty, and I've signed on to spend the next three years as the faculty representative for a house in our big new residential initiative, which is a major committment.
I do these things, though, in the full knowledge that I am unlikely to receive any material reward for them. I'm doing them because I enjoy working with students, and that's the whole reason I came to a liberal arts college in the first place. I'm happy to do student-focussed service work "for free," because I find it rewarding in the personal sense that the authors of the Inside Higher Ed piece talk about.
I'm not going to do service work without some compensation, though. If I don't enjoy it, I'm not going to agree to do it without getting something in return. Just talking to me about how important it is isn't going to work.
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How do Economics departments incentivize service? If they can't do it, there's no hope for the rest of us...
How do Economics departments incentivize service? If they can't do it, there's no hope for the rest of us...
No, you're making one of the classic mistakes of academia.
If economics faculty actually knew how to make money, they wouldn't be working as economics faculty. Academic economists are the sort of people who, to paraphrase an old joke, would walk by a fifty-dollar bill lying in the road, because if that were really a fifty-dollar bill lying in the road, somebody would've picked it up by now.
No, you're making one of the classic mistakes of academia.
If economics faculty actually knew how to make money, they wouldn't be working as economics faculty.
Such blanket statements seem unusual for you; I certainly expected better. Presumably there are more than a handful of economics profs who are more than capable of making money (or perhaps have already done so quite successfully), but who have decided they want to do something different.
I think you're confusing "Economics" with "Business". Economics isn't about "how to make money".w
I think you're confusing "Economics" with "Business". Economics isn't about "how to make money".
As a member of an economics department, let me start out by saying that Chad is mostly right about academic economists. But not entirely. Many economists do a lot of external consulting work for money. Also, economists are unusually mobile across universities. Both probably tend to hurt their "citizenship."
My department _does_ manage to incentivize service better than I think is typical. We have a "points" system, where we get points for teaching, advising, committees, etc., and need to earn a certain number of points per year. The points assigned to various activities are generally fair, so I don't mind being assigned a service task.
This goes a long way to solving the problem. But it is far from perfect. There are two big remaining holes:
1) As a department-only system, only department-level assignments are given points. Service at a broader level--e.g., university level committees--doesn't get points. By monetizing internal service, I suspect we _decrease_ people's willingness to perform external service.
2) There are some department members who are great demand for their good advising or teaching. These people fill their point allotment each year with advising and teaching assignments. Others are less good at advising and teaching. These people tend to run short of points, and wind up with more service assignments. It is not at all clear that it is good for the students to have the service done disproportionately by the people who are in less demand for teaching/advising.
The real question is how do the Psychology faculty do it? They're the ones with the expertise in contingencies, motivated behavior and principles of reinforcement...
Two comments: 1. You've forgotten community service which is probably even more undervalued in tenure review and promotion decisions. 2. Using a points system to compel people to serve on committees doesn't work (at least at my school. There are some folks who I wouldn't want to see on ANY committee on my campus. And while you might force me to serve on a committee--so I'll get my brownie points--there's no way you can force me to do anything constructive or useful.
Two comments: 1. You've forgotten community service which is probably even more undervalued in tenure review and promotion decisions. 2. Using a points system to compel people to serve on committees doesn't work (at least at my school. There are some folks who I wouldn't want to see on ANY committee on my campus. And while you might force me to serve on a committee--so I'll get my brownie points--there's no way you can force me to do anything constructive or useful.
I wrote: If economics faculty actually knew how to make money, they wouldn't be working as economics faculty.
Grant wrote: Such blanket statements seem unusual for you; I certainly expected better.
I racked up my knee playing hoops this afternoon, but before I retire to the back yard with some pain pills and a big bag of ice, let me just jump in here to note that this was intended as a joke.
Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a big chunk of ice with my name on it.
Here pretenure service means maybe advising SPS, attending departmental meetings, helping with job searches and (unwritten) not pissing anyone off.
For the rest of us, there is little incentive to do service. Financial? Raises are uniform with merit for research. Satisfaction? Dean and provost do what they damn well please anyway, lots of ad hoc committees with their cronies that endrun the "governance" process. So why freakin bother? I don't.
You said, '"too much" service activity can be actively harmful for a tenure case.'
Good grief. This seems to be the equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot. Why wouldn't universities and colleges reward service activity if they need it done? And how does it harm a tenure case?
Rebecca the thinking is that instead of being on those pesky committees so much, you could have been bringing in grant dollars. The administration doesn't really want your input anyhoo!
Here at DePauw, tenure is based upon excellence in teaching, and EITHER professional development or service has to be really good, with the other category at an acceptable level. And promotion to full professor requires significant service as well as professional development, along with still excellent teaching. So we are encouraged to get involved in service at the departmental, university, and professional levels. Pace Philip's comment above, community service only counts if it involves our professional expertise in some way. So my volunteering at a food bank would not count, but blowing shofar for High Holy Days does.
Here at DePauw, tenure is based upon excellence in teaching, and EITHER professional development or service has to be really good, with the other category at an acceptable level. And promotion to full professor requires significant service as well as professional development, along with still excellent teaching. So we are encouraged to get involved in service at the departmental, university, and professional levels. Per Philip's comment above, community service only counts if it involves our professional expertise in some way. So my volunteering at a food bank would not count, but blowing shofar for High Holy Days does.
You may have missed that one of the co-authors of the piece is an Assistant Professor who spent 5 years as an assistant provost to the Provost (the other co-author), and that they are at a small PLA college. There, having only 3 real publications in 8 years as a result of serving as assistant provost and advising two honor societies would not be as fatal as it would be at a research university.
The background of the authors might explain why they never even attempted to defend their thesis that there is no reason to fear shifting your valuable time from writing grants to serving on a campus committee before getting tenure at a major university. I'm surprised that Rob Knop (who comments on this topic in Zuska's blog as well as his own) has not stepped in, but maybe he does not need to.
My concern is different. Non-tenured faculty are often pressed into service to provide a warm body when tenured faculty refuse to serve, but are often loathe to provide an honest opinion. Those familiar with tenure angst at institutions where service is considered essential know that it is the rare Assistant Professor who will voice a dissenting opinion to the Provost or President. I know several who kept their mouths shut until they were liberated by having the chain of tenure forged around their ankles. All they provide is a "me too" voice that provides faculty-governance cover to the administration to do what it wants to do.
Keynes, famously, was quite rich, and as I was told did this primarily by applying his theories to markets and outperforming the markets.
He then also left his wealth to his college.