Concerning Scholarly and Creative Activity

Faculty at Murray State University are evaluated each year in three categories:  teaching;  service (in the department, college, university, and community);  and scholarly and creative activity.

Murray State is a teaching university, so teaching always comes first, but professors are also expected to carry a sometimes heavy service load.  And as much as we disparage the use of the dreaded phrase “publish or perish” we are also expected to be involved in scholarly and creative activity, before and after tenure.

In his book “The Pleasures of Academe:  A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education,” my colleague and friend, Professor James Axtell, recently retired from the Department of History of the College of William and Mary, has included a chapter titled “Twenty-five Reasons to Publish.”  Axtell calls for “habitual scholarship” and he argues against what he believes to be a false dichotomy between scholarship and teaching.

For Axtell, “genuine scholarship has a vital role to play in the intellectual life of all institutions of higher education, particularly in research and doctoral universities and in liberal arts colleges and comprehensive universities that have collectively decided to raise the quality of their overall performance.”

As a regional, comprehensive university, Murray State continues to strive to raise the quality of our overall performance.  According to Axtell, scholarly and creative activity must be “an academic habit to be cultivated” because “the process of scholarship is important to the continuing vitality and integrity” of the institution.

I do not have the time or space to discuss all of Axtell’s “Twenty-five Reasons to Publish,” but I can mention a few of the most compelling.  While the teacher’s “status is exclusively local,” the teacher/scholar’s “may be national or international.”  The publishing teacher is able to extend the walls of the classroom to a much wider audience.  Axtell even argues that published books and articles “like progeny of a human sort, are a lease, however small, on immortality.”  Books “are not only tombstones that the authors get to script and carve themselves before death, they often survive well beyond death and remaindering.”  “The nonpublishing professor,” Axtell writes, “takes his hard-won and extensive knowledge to the grave.”

Active teacher/scholars are also able to enrich their teaching within the walls of their classrooms.  University faculty should be “convincing exemplars of the life of learning.”  According to Axtell, students “need to see, through living example, that education is a continuing process.”

While many students will soon forget the details and facts presented in a class, “few will forget the passion with which their professors approached the subject day after day or the inspiration they gave them to think the subject important and worth pursuing.”  To profess, and that is what professors actually do, “is to maintain a continuous search for new knowledge and to teach others not only what one has learned but how to do the research itself.”

For Axtell, “one fact that is always lost in the fractious turf fights between teaching and research is that publication of scholarship in books, articles, and other media is a form of teaching in itself.”  “A well-conceived, well-written, well-distributed book,” Axtell argues, “reaches and therefore teaches far more students than the author’s evanescent lectures will reach in a lifetime.”

Furthermore, “habitual scholarship is the healthiest, most efficient, and most academically acceptable way to prevent the burnout that threatens” every faculty member.

“To avoid mid-career plateauing and late-career depression,” Axtell writes, “professors should have scholarly projects that hold their interest and renew their enthusiasm for their subjects and disciplines.”

For the teacher who learns to practice “habitual scholarship” throughout a career, retirement can bring added joy.  When some professors retire, Axtell concludes, “they often find themselves at loose ends without an audience, the applause and responsiveness of a class, or the daily routine of teaching, however much they may have complained of the `rat race’ during the school year.”  “Habitual scholars, by contrast, make easier transitions because they always have their reading, research, and writing, which, if arteriosclerosis doesn’t set in prematurely, should be as, or better than, the work they produced on the job.”

After all, the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who lived to be 88, wrote more histories, “many of them superior to his earlier efforts,” after he retired from Harvard in 1955 than during the tenure of his long teaching career.

I know this column holds little solace for struggling faculty trying to find time to juggle heavy teaching, service, and research agendas, while at the same time having a fulfilling family and social life at home and in the community, but scholarly and creative activity is just part of what is means to be a university teacher.  As Pericles said, “to have acquired knowledge without the talent of imparting it is just as though one had never thought it.”