Selections from Re-envisioning Scholarship at BMCC: Contributions from Aldo Fabian Balardini, Keridiana Chez, Kirsten Cole, Elizabeth Whitney, Owen Roberts, Jamal Ali, Stefanos Milkidis, Tudor Protopopescu and Laurie Lomask

Facilitated by Jean Amaral, Library

Recently, several faculty members were able to participate in a faculty fellows program called Re-envisioning Scholarship. The goal of the program is a conversation about what we as faculty believe should be considered scholarship, including what counts in tenure and promotion. 

Through a series of guided exercises, coached jamboard sessions, and conversations with BMCC faculty, we arrived at some interesting conclusions regarding our values and how we see scholarship developing to better fit the demands of the future.  

The editors have selected a few of the conversations shared as reflections after the summer experience. These entries are representative of the types of conversations we had, and so we have reproduced them here. We hope you will find these words food for thought when considering the ramifications of leadership when advocating for those coming up the path toward tenure, or for when you are in the midst of your own tenure process.  

Aldo Fabian Balardini
Social Sciences, Human Services and Criminal Justice

What is your vision for scholarship at BMCC and what counts in tenure and promotion?
I would like to propose a change to one of the requirements for promotion. Currently, we are required to have at least three peer-reviewed articles published in an academic journal in order to get promoted. Although I highly value research and publishing, the amount of time required in the process of publishing a single article is a luxury that unfortunately most of us don’t have given the workload between teaching full time and doing all the administrative work (college service) that is asked of us. I’m proposing that instead of requiring the publishing of three articles, which is something that is almost impossible to achieve, professors are recognized for the time spent working and mentoring students through an Honors Contract. I have worked with two students in the Honors Contract in the past and I consider these mentoring experiences to be among the most rewarding experiences that I had in my 14 years here at BMCC. For students this is also an extremely valuable experience where they learn to do research, write an academic paper, and learn presentation skills (including learning PowerPoint) as they are required to defend their paper in front of a committee. The educational value for both professors and students that results by engaging in an Honors Contract is much higher than the personal value that a professor obtains from publishing an article in an academic journal. I propose that every successfully completed Honors Contract count as two peer-reviewed articles published in an academic paper. Instead of requiring three peer-reviewed articles published in an academic journal, the new requirement would be one peer-reviewed article in an academic paper and one successfully completed Honors Contract.

Keridiana Chez
English Department

I had come into the sessions thinking fairly narrowly about scholarship: what you’d expect, books, papers, and talks. I was thinking about how, more than ever with the climate crisis, any expectation of annual conferences as some sort of measure of scholars seems supremely wasteful and, well, in defiance of scientific scholarship itself. (I don’t want to hold it against those who truly find tremendous value in conferencing, and anyone continuing should get credit for it, but I do not see the value in requiring one per calendar year.) I was thinking of whether BMCC has thought to update their expectations for publication given changes in the academic publishing industry. I still think these are things worth talking about.

Our January workshops expanded my conception of scholarship in some ways and I really valued the conversations. It was lovely to talk about sincerity and holistic assessment. In the cold light of February looking back, I confess it feels utopian and fantastical to consider what we did.

I also think about how much standards and cultures seem to vary from department to department, discipline to discipline. We talked about valuing teaching and mentoring by counting it as “scholarship,” for example, and I think I was a bit surprised. Teaching and mentoring are already counted for tenure and promotion pretty heavily in my department. I’ve been told that we are to fill a variety of “buckets,” and teaching has always been a big bucket, along with the publications and talks bucket, the department service bucket, and the college service bucket (might be blanking on a bucket). If some departments do not value teaching much at all, that should definitely be reconsidered.

Kirsten Cole
Teacher Education

What values are embodied in your scholarship?
As I work in the field of early childhood education, it is very important to me that my scholarship offers concrete insights and actions that are meaningful for the people most impacted by issues in our field: young children, families, and early childhood educators. The audience I envision for my research are current and future early childhood teachers, and I strive to make my work accessible and applicable. While my scholarship addresses complex issues (e.g. supporting young children’s healthy racial and gender identity development) it is important to me that when I write and speak about my research that I do so in language that is clear and not unnecessarily abstruse or overly academic. I seek opportunities to publish and present at conferences where the primary audience is early childhood educators. These kind of journals and conferences are not necessarily considered to have a high “impact factor” or high status, but I have appreciated that my contributions to these conversations have been recognized as sufficient for tenure and promotion at BMCC.

Additionally I have engaged in scholarship that explores pedagogical issues in working with adult learners. In this realm too, it is most important that my research offer meaningful contributions to teaching practices, particularly through practicing anti-racist pedagogy in our higher education classrooms. As I share this work, again, my primary goal is to reach colleagues who will be able to put these ideas into practice, regardless where or how my work is distributed. If, for example, my co-researchers and I have the opportunity to contribute to a book chapter rather than a peer reviewed academic journal, I would hope these scholarly contributions will be valued by BMCC.

What is your vision for scholarship at BMCC and what counts in tenure and promotion?
My vision for scholarship and what counts in tenure and promotion at BMCC would include that we do a better job of recognizing that the labor of service to the college community is often unevenly distributed across the faculty. There are often higher investments in terms of time and energy made by faculty of color, women, and junior faculty, service that faculty are often “voluntold” that they need to participate in. This means that those same faculty have less time and energy to complete the kinds of scholarly pursuits that are more highly valued in academia e.g. publishing and presenting. This issue is endemic in higher education and the wider world, but it would be powerful for BMCC to re-envision a response to this chronic issue of inequity.

