Inside Higher Ed has an opinion piece today in which a a provost and a professor talk about service, which is the catch-all category of faculty activities that aren’t teaching and research. As the title of the piece says, this is a particularly unloved area:
Yet this is the area that is least discussed in graduate school, for which no training is typically provided, and that the interview process rarely brings up. Furthermore, while tenure and promotion evaluations pay homage to the trinity of “Teaching, Scholarship and Service,” service surely gets the least amount of attention. It is very rarely rewarded either monetarily or in terms of prestige. In fact, the view of some faculty is that service is to be given grudgingly, if it all.
In liberal arts colleges, advising, club sponsorships, determination of academic policy and the execution of that policy require deep commitments of time from faculty. Many tasks, such as organizing pre-law advising or guiding students through graduate applications — assignments many large universities fill with a staff member — are elements of service for faculty at smaller colleges. Organizational realities may encourage this on the one hand, but on the other, there may also be better student outcomes in having a teacher-scholar actively engaged in these roles.
Many faculty feel pulled in multiple directions by trying to balance teaching and scholarship, but most recognize that both elements of the academic life offer unique rewards. Too often, the rewards for service are overlooked.
This struck a chord for local reasons that I’m not going to talk about here. I will note, however, that while this piece contains many lovely words about the personal and institutional benefits of service activity, it backs away from making any constructive suggestions. Or, more precisely, it backs away from making the one suggestion that would actually be constructive.
It’s all well and good to speak of the benefits that accrue from service on an institutional and moral level, but the plain fact is that, as the authors admit in the first quoted paragraph, tangible rewards for service in the form of pay and promotion are hard to come by. And in the absence of tangible rewards for service, it will continue to be difficult to get faculty to serve on committees and interact with students.
The problem with getting faculty to do service is not, as the authors seem to think, that faculty aren’t aware that these roles are important to the insitution. The problem is that, particualrly for junior faculty, these roles are no benefit to individual careers, and in many cases can be actively harmful. Doing college service will not make up for deficiencies in teaching or scholarship, and “too much” service activity can be actively harmful for a tenure case.
If college and university administrators want faculty to be more willing to do service activities, they need to put some resources behind it. This is a lovely op-ed, but it’s really no different than the guilt trip that gets laid on every faculty member who’s asked to be on an unpleasant committee. If you want to actually change the way things work, you need to start providing some material reward for service activity. That means merit raises for doing service, and a more serious consideration of service in tenure decisions.
Anything else is just useless talk.
Lest people get the wrong impression, let me note that I am not anti-service. In fact, I probably did more college service than most junior faculty, and I’ve signed on to spend the next three years as the faculty representative for a house in our big new residential initiative, which is a major committment.
I do these things, though, in the full knowledge that I am unlikely to receive any material reward for them. I’m doing them because I enjoy working with students, and that’s the whole reason I came to a liberal arts college in the first place. I’m happy to do student-focussed service work “for free,” because I find it rewarding in the personal sense that the authors of the Inside Higher Ed piece talk about.
I’m not going to do service work without some compensation, though. If I don’t enjoy it, I’m not going to agree to do it without getting something in return. Just talking to me about how important it is isn’t going to work.