Chapter 22
Scholarship
The third critical dimension of choice for the traditional university is scholarship-related activity. Because our story of BYU-Idaho didn't show a university wrestling with issues of traditional scholarship, we'll delve into those issues more deeply here than we did the choices of students and subjects.
Along the dimensions of students served and subjects pursued, Charles Eliot's design for Harvard vastly broadened its scope of activity. By contrast, his call to have all subjects at their best ironically presaged a pronounced narrowing of university scholarship. The irony is that, in calling for scholarship at its best, Eliot did not necessarily mean just cutting-edge research. Though he admired the original discoveries and literary compositions of the German and French scholars, he also valued scholarship for its tendency to “promote the material welfare of mankind” and to advance “truth and right.”1 In fact, if anything he had an administrative bias not for research but for instruction, as evidenced by his statement, “The only conceivable aim of a college government in our day is to broaden, deepen, and invigorate American teaching in all branches of learning.”2
Today even the most research-oriented universities reference the importance of teaching and service in their tenure standards. But particularly since James Conant's introduction of up-or-out tenure, scholarship—defined as original research and publication—has been the overriding factor in tenure and rank advancement decisions.3 Just as Eliot lost the Rumford Chair in 1863 to a superior researcher, notwithstanding being an innovative teacher and the indispensable assistant to Harvard's then-president, today's tenure aspirants know that no other success or sacrifice can compensate for failure to publish.
It can be argued that publication is the determining factor in tenure and rank advancement because the other forms of contribution are difficult to measure reliably. The quality of a professor's teaching, for example, is not easily assessed; students are the only ones who fully experience it firsthand, and their ability to judge its worth is limited. Yet the quality of a given piece of original research or writing likewise is not easily measured. Confidence in the ability of an academic journal or a university press to judge one submission superior to another rests on an elaborate system of blind peer review that is both complex and expensive. Similar investments in measuring the amount and quality of a professor's contribution in the classroom would undoubtedly allow distinguishing the great from the good.4
An administrator of Conant's genius for measurement could have designed such a system. Conant's goal, however, was to make Harvard not just great in the absolute sense but great relative to all others: “the best.” Outstanding instruction can occur anywhere. But Nobel Prize-winning scholarship is, by definition, unique. Harvard's system of up-or-out tenure was designed to promote that one-of-a-kind research scholarship.
Many of the institutions that copied Harvard soon found themselves producing neither great instruction nor noteworthy research. As Derek Bok observed in 1989, a majority of faculty members at these institutions reported feeling that quantity of research matters more than quality.5 Bok declared that such quantity-driven approaches to scholarship are “hard to defend, as they beggar instruction to promote research of dubious worth.”6
A Scholarship Model Inherited from a Golden Age
Part of the problem of research quality that Bok observed is a product of changed circumstances. Conant experienced research scholarship under nearly ideal conditions for university professors in his field, organic chemistry. He took his Ph.D. during a time when the basic structure of the atom and the mechanisms of atomic bonding were being discovered. These discoveries shed powerful new light on phenomena that preceding generations of chemists, including Charles Eliot, had studied in relative darkness.
Conant enjoyed the collaborative support of senior members of Harvard's chemistry department, several of whom had mentored him since college days (and one of whom, department chairman and Nobel laureate Theodore William Richards, had become his father-in-law). He also corresponded and collaborated with the cutting-edge European chemists of the day, especially the world-leading Germans. In addition to the favorable climate for discovery created by recent scientific breakthroughs and strong collegial support, Conant enjoyed an advantage in publishing his work. In the U.S., a relative laggard in organic chemistry at the time, his world-class research drew special attention from one of the premier domestic periodicals in his field, the Journal of the American Chemical Society.7
These environmental advantages propelled the talented and hardworking Conant to a level of research and publication success difficult to replicate today. In the six years before he assumed Harvard's presidency, in 1933, Conant published three books and an average of nearly ten papers per year, all but a few in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.8 If he had remained in the laboratory, his research and publication productivity might well have increased. As Harvard's president, he observed from a distance the scientific paradigm shift attendant to the application of quantum mechanics to chemistry. Had he not been bound up in administrative responsibilities, he could have applied insights from the new discipline of quantum chemistry to explore one of his personal specialties, chemical reaction rates.
