Reporter Volume 25, No.15 February 3, 1994

Research, teaching: a creative partnership
By LLOYD KRAMER
Special to the Reporter

Current criticisms of the emphasis on scholarly research in the hiring
and promotion of university professors often overlook the intellectual
traits of the best teachers. Innovative, stimulating teachers, like
innovative persons in every sphere of society, ask difficult
questions, challenge familiar clich
s, and look constantly for new ways to understand their world and
themselves.
	Scholarly research is by no means the only way to ask
questions or find new knowledge, but it is one of the activities that
help people develop and maintain a creative, inquisitive response to
the information and ideas that circulate in our culture. In other
words, good research enhances the skills of good teachers.
	Although this claim for the positive connection between
research and teaching has helped to shape American higher education
during most of this century, it has obviously failed to convince those
many critics who believe that academic research frequently hurts the
interests of the students, parents, and taxpayers whom universities
are supposed to serve. The clich
d defenses of scholarly research tend mainly to provoke angry, clich
d demands for more emphasis on good teaching.
	Everyone in American colleges and universities wants to
promote good teaching. The disagreement focuses on the question of how
we identify and support the people who will remain interesting,
knowledgeable teachers over the course of their careers in the
classroom. Strange as it may seem to persons who have read the recent
criticisms of American universities, imaginative, substantive research
offers one of the best indications that someone is likely to remain an
imaginative, interesting teacher.
	The best universities in America thus ask their faculty to do
more than teach what other people have discovered; they also ask their
faculty to contribute to the knowledge and interpretations that will
be taught tomorrow.
	In this respect, a first-rate university might be compared to
a first-rate business. Almost everyone would agree that a good
business must encourage its employees to create new products or think
of new applications for old products or search for information about
how the business might conceivably develop in the future. The company
that simply uses the research and knowledge of others can remain in
business, but it will be a mediocre enterprise that relies on
imitation instead of innovation.
	These points seem clear enough when the public discussion
focuses on the need for business innovations. America cannot compete
in a global economy unless the nation's corporations encourage their
employees to stay at the "cutting edge" of new technologies, new
research and new commercial practices.
	Yet when the discussion turns to the university, we are told
that research hurts the students and drives away the best teachers. In
fact, the university that fosters research usually helps students
because it is far more likely to retain more of the best teachersQthe
intellectually active people who are closest to the "cutting edge" in
a field of knowledge. The best universities resemble the best
businesses in their desire to seek and reward employees who develop
innovative approaches to new or old problems.
	This basic principle of institutional vitality generally
disappears when critics claim that professors (especially in the
humanities or social sciences) are giving too much attention to their
research. Most of the best teachers I know, however, happen to be
excellent researchers and writers, and the connection is not simply a
coincidence. They are good teachers because they are always asking new
questions and looking for new answers.
	It would therefore be shortsighted and self-defeating for
universities to respond to their critics by devaluing scholarly
research. Innovative, imaginative faculty teach in public universities
because the universities have acknowledged and encouraged the
connections between their research and their teaching will begin to
leave when their research is ignored or discouraged.
	Students are now concerned about the occasional loss of a good
teacher, but they would be even more disturbed to see how many
excellent teachers would leave if the support and encouragement for
research were to decline or disappear. The public universities would
survive, of course, like businesses survive when they repackage the
products of others. They would nevertheless cease to be the kind of
first-rate institutions that attract and retain those creative
researchers who also become creative teachers.
	Great teachers don't just provide information; they convey a
questioning, curious attitude toward the world; they challenge
students to find their own paths to truth; and they ultimately send
students on lifelong "research trips" that evolve in the most
unexpected directions.
	It's easy to move first-rate institutions from positions of
leadership and innovation into positions of mediocrity and stagnation
by squandering the human resources that produce new ideas. This
generalization applies to universities as well as to every other
social institution, and it carries a specific implication for people
who care about public universities: the commendable quest for better
teaching should never overlook or devalue the essential forms of
intellectual creativity that make it possible.

Lloyd Kramer is Associate Professor of History and Associate Director
of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill.