What is > Academic Work < ?
No - seriously - what IS academic work ?
A few years ago, I would have idealistically answered with something about Scholarship - and then set out to explain Scholarship. Scholarship - based on the Modernity of the Enlightenment and 1000 + years of the western University with multicultural ambitions in a global marketplace today. I have been a pragmatic idealist for a long time when it comes to my own understanding of Scholarship and the Academy in which I work. I like to believe that scholarship can be addressed or encompassed by looking at research, methods and a form of output (publishing?); but, still, often wonder - how can I share this with any/many of my students in teaching them?
While I always try to simplify what Scholarship means for an undergraduate population - I feel continuously undermined by an industrial situation that wants to reduce ALL scholarship to some kind of measurable industrial output. Even my undergraduate students at a large public University see through the templates and formula of academia and its portrayal of Scholarship. If our only common goal is to see that they have remunerative employment - where do we leave the other facets of education? How do we understand historical and cultural context, the evolution/development of ideas, and/or a critical understanding of power in society?
In the meantime, various so-called Stakeholders: from students and parents all the way up to and including President Obama (and his Secretary of Education = Arne Duncan) and the billionaire Bill Gates (who dropped out of a very prestigious University), have had increasing feedback on subjects of Academia. Of course, teachers, instructors, lecturers and Professors should also have some input on the subject - and most of us believe we KNOW it all too well. We certainly all have opinions on the subject, which are also reflected by administrators at ALL levels, as well as the politicians of various stripes who distribute, limit and evaluate funding. Then there is the media and shaping of attitudes towards Academia. But, still we have not said anything about what is academic work or who is the academic worker?
Organizational Communication does recognize Academic Organizing as one of the many subsets of its discipline to investigate the world of work and the world of organizing vis-a-vis academical organizations (including both public and private schools, colleges, universities, and unions, etc) and a wide variety of various academic theories of organizing (hierarchical, hr/hr, systems, cultural, critical, etc) to help explain our workplaces. Then - there are all of the multiplicities of schools that teach aspects of academia in all of its widely varied forms of scholarship: teaching and training of teachers, instructors, administrators, etc. Circles within circles within circles. More importantly, as any number of Deans, especially those from Colleges of Education, and teachers and administrators have pointed out to me - EVERYONE has opinions about education because we have all been its subjects. We have experienced some form of education - almost everyone has been a Student on a multiplicity of levels, and some of us actually do function as Teachers (or instructors or trainers or professors).
But few of these investigations actually address the idea of what is academic work and how it is organized. Furthermore, how could it be organized to address the loftiest standards and goals of education and scholarship? If we abdicate the responsibilities of critical scholarship, we will default to the templates and implications of industrial models of academic organizing and academic work. Not only does this leave the assessment and evaluation of academic workers to ever increasing quantitative standards (e.g. digital databases, formulaic weighting of CV's, numbers of journal articles and quantitative weighting of the standards for those journals, etc), but students really do not have any value outside of consumers intended to become the most productive efficient workers in whatever field they are slated to enter in an industrial world. This, of necessity, would include those students who themselves intend to become academic workers. What do they have to look forward to and what impact will they have on the academy? And, just as importantly, should they have a voice in these processes?
This blog is an INVITATION to those who help me shape my attitudes towards Academic Work. From students to co-workers, to professors and scholars at various levels - I hope to elicit a number of posts and/or short or long essays that can help us all to establish a better idea of Academic Work. These posts may be personal musings, thoughts, researched scholarship or reviews of others' works. After all, Academic Work is central to those of us whose lives center around the academy as students, teachers and scholars. I also invite these same scholars to comment on each other's posts (and mine!) and to go off on their own tangents. Yes, for now, I am targeting my own social network circles to help me develop this blog. If you are interested in becoming a part of the ongoing work (or know someone else who is), please contact me at mhmbear.prof@gmail.com. I look forward to the reading and the writing ! Let the games begin.