Given his personal experience, it made good sense to Conant to emphasize research publication in his up-or-out tenure system. In fact, that system, which quickly took hold at Harvard and other U.S. research universities, undoubtedly contributed to the country's rise to scientific preeminence. Yet in the coming decades, as research science became more expensive and research scientists more numerous, few tenure-track faculty members would experience anything like Conant's success. That would be especially true in the inevitable periods of more modest scientific advance in a given field, when researchers mostly fill the gaps in sweeping work done by predecessors, like Conant, who were lucky enough to start their careers during times of great change.
The Scholarship Challenge for Modern-Day A. Lawrence Lowells
With the steady advance of technology, physical scientists can be assured that more change is coming sooner or later, and with it the opportunity for new discoveries. There is no similar assurance, however, in many other academic fields. A. Lawrence Lowell, for example, would find today's world of scholarship far more competitive and confining than the one in which he made his name. The 1896 publication that secured Lowell's position on the Harvard faculty, his two-volume Governments and Parties in Continental Europe, assessed the workings of political parties in six countries: France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Switzerland. He reviewed each country's political institutions and recent history, showing the effect of these factors on party life.9
Lowell emphasized the narrow scope of his book, prefacing it with the disclaimer, “The present work deals only with a very small part of the great subject of political parties.” He also noted having chosen countries with more than two main parties so as to avoid duplication of other scholars' work. The political systems of his six nations, he observed, had been “far less studied than … the bi-party system that prevails generally in Anglo-Saxon countries.”10
Even with this careful delimitation of a field of inquiry, Lowell found his work partly duplicated before he could get it to press. While he was still in the midst of researching and writing, a French scholar published a two-volume analysis of politics and governance in the great constitutional monarchies and republics, including Lowell's big three, France, Italy, and Germany. In the preface to his book, Lowell took pains to distinguish his work as being different in its causal perspective. The French scholar, he asserted, looked primarily at government officials and analyzed parties only for their impact on those officials. Governments and Parties in Continental Europe took things the other way around, focusing on parties and identifying the effects of officials on the parties.11
Had Lowell been seeking tenure as a political historian fifty or so years later, in the middle of the twentieth century, the need to focus his inquiry to avoid preemption would have been far greater. By then the passage of time had added to the body of political history, but it had also brought many more university scholars to study it. To make original, publishable observations, Lowell would have needed to narrow his subject. He might, for example, have made comparisons between two countries rather than six. He also might have focused on just one aspect of political parties in those countries.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century Lowell's road to tenure would have been more difficult still, due to the expanded body of existing work and the many more university scholars seeking original intellectual territory. Today, publishing in fields such as Lowell's requires more than just a narrow focus of study. Seeking tenure now, a young Lowell would need to consider strategies such as critically analyzing his predecessors' work or reinterpreting political history from the standpoint of particular interest groups. He might even be tempted to join in analyzing the value of his own academic discipline, asking questions such as whether anyone can draw generally valid conclusions about the past.12
The Growing Challenge of Discovery Research
For outsiders, there is a tendency to see scholars as intellectually self-interested—inordinately prestige conscious; captivated by specialized research interests; averse to real-world performance standards; uninterested in ordinary students. The reality is that a university professor's activities are as organizationally driven as any other professional's. The typical tenured professor is as likely to have chosen academic life based on a desire to teach as on passion for a narrowly defined field of scholarship. But, since his or her early twenties, that professor has been required to run a scholarly gantlet that at multiple points presents a better than even chance of failure: gaining admission to graduate school; completing a dissertation; securing a tenure-track position; winning tenure. At every stage, survival is a long shot dependent on conformance to a research-publication model of scholarship. That model requires gunning for the top journals and university presses, narrowing one's field of inquiry, meeting exacting and sometimes arbitrary performance standards set by academic peers, and minimizing teaching responsibilities. Being the rare survivor of every stage of the professorial gantlet requires mastery of the research scholarship system that defines and drives the traditional university.
