Chair Talk #6 - Scholarship

Chair Talk #6:   Scholarship

Maintaining quality in scholarship is our most critical challenge – so say the 300+ faculty who responded to our recent Faculty Priorities Poll.  They fear both our ability to maintain scholarly excellence, and to nurture it well into the future. 

Higher education, and research universities in particular, are defined by scholarship, and by their roles in both discovering and disseminating the fruits of that scholarship – knowledge and wisdom about the world and how to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives.  Scholarship includes research, both wet and dry, in labs and libraries, as well as performances in both concert halls and classrooms.  Virtually none of these activities pay for themselves, and anxiety around maintaining high quality scholarship reflects the fact that we are increasingly dependent on student tuition revenues to help pay the bills.    The part of our mission involving knowledge dissemination is something faculty embrace, with some individual variation for sure.  There is concern, however, that we are being called upon to teach more with less – and that this will necessarily impair the quality of our teaching, as well as the quality and quantity of our scholarship.

So, what’s a well-intentioned university administration meant to do in a situation like this?  There’s both good and not-so-good news about the way the UA has answered this question.  The good news is that two separate processes have emerged, each with substantial faculty involvement, both of which speak to concerns about the quality of scholarship at the UA.  The not-so-good news is that these activities were not communicated as well as they might have been.  And this in turn made it difficult for the wider campus community to understand, much less feel positive about, what was happening.

The Cluster Hire process, organized by the Provost and Senior Vice President for Research, and the Strategic Planning Meetings organized by the SVPR’s Research and Development office (ORD) have unfolded over the past six months. One can have an honest debate about whether these efforts were well conceived or not – I happen to think they were.  Both efforts clearly experienced hiccups, but both are moving forward.  Give them a B or a B+.

On the other hand, communication was less effective than it needed to be.   Serious misunderstandings and misgivings about both efforts abound, and this could probably have been avoided with more, and earlier, information.  Give it a C or a C-.

The existence of the Cluster Hire and Planning exercises shows that senior administration understands the need to invest in quality scholarship, and is committed to finding the required resources.  This is good news.  It is what we would hope and expect. 

In my view it is time to move on from the bumpy roll-out and to benefit from these efforts.  To start, the initial reports of the Strategic Planning Groups are available on the ORD website (http://research.arizona.edu/strategic-planning-sessions) and I strongly urge those who felt they were inappropriately or inadvertently left out of a discussion they should have been a part of to speak up now and join the process. To my knowledge, strategic planning in the various areas is still very much a work in progress.  Further, my understanding is that the cluster hire process is moving forward, along with regular hiring through existing college resources.  In other words, lots of searches and in the end, lots of new colleagues and exciting new scholarship.  This is good for all of us, whether or not we are in a directly affected unit. 

Finally, I note the Quality Brainstorming Groups that have been set up to ‘define quality’ and ‘address how to measure it’.  About 40 faculty volunteers comprise these groups, which have started looking at both instruction and scholarship.  They have 4-6 weeks to finish the job, and have gotten off to a fast start.  Stay tuned for the results of their brainstorming.

If we speak up and embrace quality we can help preserve it.