October 11, 2001-Vol33n6: FSEC discusses public service

FSEC discusses public service

By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor

The Faculty Senate Executive Committee has asked the senate's Public Service Committee to revisit the issue of how to evaluate public service as part of the promotion and tenure process.

The Public Service Committee, chaired by Robert Shibley, professor of architecture and director of the Urban Design Program, had asked for guidance from the FSEC at the body's Oct. 3 meeting on how the committee should proceed. Although public service is one of UB's missions, Shibley said that many faculty members are not willing to pursue such projects because they feel the university lacks methods to evaluate and offer rewards for such work.

Shibley defined public service as "a form of scholarship that includes the generation, transmission, application and preservation of knowledge for the direct benefit of other communities in ways that are consistent with an academic unit's missions."

Peter Nickerson, professor of pathology and past chair of the Faculty Senate, pointed out that there had been a statement broadening the definition of scholarship to include public service in a draft revision of the President's Review Board's policy governing evaluation of professional academic work. However, the section governing public service was "shot down" by the deans, Nickerson said.

Dennis Malone, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, said he understood that the primary reason for the dean's disapproval was because they didn't know how to evaluate what was significant public service and what was not.

"There are things that sound impressive, but are not," Malone said, adding that in order to be promoted to SUNY Distinguished Professor, candidates must show what impact their service work has had.

"I think the deans would be happier with that kind of statement," he said.

Shibley told FSEC members he wanted to play devil's advocate.

"Let me see if I've got this right: We do service learning as a vehicle for scholarship, we profess that scholarship in all the ways that scholarship should be professed, we recognize and reward it accordingly. Why do we need to do anything?" he asked.

"Service is one vehicle for this; the strict application of scientific method is another, etc., etc. What's the deal? The measure is the same measure we all use to assess quality scholarship, which of course, is a variety of measures."

William Baumer, professor of philosophy, said he would have a serious problem identifying a service-learning project in the classical humanities that would result in a publishable research article, and therefore, public service would be "separate and distinct" from a junior faculty member's regular teaching and research responsibilities.

"The net result is that the attitude in my department, which I have legally promoted along with my senior colleagues, is that you keep the junior faculty protected—you don't put them on committees…you don't expect them to get heavily involved," Baumer said. "You do expect them to get their courses down, to get their research programs going, to get their research done and to meet the hurdles for tenure."

If public service is made a requirement for promotion and tenure, there will be a "significant chunk of the faculty that will be very unhappy with it, that will not support it," he said.

Moreover, this same group of faculty members—because of their backgrounds—"have real difficulty understanding service learning and research, unless you can convert that to what we understand is the traditional product," such as scholarly articles, he said.

Shibley pointed out that he recently published an article on rethinking the Niagara Frontier that took an historical perspective on cross-border relationships. He called it "a solid piece of humanities scholarship and a distinctly important piece of service." The article, he said, was evaluated through traditional scholarship vehicles. The service aspect, he said, is "additional value added."

Charles Fourtner, professor of biological sciences, agreed with Baumer, noting that in the sciences, faculty colleagues play an extremely important role in promotion and tenure decisions.

There must be some evaluation mechanism that makes public service "important to the discipline," he said.

Accordingly, such a project would be worthwhile "as long as NSF or NIH supports it," he added.