The gantlet is getting steadily more difficult to run. Since the late 1960s most academic fields have produced an oversupply of Ph.D. holders relative to the available tenure-track university positions.13 Clark Kerr, whose University of California system graduated far more Ph.D.s than it could begin to consume, saw the problem coming more than four decades ago.14 The post–World War II boom in college graduates produced a related increase in applications to Ph.D. programs across the country, which admitted candidates in numbers well beyond their own need for future faculty. It was one thing for Berkeley and Harvard to do this, but another for the less prestigious universities, which had less-accomplished students and more-limited resources with which to work. The result was an academic market swamped with competitively undifferentiated professorial candidates.
In recent years, the difficulty of winning a university tenure-track position has been compounded by a trend away from offering such opportunities. Between 1997 and 2007, the percentage of tenure-track instructors at four-year universities fell from more than 50 to 39 percent.15 At research universities, fewer than 30 percent of instructors are on the tenure track. Against this shrinking demand, the growing supply of candidates requires many to work in temporary and part-time teaching positions.
Those fortunate enough to get on the tenure track face new challenges in surviving the up-or-out, publish-or-perish process. The number of scholars trying to publish via the elite journals and academic presses is growing. The competition has become global, with prestige-conscious Asian universities and their sponsoring governments increasingly targeting the best English-language publications.16 A proliferation of new journals helps tenure-track faculty only at the less elite universities, where the number of articles published may count for more than the quality of the publication. The cutting of budgets and outright closure of university presses makes it harder for scholars to publish books even through less prestigious channels. This matters especially to tenure-track faculty in the humanities, for whom publishing books is the ultimate test of scholarship.
This perspective suggests that it is the DNA of the university that produces its scholarship-related problems today, not the inherent preferences of professors.17 Personal preference alone does not explain the choice of research over teaching or the selection of esoteric inquiries over more broadly practical ones. Those decisions are also driven by experience and by an instinct for professional survival and advancement in an increasingly competitive environment. The apparent inclination to favor the library and the laboratory over the classroom reflects a self-preservation calculus rather than a natural aversion to instruction and mentoring. The desire to research and teach specialized, advanced subjects rather than broader ones reflects years of narrow inquiry, not inherent inability to integrate and apply knowledge.
A Broader Definition of Scholarship
As Derek Bok lamented the diversion of scholarly effort into research of “dubious worth,” he conceded that “universities that lack distinguished scholars are unlikely to stop putting undue emphasis on publication only when there are credible, attractive models of excellence other than that of the research university.”18 As it happened, an alternative model of scholarship was proposed just one year after he made this statement. Writing with a group of colleagues in 1990, Carnegie Foundation president and former U.S. Commissioner of Education Ernest Boyer suggested a fourfold definition of scholarship. In addition to what he called the scholarship of discovery, which encompasses traditional academic research, he added three other categories: integration, application, and teaching.19 These latter three types would expand the traditional definition of scholarship to include putting discoveries into context, showing their application to practical problems, and sharing them with students.20
We must justly prize those faculty who are truly gifted…. We will never totally forsake recognition for publishing in the usual academic journals, but we must be brave and wise enough to appreciate and reward other forms of scholarship as well.21
—Gordon Gee, president of The Ohio State University
Boyer made it clear that all faculty need to establish their credentials as researchers, something they do in producing master's theses and Ph.D. dissertations. However, Boyer and his colleagues argued that “it is unrealistic, we believe, to expect all faculty members, regardless of their interests, to engage in research and to publish on a regular timetable. For most scholars, creativity simply doesn't work that way.”22
Boyer suggested both a broader, fourfold definition of scholarship and a broader definition of peer review, with an emphasis on writing but not necessarily on publishing in refereed journals. He proposed that faculty be given credit for textbooks and “popular writing,” assuming review by qualified peers.23 Today these recommendations seem all the more sensible, given the feasibility and ubiquity of electronic publication.
Boyer's definition of scholarship is modular: an academic institution can use the definition to customize its mix of scholarly activities.24 Under David Bednar, for example, BYU-Idaho chose to focus on the scholarship of teaching. Kim Clark's call to create cross-disciplinary courses with practical relevance expanded the school's definition of scholarship to include, in a modest way, integration and application.
