Universities 'On the Make' Emphasize Production Line of Scholarly Research

American education is sick, sick, sick. Everybody knows the symptoms: student ignorance and apathy, graduate incompetence and irresponsibility, and of course, public myopia, hedonism, avarice and crudity. There is not a single malaise of our time which has not been evoked to prove that educators are falling down on the job. The Academic Marketplace is among the more sensational diagnoses of this morbid condition.

Senior author Theodore Caplow is a sociologist at the University of Minnesoto, while Reece J. McGee is from the University of Texas. Their book is an analysis of employment policy in major American universities. Their "data" consists of interviews with the department chairman and another colleague of every professor who voluntarily or involuntarily vacated a chair in any one of nine large universities between July 1954 and July 1956. Their conclusion is that universities seek employees who will enhance their national prestige, which means employees whose publications will receive national attention.

If you regard a university as a factory, then it might build its reputation on either of its two products: alumni or research. In practice, producing alumni is a tricky and unrewarding business, for there is no practical method of evaluating a young alumnus, nor of telling whether his quality is produced in college or in some other manner. As a result, you must wait until the public notices that your alumni become rich and famous--usually a half century after you have raised the quality of education. Only a college which views its mission as eternal can depend upon such a large delayed reaction.

For the college on the make, the royal road to reputation is the research production line. If a university can beg, borrow, or steal a dozen scholars who then illuminate the academic horizon, it may rise from anonymity in a single decade. In part this is due to the comparative ease of evaluating scholarship as opposed to evaluating graduates, and in part it is due to the fact that academic reputations are national, whereas personal reputations of graduates are usually local.

The danger of hitching your reputation to scholarship is that once you build a research factory, you cannot readily convert your vast plan to the production of educated alumni. For if scholarship is to be anything, it must be cosmopolitan. The scholar must therefore speak to a national or international audience, not to the local parish. Such an audience naturally focusses his first loyalty in the universal "discipline," rather than on his employer, the local university. Moreover, his prestige with this national audience is primarily determined by what he himself produces, secondarily by what his departmental colleagues produce, and hardly at all by what his students produce, since they usually do so only after he is dead, and seldom credit him with their success. Under these circumstances, scholars tend to recruit colleagues who will enhance the immediate professional reputation of their department, rather than teachers who might, in the distant future, enhance the local reputation of the college, to which the recruiter has only a secondary allegiance.

This research syndrome has certain rather ridiculous facets. Professor X, for example, is "in" Chaucer. He has published several articles on the text, and has succeeded in exposing two punctuation errors in the Robinson edition. He seeks a job in State U. where old Professor Y, the incumbent Chaucerian, has just died. Now Professor X, having heard through a friend that the position is open, and having discreetly let it be known that he is interested, gets a request for copies of his articles. He dutifully sends them to the department chairman, on whose desk they sit unread, until the appointment is made. Meanwhile, the department chairman is inquiring among his friends at X's university about the young man's research "promise." Will he be "productive?"

At first glance, this is rather strange, since evidence about the quality of X's scholarship is on his desk. The problem is that the chairman has neither the competence nor the interest to evaluate X's articles. Indeed, if anyone on the faculty were acquainted with X's work, the field would be "covered," and X would be superfluous.

In one sense, the whole spectacle is absurd. If you view education as a human rather than an institutional enterprise, then it hardly matters where X is, so long as he is happy and gets along passably with his colleagues. No matter where he is, he will be able to promote scholarship by publishing articles on Chaucer and to promote education by unfolding the Canterbury tales to a few interested students.

Viewed in this light, the findings of The Academic Marketplace are important only to Deans and Department Chairmen who are trying to improve their recruiting system. But perhaps the matter is more serious. Perhaps recruiting policy is so inefficient and inscrutable that it demoralizes young scholars, or keeps them from entering the profession. Perhaps the emphasis on research is such that these men slight their teaching and come to regard the production of educated men as impossible or irrelevant. Perhaps the emphasis on prestige accounts for the mountains of trivia which annually emanates from the pens of intelligent and humane men.

In order to test these hypotheses, however, we would have to interview scholars who had been recently hired or fired to see how recruiting policy effected their habits. Everyone knows, for example, that big universities do not promote men simply because they are good teachers. But there is no objective evidence that this has subverted the quality of university teaching. It is possible that the personal challenge of facing a room full of live students forces a professor to teach as well as he knows how, and that more tangible incentives such as promotion would be superfluous and ineffective.

Unfortunately, Caplow and McGee did not interview anyone who was actually looking for a job, so they can tell us nothing about the impact of recruiting policy on the educational process. As the book stands, it leaves us with the completely unjustifiable impression that academic life is a perpetual struggle for prestige. Yet it would be equally logical to suppose that because public opinion polls show that men choose their lawyers by inquiring among friends, lawyers are therefore consumed by an insatiable lust for popularity