Thank you for rearranging the agenda and giving me the opportunity to speak. I ask for your patience, as my remarks will take approximately fifteen minutes.
For those of you who know me only vaguely, I am Douglas Walcerz, from the department of Mechanical Engineering, and I am one of four faculty members who were denied tenure this year. I have talked with the other faculty members, and we agree that the most probable justification for the decision was that our scholarly achievement did not meet the provost's standard of quality. So, I am here to address the topic of scholarship and the question of quality.
Scholarship is important; the discovery of new knowledge is an essential element of higher education. Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation writes: "The scholarship of discovery, at its best, contributes ... to the intellectual climate of a college ... Not just the outcomes, but the process, and especially the passion, give meaning to the effort."
The benefits of research extend beyond our academic climate, of course. The production of new knowledge is closely tied to national security, economic competitiveness, and social progress.
In most cases, the artifact of academic scholarship is the referred journal article. The design of the scholarly enterprise has made the journal article the gold standard of academic worth. Publications dominate decisions about tenure, promotion, annual salary reviews, and virtually all the marks of prestige in academia. This is consistent with the high value that has attached to scholarly pursuits. But every human system has weaknesses, and the scholarly enterprise is no exception.
The trite but pithy phrase publish or perish hints that some publications may exist not for the advancement of knowledge, but rather to prevent the author's perishing. The desire for professional recognition and financial reward can create a publishing imperative that is independent of scholarly pursuits.
A Carnegie Foundation national survey in 1989 found that at comprehensive institutions such as WPI, 54% of faculty agreed with the statement Publications used for tenure and promotion are just counted, not qualitatively measured. The belief that quantity is more important than quality is a powerful force that estranges scholarship from publication.
In an address to the faculty in 1991, Donald Kennedy, president of Stanford University, called for: "significant changes in the process of appointment and promotions, so as to decrease the pressure on the quantity (not quality) of research production... [I hope] we can agree that the quantitative use of research output as a criterion for appointment or promotion is a bankrupt idea. The overproduction of routine scholarship is one of the most egregious aspects of contemporary academic life: It tends to conceal really important work by its sheer volume; it wastes time and valuable resources."
For me, the saddest statistic comes from a 1990 survey by the Institute for Scientific Information. The survey found that 47% of publications in the so called hard sciences are never referenced in the four years subsequent to publication. If you look just at engineering the number is worse: 72% are uncited after four years. Even the authors of the articles themselves could find no meaningful content to include in a subsequent work. What a sad commentary on this noble enterprise.
Peer review is supposed to defend us against such perversion, but is becoming less and less effective in the face of an exponentially growing floor of submitted work and relatively meager rewards for the unglamorous job of reviewing that work. The simple truth is that reviewing articles is intellectually demanding, time consuming, and poorly regarded compared to publishing. As a result it is often neglected and does not ensure quality the way it should. This critical weakness has been fully exploited in the struggle for academic survival.
Please do not take my remarks to mean that I condemn academic research and publishing. I emphatically do not. Despite its weaknesses it is tremendously successful for the advancement of knowledge. I love the freedom and stimulation of science, and I publish my work whenever I believe I have something substantial and meaningful to say. But I don't believe the measurement of scholarship as it has been practiced for the past decades should dominate academic life the way it does. Scholarship is more than research and publishing.
I would argue that of equal importance to the discovery of new knowledge is the application of knowledge in commerce, government, industry, and other venues. By application, I mean using knowledge, especially new knowledge, outside the academy. It is unfortunate that application has been ignored, and many blame our national economic struggles on academic neglect of the practical use of knowledge.
The 1988 MIT report Made In America stated "[Engineering] science came to dominate the nation's leading engineering schools. Excellence in engineering science became the principal criterion for faculty tenure and promotion. At the same time, the design of manufacturing processes and production operations acquired a reputation as lowbrow activities and largely disappeared from the curriculum."
Eric Walker, past president of the National Academy of Engineering, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1987: "[Typical engineering graduates] resemble research scientists more than they [do] engineers able to design and manufacture turbines, generators, transformers, and internal combustion engines... A wholesale return to the basics in engineering education will be necessary before the United Stated can begin to reclaim its position of preeminence in the world marketplace."