Clark's former employer, the Harvard Business School, has the financial and faculty resources to emphasize all four dimensions of scholarship. Like Harvard's other graduate schools, it is a leader in discovery scholarship. But HBS does not limit its definition of better to only this form of scholarship. The school's faculty members also engage in integrative, applied, and instruction-related scholarship. For example, Michael Porter's path-breaking insights into competitive strategy stemmed from the integration of discovery research from many distinct fields. Developing a theory of how institutions create and sustain competitive advantages required him to integrate insights from many traditional disciplines, including economics, finance, accounting, operations management, organizational behavior, business policy, public policy, law, and military strategy.
HBS faculty members also engage in the scholarship of application and instruction. Clayton Christensen's initial discoveries in just one industry, computer disk drives, have been applied in many others (such as, in these pages, higher education).25 C. Roland Christensen's scientific approach to discussion-based learning contributed to a body of teaching scholarship that includes the 350 new HBS cases created each year, which are used for classroom discussion by universities around the world.26
All three of these well-recognized contributors to Harvard's mission deviated from the prevailing university approach to scholarship, which is to seek to prove something entirely new. Instead, they followed their intellectual instincts and did, to paraphrase Lowell, useful things the world wanted done. In the process, they created not only great practical value for society but new intellectual platforms for scholars in their fields. A similar case can be made for Eliot. He was an undistinguished researcher but an administrative genius and the creator of the world's most powerful paradigm for higher education. Any university, including Harvard, would do well to have a path to tenure for such a uniquely valuable scholar.
A New Type of Carnegie Classification
In 2006, having reassessed the effects of its classification system, the Carnegie Foundation introduced a new, elective category, a “Community-Engagement Classification.” All institutions remain subject to the standard system, but they may also decide to seek this new status, which recognizes “diversity of institutions” and seeks to“engage institutions in a process of inquiry, reflection, and self-assessment.”27
More than giving higher education institutions a new badge of distinction, the purpose of Community-Engagement Classification is to focus their scholarly, teaching, and learning activities on the communities in which they reside, with the intent of producing mutual benefit—work the world wants done. Ernest Boyer's broad definition of scholarship, especially the knowledge application and teaching categories, potentially facilitates this kind of interconnection of faculty members, students, and members of the external community.
The application process for Community-Engagement Classification requires institutions to make explicit the connection between what they say they want to achieve and what they do in practice, an exercise amounting to thorough genetic reengineering, as suggested in a 2008 Foundation report:
One of the major strengths of the institutions that were classified as engaged with their communities was a compelling alignment of mission, marketing, leadership, traditions, recognitions, budgetary support, infrastructure, faculty development, and strategic plans—the foundational indicators of community engagement.
For example, Portland State University's motto, “Let knowledge serve the city,” was translated into budgetary priorities, an office of community/university partnerships, a consistent message from institutional leadership, and promotion and tenure guidelines that reward Boyer's “scholarship of application.”28
Diversity of scholarship at the Harvard Business School calls into question the public stereotype of the university scholar and illustrates the potential power of a broader definition of scholarship. In fact, great teachers at all universities practice the scholarship of integration, application, and teaching every time they engage a learner, whether a graduate student or an undergraduate. To effectively convey an idea they must first answer at least three questions:
1. How does this idea relate to other ideas?
2. How does it apply in practical settings?
3. How can I best communicate it?
Unfortunately, the world at large rarely hears from these great university teachers. They are not given time or incentives to publish what they know about integrating, applying, and teaching the new discoveries of their colleagues. Even those research discoveries get limited circulation: they are likely to be shared outside of the academy only to the degree that they show economic value.
