An Immodest Proposal

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Notes

1. For clarity, let me supply a definition of “engagement” that comes from the report of the University of North Carolina's Task Force on Future Promotion and Tenure Policies and Practices: “Faculty ‘engagement’ refers to scholarly, creative or pedagogical activities for the public good, directed toward persons and groups outside the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Such activities (in the form of research, teaching, and/or service) develop as collaborative interactions that respond to short and long-term societal needs. Engagement serves people in our state, nation, or the wider world through a continuum of academically informed activities.” The full report, which represents a succinct attempt to shift tenure and promotion policies toward acknowledging “engaged” work, can be found at the UNC Web site: “Report of the UNC Task Force on Future Promotion and Tenure Policies and Practices,” Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, May 8, 2009, http://provost.unc.edu/policies/Taskforce%20on%20Future%20Promotion%20and%20Tenure%20Policies%20and%20Practices%20FINAL%20REPORT%205-8-09.pdf. A much longer examination of the same set of issues is Julie Ellison and Timothy K. Eatman's “Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University; A Resource on Promotion and Tenure in the Arts, Humanities, and Design,” Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in public Life Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship, 2008, http://www.imaginingamerica.org/TTI/TTI_FINAL.pdf.

2. Stuart Hall, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, ed., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988): 35–74; and Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48.

3. For a fuller discussion of the value and specific modes of collaborative academic work, see Jane Danielewicz and John McGowan, “Collaborative Work: A Practical Guide,” symplokē 13 (2005): 168–81.

4. Thus I think that the Ellison and Eatman report, useful though it undoubtedly is, concedes way too much to the primacy of “scholarship” as what professors should and must do.

5. For a more extended treatment of the question of “prestige” and its connection to undercutting an attention to the multiplicity of tasks that need attending to at a modern university, see my “The Humanities, American Universities, and Money,” South Atlantic Review 73 (2008): 4–32.

6. Obviously, I am only talking about tenure-track faculty when I refer to our privileged position. Universities are already too likely to have a two-tiered system between tenurable research-oriented faculty and non-tenurable “teaching” faculty. If engaged work gets shunted to the non-tenurable, we will have hardened a hierarchy that is already deeply entrenched and pernicious. So the attack on “scholarship” as the sole determinant of professors’ value is also a necessary piece of any attempt to roll back the ongoing disappearance of tenure. We must fight for the full acknowledgement and reward of all the different kinds of work that universities require of their faculty.

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John McGowan

John McGowan is Ruel W. Tyson Jr. Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill