Why Not Reward a Political Scientist Who Helps a Neighborhood? : UC: Research should be more than specialized investigation. It should include applying scholarship to the classroom and to the world.

The University of California honors and rewards winners of the Nobel Prize in physics. It just shakes the hands of Nobel Prize-winning peacemakers. Service to humanity is not the work of the university. Specialized investigation is.

The Pister Report of the University of California Task Force on Faculty Rewards, released earlier this month, would change all this by expanding the university’s concept of research to include applying scholarship to the classroom and to the world. Regrettably, it will be an uphill battle.

The official criteria for faculty advancement and review are teaching, research and service. The pivotal factor is published research, either in the form of technical books or journal articles written expressly for other scientists and scholars. Most of this published material is read only by a handful of specialists. It has little lasting interest.

Indeed, scientists and scholars increasingly write more and more about less and less and, as a consequence, know less and less about more and more. The discipline of specialization requires reading deeply instead of widely. Yet, often it is better to be well-read, especially where the humanities and social sciences are concerned, since they address the ways we think and live, the values we have. Knowing everything there is to know about a single line of text or an ancient artifact can isolate scholars from the diversity of knowledge necessary to make cross-cultural connections or to take a longer view of history than simply living in the present or the past. Scholarship can become preoccupying when there’s little beyond assembling Heraclitus’ sayings.

During the entrepreneurial ‘80s, UC professors advanced their standing and income almost exclusively by publishing specialized research. They aped the model of the natural sciences: creating a niche and becoming expert at it. As a result, the community of scholars fragmented.

In its place emerged free-agent marketeers hawking innovations of their own erudite subdisciplines, building reputations within the university for what’s hot and au courant , and generating a secondary form of pedantry devoted exclusively to the work of fellow scholars. The result of this kind of Reaganomics on higher education has been devastating: escalating salary wars for recruiting superstars, overcrowded classes and rising fees.

Consider the reading necessary just to keep a single course of lectures alive. Reading books takes time and thinking, not to mention integrating insight into lectures. But why should university scholars devote, say, 20 hours a week to reading generally for their classes, when they could devote that time to research and be rewarded for it? The result of obsessive devotion to research is that undergraduate courses taught by full-time faculty have become more like graduate seminars. Courses on the history of ideas, for example, become lectures on Descartes or Frege. Or else professors are simply less informed when teaching classes they’ve not published on.

This produces a loss of general knowledge in the classroom and in the minds of faculty, who simply cannot find the time for general reading anymore. The economics of reward for specialized research forced this course of action.

Following suggestions made by Ernest Boyer of the Carnegie Foundation, the Pister report recommends that the scholarship of teaching, as well as the traditional scholarship of discovery, be rewarded. In this way, faculty who devote a significant portion of their research to creating better classes and being more generally informed would receive the kind of recognition that discoverers expect and get.

Academic business-as-usual, with its emphasis on esoteric scholarship, discounts books and articles written for the general public. Yet, successfully communicating complex thoughts to ordinary people is far more demanding than adding footnotes to Plato. The Pister report recognizes this by endorsing what Boyer calls the scholarship of application. A political scientist who makes distinguished use of learning to improve the quality of neighborhoods should be rewarded for his work.

There is also the scholarship of integration, in which genuine connections across disciplines as disparate as law and literary criticism, genetics and morality are made. Interdisciplinary centers are sprouting within the university. But unless the conception of scholarship is broadened, the new institutes will perpetuate more of the same specialized research. There is a crying need for universal truths in a world awash with technicalities and divided into factions.

Unfortunately, the learning curve for change inevitably eludes those entrusted with institutional enforcement of the rules. Faculty personnel committees, like all bureaucracies, tend to think narrowly when precedent is at stake. Furthermore, because UC respects the principle of faculty governance over personnel decisions, chancellors are reluctant to override faculty decisions. Whenever chancellors do promote those passed-over, for reasons of the common good, they suffer for it. So, real reform must be motivated by the faculty. It cannot be imposed.

Magnanimity toward scholars honestly engaged in genuine inquiry is a virtue worth cultivating. UC sorely needs a collegiality of scholars who recognize that those who take their research seriously may nonetheless express themselves in different ways and may, in time, change the ways scholars manifest their learning--writing essays instead of marginalia, reading more, writing less.

The university is an allegory for the larger society. Both suffer from an obsession with self-interest, at the expense of common interests, common causes, common good. The Pister report tests the goodwill of the faculty. Public support for the university is hanging in the balance.