The Need for New Scholarship Incentives
Changing that reality will require modifying the research- and graduate program-favoring incentives built into the university's organizational DNA. Columbia English professor James Shapiro, a former hero of a great books course in the undergraduate core curriculum there, has trenchantly voiced the need to recognize more than one form of scholarly contribution. When asked about his decisions to stop teaching the course, he replied, “When you acknowledge this course and reward faculty accordingly, then I'll be glad to teach it again. But in universities today salaries and resources are built on the star system, and everyone knows that.”29
To perform the critical jobs of discovering and sharing knowledge, universities need a diversity of tenure paths and faculty contracts that provide the essential acknowledgments and rewards. The tenure process is particularly determinative. As Louis Menand has observed, “Until professors are produced in a different way, the structure of academic knowledge production and dissemination is unlikely to change significantly.”30
A form of diversity in faculty promotion and compensation already exists at most universities, but it reflects the haves-and-have-nots rationale of the traditional tenure system. Non-tenure-track faculty often make less than their peers even when carrying outsized teaching and administrative loads. Universities and their faculty members are better served by customized contracts that reflect a professor's unique mix of instructional, administrative, and scholarly activities, with scholarship defined to include research related to discovery, integration, application, and teaching.31 These forms of scholarship can be weighted differently based on institutional objectives. Still, all institutions need to ensure that their promotion and compensation systems do not have the effect of making instruction a stepchild.
Harvard Business School has shown the potential for altering the traditional scholarship DNA. For example, its course development path to tenure recognizes the focused scholarship of teaching required to keep the institution at the forefront of business education, just as its research and publication track creates incentives and opportunities to produce traditional scholarship. Course development was, in the beginning, the main path to tenure at HBS. In the 1920s, when Dean Wallace B. Donham encouraged adoption of the case method of instruction, he challenged members of the faculty to develop classic instructional cases such as those he had studied as a Harvard Law School student. Most full-time faculty members engaged in both case writing and course development.
Course development means just that: not merely effective classroom teaching, which is a point of pride for HBS and a requirement of all faculty, but the creation of intellectual content to guide and facilitate the instruction process. The standard of excellence on the course development track to tenure is similar to that of the research-and-publication track: the creation of powerful new ideas, rigorously supported and peer-reviewed.
The difference for course development faculty is that their ideas are published in the form of instructional materials—cases, case teaching notes, technical notes for students, course overview notes—rather than articles in scholarly journals. While most other top-flight business schools base tenure primarily on research scholarship, like the rest of academia, HBS has both stayed in the forefront of research and maintained its ability to cultivate instructional genius in the model of C. Roland Christensen. No school at Harvard is considered more relevant by the nonacademic world or is more esteemed by its academic competitors. The Harvard Business School's success suggests that Lowell-style usefulness in scholarship is not limited to discovery research, nor does it detract from scholarly reputation.
The notion of diverse forms of scholarship and types of scholars raises the question, “What about tenure?” From the standpoint of the university's ability to do things the world finds useful, the question may be less important than it seems. Both those who decry tenure as an anticompetitive labor practice and those who argue its vital role in protecting scholars often fail to distinguish the process from the outcome. The main outcomes of tenure, job security and intellectual self-determination for competent professors, are not necessarily a net liability to the university. Nor are they things unique to higher education. To the extent that tenure is problematic, the problem lies more in the way tenure is granted than in its outcome.
Universities are not alone in applying a tenure ethos. Honoring the value of experienced employees is a hallmark of high-performing institutions; whether universities or businesses, they seek to retain their proven people.32 That is particularly true of knowledge-dependent enterprises such as law firms and management consultancies that, like universities, invest in creating a core group of carefully trained and vetted partners.33 Such stalwart contributors do not normally slack off or suffer diminished capacity with time. Nor, in a country where free speech is both legally protected and recognized as a competitive asset, do longtime employees often find themselves terminated merely for expressing opinions about what is best for the organization. Well-managed companies, like universities, honor long service and intellectual honesty not only out of legal and moral obligation but also because of the competitive value of individual experience and collective openness.
In this respect, the typical tenured university professor is little different from his or her for-profit company counterpart. It is true that the tenured professor enjoys a high degree of intellectual autonomy. He or she can make unfettered choices of what to study and what to say in the classroom, based only on demonstrated expertise.35 This is not so different, though, from the various forms of employee empowerment practiced by high-performing companies, including factory floor job rotation and self-directing work groups.