It is my opinion that the application of knowledge was neglected because it did not fit the mold of scientific scholarship. Scientific studies are designed to be of general interest to the scientific community, hence their publication in a journal. Applications, on the other hand, are usually specific to a client. Research produces referred journal articles, but the artifacts of application are usually engineering drawings or circuit diagrams or computer codes or machines or even a new business or human organization. Scientific studies usually isolate some interesting phenomenon under precisely controlled conditions, but real world applications are usually integrative and use empiricism to compensate for unknown conditions. Given these differences I can readily see how application became divorced from our concept of scholarship. But this was a mistake. Research and application are dissimilar in ways that strike an odd balance, and the two activities complement each other.
In his book, Scholarship Reconsidered, Ernest Boyer writes: "The scholarship of application, as we define it here, is not a one-way street. Indeed, the term itself may be misleading if it suggests that knowledge is first 'discovered' and then 'applied'. The process we have in mind is far more dynamic. New intellectual understandings can arise out of the very act of application - whether in policy, creating an architectural design, or working with the public schools. In activities such as these, theory and practice vitally interact, and one renews the other."
We need application in the academy because it is an essential part of scholarship and it is our link to the greater society.
As Oscar Handlin observed, "[We] can no longer afford the luxury of pursuits confined to an ivory tower... [S]cholarship has to prove its worth not on its own terms but by service to the nation and the world."
I plainly admit that I feel blessed to have worked at WPI. More than any other institution I know, WPI resisted a singular focus on scientific research and maintained a healthy balance between the discovery of knowledge, the use of knowledge, and the transmission of knowledge, i.e., teaching. WPI really is different. When I came to WPI in 1990 I suffered culture shock: seven-week terms, NRs, projects, teamwork, active learning. WPI still taught ME's to use milling machines, Chem Eng's operated a distillation column, and we had a nuclear reactor for undergraduates. What planet was this? My senior colleagues explained that this was Earth, the real one, and the places I had come from, Purdue and The University of Texas at Austin, were distant relations.
My class of new faculty took time to learn the WPI culture, and when we realized that the philosophy of choice and self determination that marks our educational program also applied to scholarship, we made some choices. Some of us chose to emphasize traditional research and publishing, others chose the scholarship of application, and at the same time I think we all recognized that at WPI, work that seamlessly merged both with teaching was the ultimate goal.
Dave Zenger spent five years creating the Powder Metallurgy Research Center, a consortium of 15 struggling manufacturing companies trying to exploit a relatively new technology. He has done more leg work, taken more plant trips, and given more technical seminars than any probationary faculty member I know. He has built a one-of-a-kind technical organization from nothing. This organization provides opportunities for MQP's and graduate work in manufacturing. The client companies provide technical expertise and professional mentorship. And the annual dues that WPI receives, about $150,000, build our educational and research infrastructure. The PMRC is more than the articles Dave has written about it. It is a human organization, a substantial and creative product of his intellect and skill, and it is one of the highest quality scholarly achievements I've seen from a probationary faculty member. Isn't that what WPI is about?
John Bausch is leading the effort to create the Design Studio of the Future, an experiment in global engineering. He is attempting to create a network of geographically disparate engineering schools that are linked not just through Email, not just through live communication, not just through shared design databases, but through all of these and through their very manufacturing processes. He might succeed; he might not. It is an experiment , and it has risks. It isn't a referred journal article but it is an original creation of his mind, it is physically real, and it is scholarship.
John Griffin has created software, a HyperCard stack, for teaching economics. This is the kind of work that we keep saying is the wave of the future. It is the kind of work that we say is essential to simultaneously increase teaching productivity and quality. It is scholarship.
As for myself, I have published research, received patents, written software, and created a small network of client industries to support MQP's and my two innovative design courses. It is a mix of discovery and application and teaching that crosses disciplines and educational levels.
Our choices were not made in a vacuum, and they certainly were not kept secret. For five years the WPI community, including the provost, said, Yes, the Powder Metallurgy Research Center is important and valued. Yes, the Design Studio of the Future is what WPI wants to foster and encourage. Yes, the classroom innovation is needed and appreciated. Yes, industrial linkages are exactly what we need because federal support is shrinking and students are attracted to real-world applications. And then in our sixth year we were told, No, you haven't done the right things, and you must leave WPI.
I don't know. Perhaps this type of work wasn't counted as scholarship because it wasn't peer reviewed. Quality should be WPI's greatest concern, but peer review is not the only means to measure it. I would argue that the scholarship of application is best evaluated by its clients. Project sponsors can be excellent judges because of their financial commitment, personal involvement and practical interest in the outcome. I sadly suspect that these measures were not taken seriously in the tenure decisions.
