Service

One last time to Webster’s

Service; contribution to the welfare of others.

Service is the third responsibility of tenured and tenure-track faculty members – in addition to the teaching and creative/scholarly research functions that I addressed in previous blogs. The relative amount of time, reflected in the distribution of a UAHuntsville professor’s state salary, that should be spent in academic service (servitude?) is 20%. This 20% is in addition to the 60% expected for teaching and 20% for research.

So what constitutes academic service? What fills up this 20% of a professor’s time? As we saw, ‘research’ means different things in different arms of the university and there are also many ways to teach students beyond the classroom experience. Likewise, service can take on many different forms and different academic disciplines demand different kinds of service.

In the broadest sense, service often means simply contributing to the day-to-day operation of Academic Affairs, the heart of the teaching mission of the university. Such operations may include serving on faculty and administrative committees, overseeing crucial aspects of our educational mission such as curriculum changes, tenure and promotion, search committees for new faculty and many more. At the administrative level there are key committees like the Faculty Senate, Deans’ Councils, strategic-planning committees, etc. Many of these committees ensure that faculty members play a key role, partnering with the Provost and Deans, in the running of Academic Affairs. Service within a department can mean working with students beyond traditional teaching and academic advising – perhaps being involved with student professional organizations, helping students to raise funds for extra-curricular activities, organizing study-abroad programs, helping with student research, or community outreach.

But service can mean more than being on multiple department/college/university committees (although committees do seem to proliferate in universities more than in many other organizations).

Beyond the university boundaries, many UAHuntsville faculty are active at the local, regional or (inter)national level, for example, acting as directors or leaders of professional societies, organizing conferences, testifying in their area of scholarly expertise before the state or federal legislatures, helping federal and other funding agencies by reviewing proposals or developing new research programs, reviewing or editing books or other creative endeavors, on the editorial board of professional journals or book publishers, or being the editor of an academic journal or book. In fact, the list of service opportunities is as varied as the list of organizations that impinge on the education of students at all levels from bachelor’s degrees to beyond the doctorate.

So why is such ‘Service’ expressly required of professors? Why don’t they just teach and do their research? Part of the reason for this requirement is that the academic enterprise as a whole depends on the collective wisdom of its constituents. This cooperation happens because of the extraordinary openness with which professors exchange their intellectual opinions and share their new ideas. By contrast, in many (particularly industrial) organizations, new ideas or processes are hidden and not discussed until they can be registered as a trademark, or patented to prevent others from taking undue advantage of someone else’s intellectual property.

In academe, intellectual property is usually exchanged freely. The moment professors come up with a new scholarly idea, scientific hypothesis, creative concept, method of teaching, way of communicating knowledge, assessment of current knowledge, they tend to share it across the boundaries of departments and colleges and present it to their whole academic discipline at conferences or through publications.

This need to share new intellectual property reflects the fact that professors tend to become more specialized in their expertise as they grow in their positions and are, therefore, seldom generalists. So when it comes to the good of the university or the professional academic community it is essential to solicit the input and ideas of a broad spectrum of specialist faculty scholars. For example, a curriculum is not a single professor’s responsibility, a PhD committee gathers experts from several related fields to set standards and measure the student’s progress, a professional journal receives manuscripts covering many different areas in a particular discipline and, while an individual editor may be well informed in many areas, she is rarely skilled enough to make publication decisions without seeking reviews from colleagues with complementary backgrounds.

So, the next time your professor is not in the classroom or the office or the lab, he may well be in a committee meeting on campus or reviewing a book on a plane to Washington to visit a federal agency, or testifying before congress, or organizing a conference in Milwaukee (yes we have them there too). The experience that comes from such service to the university, the community, the nation and the many professional societies in the world, is all part of the continuing education of professors, giving them insights that they cannot get from other, more standard, scholarly and pedagogical pursuits. Then they can bring that new knowledge into their classroom, to their advisees, their research students and their faculty colleagues.

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