The essence of [creating a great company] is to get the right people engaged in vigorous dialogue and debate, infused with the brutal facts….34
—Jim Collins, author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don't
What is most unusual in the typical university is the publication-focused, lengthy, and too often uncertain process for winning tenure. This process has at least two potentially self-defeating effects on the institution. One is to artificially skew faculty preferences away from teaching and to foster unproductive anxiety and a sense of second-class citizenship among untenured professors.36 Another is to create the risk of entitlement feelings among those who survive the protracted, stressful process. The result can be a reduction in individual commitment to the institution and its students, both pre- and post-tenure. It is the tenure process, not necessarily the university's guarantee of employment and intellectual self-determination to those who win tenure, that can disadvantage the institution.
That may explain Gordon Hinckley's having omitted reference to tenure in his announcement of the creation of BYU-Idaho. Hinckley focused not on tenure but on the issue of rank: “Faculty rank,” he said, “will not be a part of the academic structure of the new four-year institution.”37 Hinckley's concern about Ricks College professors becoming members of a university faculty was neither that they would grow lazy nor that they would face greater threats to their academic freedom. What Hinckley wanted was to preempt the creation of different professorial classes based primarily on research productivity. Such scholarship-based class distinctions, he felt, would distance faculty from one another and ultimately from the institution and its students.38 Thus, in addition to keeping compensation the same across all disciplines, with differentials based only on lengthy of service, Hinckley reinforced the tradition that each member of the faculty be called simply “professor.” He recognized that it was not tenure per se but its grounding in a narrow view of producing “the best” scholars and its manifestation in multiple academic ranks that was to be avoided at the teaching-focused university he was creating.
Hinckley felt comfortable with BYU-Idaho's pursuing the same approach to faculty employment that had worked well for Ricks College. That approach resembles what good companies do: work hard to identify people with good long-term potential to contribute; give them incentives consistent with the organization's goals; invest in their development; and hang on to them.
The BYU-Idaho hiring process, which culminates with what David Bednar called a college president's most important decision, begins with a global search that must produce multiple qualified candidates.39 Vetting of these candidates occurs in the classroom, where teaching capacity is observed, and in personal interviews that begin with departmental and college representatives and end with the president.
For three years after being hired, a BYU-Idaho professor has probationary status that, in the large majority of cases, produces “continuing status.” The decision is based on a review conducted by academic leaders and the president. The primary criteria are teaching and other instruction-related contributions to the university, such as curriculum development and student advising. These criteria square with the university's choices of students, subjects, and scholarship.
As in most professional organizations that hold their employees to clearly stated objectives, dismissals of faculty with continuing status at BYU-Idaho are rare. That comports with the exhortation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP): “In the effective college, a dismissal proceeding involving a faculty member on tenure, or one occurring during the term of an appointment, will be a rare exception, caused by individual human weakness and not by an unhealthful setting.”40
Continuing status at BYU-Idaho does not foster a sense of professional invincibility. In fact, no tenured professor should feel immune to ongoing performance assessment and potential dismissal for failure to meet threshold standards of productivity. The AAUP has made that clear, saying, “The faculty must be willing to recommend the dismissal of a colleague when necessary.”41 Institutions are expected to set their own definitions of adequate cause for dismissal; these may include incompetence and neglect of duty.42
Though the AAUP allows for post-tenure review, fewer than half of four-year institutions surveyed by the Harvard Graduate School of Education have policies for conducting such reviews.43 Herein lies another process flaw that is unrelated to tenure's main outcome, employment security. Many university communities presume that tenure is an immutable decision; for them, the presumption becomes self-fulfilling, and they may find themselves employing unproductive faculty members who cannot be dismissed. This can be particularly problematic in the United States, where anti-age discrimination laws create a high bar for dismissing older workers.
Tenure granted by the wrong kind of process can impose debilitating costs on a university, including decreased instruction quality, faculty disunity, and diminished productivity. Yet the flaws are in the process rather than the concept of employment security. A flawed process is one that grants tenure for activities such as mediocre research that does not substantially contribute to the institution's mission, one that is opaque and perceived to be arbitrary, or one that creates a presumption of immunity to post-tenure performance review. An institution that operates such a process has itself—not tenure—to blame.
