Dear community-engaged scholarship colleagues,
We thought you'd be interested in this article. Although not focused on community-engaged
scholarship (CES), the points and strategies may be applied to CES.
Thanks,
Rahma Osman
Program Assistant
Community-Campus Partnerships for Health
From: Rick Reis <reis@stanford.edu>
Date: 27 October, 2011 9:06:17 PM EDT
To: tomorrows-professor <tomorrows-professor@lists.stanford.edu>
Subject: TP Msg. #1130 Tenure Across Borders
The
University of Southern California offers an exception to that general
trend. In
recently amending its tenure and promotion guidelines, USC
became one
of the first institutions in the country to provide
departments
and committees with clear and explicit instructions on how to
weigh
interdisciplinary research and collaborative scholarship when
rewarding faculty.
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Folks:
The posting below looks at a new approach at the
University of Southern California to make explicit the requirements for
tenure-based interdisciplinary reseaarch. It is by Dan Berrett from the July
22, 2011, 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 ©2011 Inside Higher Ed Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
Tomorrow's Academic Careers
Tenure Across Borders
For many full-time faculty members who have not earned
tenure, the prospect of conducting interdisciplinary research or collaborating
across departments can be, professionally speaking, a risky gambit.
While many colleges and universities say they want their
faculty members to do work in these areas -- and they may even make joint
appointments across departments or award grants to carry out such research --
institutional support often falters when it comes time to decide tenure and promotion.
Faculty members can be daunted at the prospect of negotiating factions not just
in their department, but in another one as well. Turf battles and a
misunderstanding of what qualifies as interdisciplinary scholarship also can
make it difficult for those sitting on committees to accurately render
judgment.
The University of Southern California offers an exception
to that general trend. In recently amending its tenure and promotion
guidelines, USC became one of the first institutions in the country to provide
departments and committees with clear and explicit instructions on how to weigh
interdisciplinary research and collaborative scholarship when rewarding
faculty.
"I actually haven’t seen anything like this
before," said Anita Levy, senior program officer of the American
Association of University Professors. "I think this is really a model
that, with some tweaking, could be emulated by many institutions quite
successfully."
In January, USC's University Committee on Appointments,
Promotions and Tenure, a group of full professors that advises the president,
produced a new manual
(http://bit.ly/vYQO0y)
that spells out how tenure and promotion should be determined. Frequent
references to the merits of independent scholarship -- the kind of language that
leaves many researchers worried not just about interdisciplinary research but
about co-authored books or articles -- were made less conspicuous, and a
general approach to discipline-spanning scholarship was made more explicit. The
university, says the manual, "welcomes interdisciplinary work equally with
that within disciplinary cores, including work that crosses from social
sciences into the humanities or transcends the home department."
In order to adequately evaluate interdisciplinary and
collaborative work, the manual advises a candidate's tenure or promotion
committee, which is based in the home department, to include one or more
members from relevant outside departments. These colleagues should be consulted
on the selection of referees from the other disciplines; those who share the
candidate’s interdisciplinary focus should be chosen as well. Candidates are
also reviewed by committees at the school and university levels.
The manual also assigns a candidate's committee with the
responsibility of appropriately judging publications that are outside the core
discipline, of recognizing interdisciplinary graduate teaching and of crediting
faculty who advise graduate students outside the home department. "The
committees should make special effort to understand other disciplines’ customs
on co-authorship, sequence of authors, and use of conferences, journals or
monographs as premier outlets," the manual reads.
Departments and schools should take note when a
candidate’s scholarship spans disciplinary or school boundaries, the manual
continues, or when it makes a link between fundamental and applied research, or
focuses strongly on problems of social importance. "It is essential to
strive to evaluate such work properly when it differs from the usual expectations
of the home department or discipline," the manual states.
The manual also furnishes guidance to departmental
committees that judge collaborative work. A few of a tenure or promotion
candidate's co-authors on collaborative work should be invited to be referees
(in addition to five or six referees who are not co-authors) to testify to the
contribution of the candidate. The manual also instructs departmental
committees to bear in mind tenure criteria outlined by the National Institutes
of Health which are designed to encourage and reward team science. These
criteria include identifying the distinct intellectual contribution a scholar
has made to the work of a multidisciplinary team, such as independent
publication or the presentation of findings at conferences.
While Levy of the AAUP largely hailed the new guidelines
at USC, her praise came with some minor caveats. She said the association would
like to see more clarity regarding how long the probationary period should last
for pre-tenure professors doing interdisciplinary work, and a more explicit
placement of tenure for these faculty in the university itself, not their
departments or schools.
USC wants to better support interdisciplinary scholarship
largely because it serves a competitive advantage, said Randolph Hall, vice
president of research.
Research institutions and laboratories tend to be more
adept at embracing interdisciplinary approaches, he said, and at bringing
people from diverse fields together. "We're not always innovative in how
we do research," said Hall, referring to universities in general.
Changing the systems and structures that are in place,
such as the tenure and promotion guidelines that drive many faculty members'
behavior, was one step.
Another was to shift the larger university culture. It is
a slow-moving process, Hall acknowledged, but one he hopes will start to take
root within about five years. To start that process, the university has held
six workshops on collaboration and creativity at the Norman Lear Center of the
Annenberg School for nearly 60 faculty members from 13 schools and 30
disciplines, along with experts on collaborative research (http://bit.ly/tRjA1i)
USC also created a fund to support interdisciplinary and
collaborative projects. The projects, which are selected by a faculty
committee, must demonstrate significant interest from scholars in diverse
fields, and its principal investigators must reapply for renewal each year --
$30,000 each year for three years. The idea of the grants, said Hall, is to
provide seed money and a bit of buzz on campus. “We want to show that
collaboration matters,” he said.
Most of the awards USC has granted in 2010 and 2011 have
been to scholars in the physical and biological sciences and engineering, who,
generally speaking, tend to be more accustomed to adopting a collaborative
approach. For example, faculty in USC's engineering and pharmacy programs and
its medical school are undertaking a project that combines technology and
pediatrics; faculty in the schools of medicine, gerontology and dentistry are
starting an initiative to repair neurodegenerative disorders. A computer
scientist has joined forces with a psychologist to marry game theory and the
study of human behavior. Similar melding of disciplines by the same computer
scientist, Milind Tambe of the engineering, computer science and industrial and
systems engineering departments, has resulted in funding from the U.S.
Department of Defense's Multidisciplinary Research Initiative program.
With government agencies rewarding scholars for interdisciplinary
work, it is perhaps not surprising that many universities do so, too. The
University of Pennsylvania views such scholarship as not only legitimate, said
President Amy Gutmann, but as "one of the university's very highest
priorities." Since 2005, Penn has installed in joint appointments 12
faculty members whose research and teaching are interdisciplinary in nature.
Even though Penn's tenure and promotion guidelines don't deal as explicitly
with collaboration and interdisciplinary research as those of USC, Penn's
investment in new faculty lines has had what Gutmann called a strong multiplier
effect: it created a clearer path to joint appointments between schools and
departments, as reflected in a new Integrated Studies Program and in medical research
centers that have been organized into disease-based teams. Since 2006, Penn's
provost’s office also has been awarding $6,000 grants to about a half-dozen
interdisciplinary projects each year.
Still, Hall argued that the scale and systematic nature
of USC's new approach to interdisciplinary and collaborative work were of a
different order. “I can’t think of a university that has embraced it as much as
we have,” he said.
— Dan Berrett
© Copyright 2011 Inside Higher Ed
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