Whatever the reasons, the tenure decisions came as a shock. The confusion might have worsened when CTAF's report showed that they thought the three of us had done the right things, but the provost thought we hadn't. I assure such disagreements have major consequences for the school and should not be taken lightly.
In 1989 Ernest Boyer declared: "Let's agree that the 1990's will be the decade of undergraduate education. But let's also candidly acknowledge that the degree to which this push for better education is achieved will be determined, in large measure, by the way scholarship is defined and, ultimately, rewarded."
Now, seven years later it is clear that he was taken seriously. Stanford, Purdue, MIT, and virtually all the science and technology schools large and small across the nation are experimenting with and improving their curricula. This is good news for technical education, but whether we like it or not, it is rapidly eroding our market niche. Projects are the buzzword everywhere, not just at WPI. Teamwork and interdisciplinary work and globalization and lifelong learning and real world experience and attention to undergraduate teaching are sold to parents and prospective freshmen everywhere, not just at WPI. We are no longer a unique institution. What is going to set us apart is our cost, officially pegged at $25,520 next year not including books and personal expenses. That spell trouble.
We need to go beyond the Plan as it exists today. We need a new niche that will distinguish us from the competition. As much as I love faculty governance, I doubt that a "new niche" committee will do the job. And as much as I appreciate the Vision Statement we all received from COG, talking and doing are two different things. And I can't say that I feel a lasting galvanizing effect from our 5-year Strategic Plan or the Blue Ribbon Task Force. If the job gets done, I believe it will be because imaginative faculty, especially junior faculty unencumbered with preconceptions, are given the freedom and security to experiment with new ideas and take risks with new ways of teaching, learning, and researching.
This year's tenure decisions destroys any security young faculty may have felt relative to unconventional, innovative scholarly undertakings. After this year's tenure decisions can you really advise interested junior faculty to pursue industrial linkages? Can you tell them that time devoted to classroom innovation is well spent? Can you encourage strong involvement in undergraduate projects? Can you encourage them to experiment with futuristic ideas about the practice of their profession? I don't think you can, and if you did they would have cause to doubt you.
When the faculty created tenure at WPI 25 years ago, I think they got it right. I think they were well aware of the perniciousness of the publishing imperative when they declared "High quality scholarship" (italics added) as a criterion for tenure. References to the quantity of scholarship are notable for their absence. And they took pains to provide a broad definition of scholarship. The WPI Faculty Handbook states: "High quality scholarship can be evidenced in many ways, including: publication of peer-reviewed journal articles and books, professional awards, citations in professional literature, presentations at professional meetings, grant proposals and grants awarded, offices held in professional societies, Journal editorships, reviews of papers and proposals, patents, etc."
Based on this year's tenure decision, I am worried that the definition has been reduced to the counting of referred journal articles. Less than two weeks ago in a small group discussion about the tenure decisions a member of the ECE faculty said that the unwritten rule in his department was that you needed about six referred publications to meet the scholarship criterion. I myself have heard that in my department you needed about five. One of the candidates for provost stated in his open meeting that at his school you needed about seven. What I hope you understand is that there shouldn't be a number or even a perception of one. The criterion is quality, not quantity, and the definition of scholarship is supposed to encourage creativity and risk taking and originality, not slavish devotion to the publishing imperative.
The faculty are the soul of WPI. We collectively posses WPI's institutional memory, and by our actions we declare our values to each other, to our students, and to the world. The faculty have the power to shape this institution according to their will. But I will not advocate unilateral action. As much as I passionately believe in the need for a broad view of scholarship here at WPI, there is another matter of equal importance that I will mention in closing. These past six years most of the faculty-administration interactions I've seen have not been pleasant. The Strauss-Apelian era was marked, according to many, with relative financial strength in a difficult economic climate, but also with some moral weakness. Perhaps it was economic realpolitik. The result, which Strauss himself declared in print after leaving the presidency, was a disturbing increase in distrust, hostility, and intransigence between faculty and administration. It must stop. If the faculty can't work this issue in harmony with our new president's developing vision for WPI, I would rather you turn you attention to something else. WPI may be poorer for losing John Bausch, John Griffin, Dave Zenger and me, but it will be destitute without collegiality. I urge you to pass this motion for the benefit of WPI.