Universities may benefit from more of the right kind of tenure, as BYU-Idaho does from its continuing faculty status. Those benefits include (1) incentives for tenure-track professors to innovate in ways that help the university, such as contributing to general education courses; (2) less dividedness among the faculty, the majority of whom will either have tenure or be confidently on their way to earning it; and (3) fewer courses taught by potentially unqualified instructors.44
A form of tenure might be extended even to adjunct faculty, including those working online. An adjunct instructor who has successfully passed through a well-designed probationary process represents an asset of far greater value than the current market rate for such services implies. Universities that rely on these “contingent” faculty will benefit from contracting with the best of them on terms designed to increase their long-term commitment to the institution and its students. An outstanding adjunct instructor might, for example, be guaranteed a certain annual course load and paid a premium rate. This is the compensation model of some for-profit institutions.
Even a well-designed and managed tenure process is not without its potential risks. Among those is an increase of faculty power, which can be used to thwart administrative efficiency measures or even call for the removal of a president.45 But as Richard Chait of Harvard's Graduate School of Education has noted, “The degree of professional autonomy varies more as a function of institutional prestige, culture, and ethos than is suggested by a faculty member's tenure status.”46 In other words, tenure is more likely to strengthen a particular an existing faculty view of institutional authority than to create one.
This suggests that tenure can also work in favor of a skillfully led institution. A faculty member who enjoys a sense of employment security may be more likely to support a well-reasoned and communicated administrative proposal for change. Charles Eliot created tenure for his faculty and trusted them to act in the best interests of the institution, treating them as “the most intelligent and fair-minded body of men in the world, for his purposes.”47 His power to lead Harvard was the greater because it ultimately rested with self-confident faculty members who chose to support his institutional initiatives. The tenure debate, to the extent it focuses on reasonable employment security and intellectual freedom, is misplaced. A high degree of individual security and self-determination are good for all organizations that depend on human insight and commitment for their success, including and especially universities.
The Scholar's Out-of-Class Activities
As in the case of tenure, questions about professors' connections to the world outside the classroom require nuanced analysis that is sensitive to the needs and welfare of the university community. These out-of-class connections can benefit not only individual scholars but also students and the institution as a whole. For example, high-quality research can both burnish the university's reputation and expose students to cutting-edge thought. Even a student-centered university with limited graduate programs may be justified in performing traditional scholarly research, especially as it enlists undergraduate students in the effort.
Likewise, the so-called commercialization of universities is not a problem per se. Institutional research contracts with private sector companies and individual faculty consulting activities need not come at the expense of students. Properly managed, they can make a net contribution to the educational mission of the university, including its job of mentoring. Students benefit from professors' connections to the world outside academe, particularly as they are invited to participate in those external activities. That is borne out, for example, in the one-day per week given by most leading business schools to their faculty members, whose connections to the corporate world yield rich dividends for MBA students in the form not only of insights brought back to the classroom but also student consulting projects and career connections.
Of course, university administrators and faculty members must recognize the high cost of their combined scholarly and instructional activities. Performing these two fundamentally different activities under one roof, in a way that research laboratories and for-profit educators do not, inevitably creates coordination costs that must be justified by their benefits. The benefits of scholarly activity will outweigh those costs only if the activity is motivated by a true quest for knowledge and a hope of some ultimate good to students and society at large. It is all right that a given line of research may have no immediate practical purpose, on the one hand, or that it be funded by a for-profit company on the other. But the goal of the scholar must be the advance of knowledge, not the bolstering of a tenure portfolio or the acquisition of university overhead reimbursements.
The student-conscious scholar is uniquely valuable, capable of performing the jobs of discovery, memory, and mentoring like no one else. Thus, the university is justified in assuring such a scholar employment security and in encouraging him or her to explore the boundaries of knowledge not only in the laboratory and library but in the world at large. Of course, this presumes that the university has defined scholarship more broadly than just discovery research and in a way consistent with its unique choices of students and subjects. It also presumes that the policies of the university align with and reinforce these choices. Given the genetic tendency to imitate the great research universities, which aspire to having everything at its scholarly best, creating alignment around unique choices isn't easy. The choices cannot be made only tacitly or on paper. The university must have its strategy reflected in its institutional DNA: its program offerings, organizational structures, policies and procedures, and other systems that guide and support its activities. In particular, the university's strategic choices must be reflected in its success measures. We explore what it takes to accomplish that in the following chapter, the next-to-last in our journey.