In Defence of the Diversity of Faculty Talents (CPP RPS 60/2013)

Abstract

We would like to introduce this article with a delicious quotation from a piece by Ronald Barnett, emeritus professor of higher education at the Institute of Education (IOE) of the University of London, one of the most recognized British educational scholars. In his article Being an Academic in a Time-Impoverished Age Barnett picturesquely describes the time constraints experienced by contemporary academics: “Today’s academic moves in multiple time frames… There is a class to teach… still some preparation was undertaken the previous evening... in our academic’s mind, too, are insistent thoughts about the deadline in a fortnight’s time by which a research proposal has to be submitted… Prior to that is a further deadline in the next week by which some thoughts on the departmental learning and teaching strategy will have to be put down on paper… Put to one side and half forgotten is a proforma to all staff requiring that an assessment be made under more than twenty categories of activity as to how our academic has spent her time during the past time. In addition, our academic is working on a paper for submission to a journal and has committed herself to submitting it in two months’ time… Over a much longer time frame still, our academic harbours thoughts of… a sabbatical term in the Antipodes to help to frame that agenda” (Barnett 2008: 7-8). This quotation transfer us to the very heart of the current debate on what activities of the professoriate should be most highly prized, namely the issue of the faulty time (Boyer 1990: XI). Different obligations described by Barnett generally fall within one of three categories of faculty activities: research, teaching, or – the most unwelcomed - administrative burdens. But the abovementioned activities by no means exhaust the list of duties conducted by the members of a contemporary faculty. Counselling and advising students or service to the public can be mentioned as additional ones between many others. In this article we undertake the problem of the broad range of faculty activities and the issue of the contestable measures of their evaluation within the institutional framework of a university, which can be summarized by two questions: What it means to be a scholar at the beginning of the twenty first century? What is the meaning of scholarship itself? (Boyer 1990: XII, 1)