Kennedy: Where ideal
meets reality in
university life
BY ELAINE RAY
When President Emeritus
Donald Kennedy was a graduate student, he and his
counterparts envisioned the ideal university. Good Guy U.
would be free from hierarchical traditions, competition
and interdisciplinary scorn. Students would be
professors' highest priority and also would have a
significant role in institutional affairs. Faculty would
share ideas, equipment and credit with their students and
colleagues. When it came to resources and respect, GGU's
administration would be nothing short of evenhanded.
"In this bit of 1950s
fantasy, there are a few hints of what a reinvented
university ought to be like; and indeed, much has
happened since then to convert some of our youthful
imagination into institutional reality," Kennedy
writes in his new book, Academic Duty. "But
in some respects the changes have been meager and in
others they have moved in the wrong direction."
Related
Information:
It is the areas in which
universities have resisted change or have gone astray
that Kennedy seeks to lay out in his book, published by
Harvard University Press. Simply put, academic duty
refers to devotion to a university's primary educational
mission. But, Kennedy writes, institutional values have
changed and as a result, loyalties often become divided.
For instance, while
teaching remains at the core of an institution's primary
calling, research and technological innovation have
assumed increased importance. Often professors' own
scholarly work, not that of their students, absorbs much
of their time and intellect. According to Kennedy,
several factors have contributed to this decline in
attention to teaching. The overproduction of Ph.D.s
coupled with the elimination of mandatory retirement have
increased competition for the few treasured faculty slots
that are available.
"The advice that
newly appointed faculty members are most likely to
receive from either a department chair or a sympathetic
senior colleague is: 'Concentrate on your research and
forget the rest of that stuff until you're tenured,"
says Kennedy, now the Bing Professor of Environmental
Science.
In one of many
hypothetical scenarios, Kennedy compares the senior
professor at a medium-sized private liberal arts college
with his counterpart, a baby boomer. The elder professor
began his career in the 1960s, when expanding enrollments
and increased federal research support created growth in
faculty positions that averaged 7 percent a year. He has
never considered a job outside of higher education.
By contrast, his younger
colleague, a woman, enjoys teaching, but competition for
research funds is fierce, and academic and financial
demands are so high that she considers a job in private
industry. Although both individuals have enjoyed
successful careers, writes Kennedy, they have come
through the ranks in vastly different institutional
cultures one filled with optimism and one with
pessimism.
Institutions contribute to
that culture of pessimism, Kennedy says, by failing to
prepare doctoral students for what lies ahead. Faculty
members often need graduate students to support their
research programs, but by increasing the number of Ph.D.
candidates they contribute to these very students'
disillusionment. Once Ph.D.s graduate, many of them
become part of a new class of what Kennedy calls
"quasi-permanent" research scholars and
short-term "para-faculty" who may teach one
course at several institutions, but have limited
prospects of finding full-time tenured positions.
"Surely it is a part
of academic duty maybe even the central part to
prepare students realistically for productive and
rewarding lives," Kennedy writes. "If we cannot
do that realistically for our own doctoral students, we
have failed a basic obligation."
Kennedy offers several
other hypothetical scenarios to illustrate quandaries in
which universities and their faculties find themselves.
Those situations include cases of conflict of interest
that can arise between a scholar's academic research and
private consulting work; problems that surface when
professors fail to give due credit to colleagues or
students or when they give unwarranted credit; and the
problems that arise when scholars plagiarize the work of
others.
Among the real-life dramas
that Kennedy includes in the book, his assessment of the
indirect cost scandal will no doubt be closely read. The
controversy began in 1990 when Paul Biddle, a
representative from the Office of Naval Research, accused
the university of improper accounting practices regarding
federal research funds. Although the university was
ultimately vindicated, the publicity surrounding the
controversy was so damaging that Kennedy resigned his
presidency.
Kennedy describes how he
learned too late that the university had billed the
government for depreciation costs of a yacht that had
been donated to the athletic department and was slated to
be sold. He also described how during congressional
hearings on the matter, Stanford was accused of using
government funds to purchase such items as a $12,000 pair
of urns, a $1,600 shower curtain and a $1,200 Italian
fruitwood commode for Hoover House, the presidential
residence, a National Historic Landmark and the official
site of all official university entertaining.
In his defense, Kennedy
argues that there was no $1,600 shower curtain. That
item, he asserts was one minor item in a bill for a large
amount of upholstery and drapery work. The urns cost
$1,200 (the larger figure was a typo) and the fruitwood
commode was actually a cherry chest of drawers. All were
legitimate general administrative expenses, Kennedy
asserts.
"The political
climate in which the university had to sail for the next
months was thus established not by the major issues
surrounding indirect cost policy but by the carefully
crafted public impression that at Stanford we were living
high at public expense," writes Kennedy.
While Kennedy has no kind
words for Congressman John Dingell, chair of the
subcommittee that held hearings on the allegations, he
singles out the media for particular scorn. The news
program 20/20 created a hostile environment, he
said, when it reported on the most sensational aspects of
the controversy two weeks before the congressional
hearings. About the print media, including the New
York Times, he writes: "Once newspapers have
learned something, they can't unlearn it. It is as though
a computer virus lives in their word processors, seeking
out the name of a particular person or institution and
then attaching its own boiler-plate."
Kennedy writes that he
learned, the hard way, that universities cannot simply
count on public trust. They have to earn it. "We let
the important matter of how public research funds are
accounted for slip into a swamp of obscurity. By failing
in our duty to explain what we were doing and why, we
left ourselves open to a painful trial-by-media. Long
before there was any interest in indirect cost accounting
we should have recognized that the agreements between the
universities and the government were so arcane and so
private that they were bound to raise troubling
questions," he writes.
Overall, Academic Duty
provides a thoughtful examination of the modern research
university for the general reader. For those involved in
charting the course of these institutions, it can serve
as a cautiously optimistic guide for redefining higher
education's values.
"Having been given a
generous dose of academic freedom, we haven't taken care
of the other side of the bargain. The struggle about the
universities has little or nothing to do with Right or
Left, or with cultural relativism, or with race relations
or with any of the particular matters that earn us media
attention. It has to do with how we see our duty and how
our patrons and clients see it. If we can clarify our
perception of duty and gain public acceptance of it, we
will have fulfilled an important obligation to the
society that nurtures us. That obligation constitutes the
highest institutional form of academic duty,"
Kennedy writes. SR
|