Additionally, many BMCC scholars have deep ties in the CUNY community. Many of us completed doctoral studies at the Graduate Center and engage in collaborations with colleagues across our many campuses. The requirement that the majority of our letters of reference for tenure and promotion need to come from institutions outside of CUNY does not adequately recognize and honor this reality. CUNY is a large, multi-campus institution and we have done great work to build opportunities for scholarly collaboration across the CUNY campuses (e.g. the BRESI initiative.) Why should a scholar whose primary collaborations have been with other CUNY faculty be penalized in the tenure and promotion process? Travel to conferences to network with scholars beyond CUNY is costly in terms of time and money, so this requirement seems like an unfair penalty on faculty who do not have the opportunity to build scholarly relationships beyond CUNY.

What do you think we (faculty at BMCC) can work on related to reenvisioning scholarship?
I would like for us to do a more consistent job of mentoring new faculty and supporting their scholarship. I think we all come to the college with a wide range of pre-existing levels of support for our research and other scholarly and creative pursuits. The process of finding an audience for our work is often mystifying. Additionally the traditional structures of academia operate on a model of scarcity and competition, but it does not need to be that way. My dream for BMCC would be that we could come to a collective understanding that we are an interdependent community of scholars. I would love to see more active sharing of access to grants and participation in research, as well as presentation and publication opportunities. I would also like to see us think outside the narrow traditional boundaries of what counts as scholarship to include engagement with social justice activism and producing popular media (e.g. podcasting, etc.) as valued contributions to the construction and dissemination of knowledge.

Elizabeth Whitney
Speech Communication and Theater Arts

I came to academia through the field of Performance Studies, where the emphasis is on a balance between theory and practice. My scholarship has included creative forms that emphasize documentation and process, such as digital storytelling, lecture performance, and autoethnography. I value creativity, reflexivity, and interdisciplinarity in my scholarship, and these are usually also values that draw me to scholarship by other academics and artists.

We need clearer objectives for what scholarship is needed for tenure and promotion at BMCC. At present, it is not clear how many and what kind of research-based products are required. A set of guidelines (and this should also be the case for service, because that is equally unclear) should be outlined for faculty seeking tenure and promotion.

I would like this group to work on suggested guidelines for tenure and promotion. I do think that BMCC administration needs to be involved in this process, to ensure that the work we do will be taken seriously and implemented.

Owen Roberts
Media Arts and Technology

My department is made of people who work in varied mediums, including design, web development, animation, art, film, documentary, television and others. While it’s exciting to be around people working in different ways, it adds a challenge to discussing the way our work contributes to tenure and promotion, and there’s an ambiguity that is kind of double-edged: it creates more flexibility than it seems may exist in other departments, but it can also feel unclear what aspects of our creative work will count.

I’ve changed my creative output a bit toward works that can more easily fit into categories with recognizable achievements, for example, animations that screen at film festivals. Other, more experimental and interactive work that I’m interested in making, like art games, don’t always fit into competitive or juried platforms. This isn’t always bad. I like making animation. But I wonder how the real and/or perceived requirements for tenure and promotion affect the choices we make, consciously and unconsciously, as scholars and creatives. Is that pressure useful in some ways? Or would my work grow in more unpredictable and potentially novel ways freed from those concerns?

Jamal Ali
Science

It was fascinating for me to think in the workshop about what kinds of activities can be considered scholarship, apart from articles in peer-reviewed journals. I define scholarship as the intellectual effort and planning that expands student knowledge and college performance. This can be done through many ranges of activities; such as conducting advanced research, students participating in the research, writing articles in all types of journals or newspapers, writing a book or part of it, presenting at conferences, and engaging in professional development activities. For tenure and promotion, BMCC needs to clarify what scholarship is required. It also needs to expand on what is accepted as scholarship. By doing this, faculty can explore their talents based on what they have, rather than being limited to a limited number of options. As a matter of fact, I am for more diverse forms of scholarship to be counted towards tenure or promotion.

Stefanos Milkidis
Social Sciences, Human Services and Criminal Justice

What the workshop made me realize is that scholarship could (and should) be about community and solidarity, collegiality and an ethics of care for each other regardless of any rank distinction between full-time/tenured and part-time faculty. This constellation of values, while manifest in a social justice sense within my research and scholarship, could thus find new avenues of expression (through initiatives like this workshop, for example) that allow us to exchange opinions, but primarily express our own voice, thoughts, concerns and/or collective action plans from our own scholarly positionality for the purpose of bringing about change to the corporate/bureaucratic aspects of academia.

These values can then be translated to a vision that I have not just for BMCC, but also the other colleges within the CUNY system. In short, tenure and promotion should become part of a process that is first and foremost personal, flexible, and contextualized within a larger record of knowledge sharing, community engagement, experience, and/or activism, and not just through a monolithic path of a checklist requirements.

In this respect, BMCC faculty, and CUNY at large, could reenvision scholarship in a sense that is based primarily on community, building bridges of collaboration between faculty regardless of rank, through collective action and concrete proposals that would aim to recreate our institution and beyond. I know this may seem idealistic or utopic even, but it is the whole point of reenvisioning scholarship, to make vision a reality one day – or as close to reality as possible.

Tudor Protopopescu
Academic Literacy and Linguistics

In my ideal world all language and concepts, implicitly or explicitly, relating to “production” and “assessment,” “accountability,” and all of their industrial-capitalist cognates, would have no place in discussions related to the life of the mind, and so no place in discussions concerning scholarship or tenure and promotion. For me, scholarship aims at understanding; it is the rigorous, committed pursuit of understanding for its own sake, because understanding is intrinsically valuable and rewarding. Understanding is intrinsically valuable because it is part of how people go about realizing their autonomy, their personhood, and people are intrinsically valuable. As such not only can scholarship not be measured with the panoply of quantitative “accounting” approaches used by administrators, but to do so perverts what it tries to measure. The concern, indeed fear, over ‘being productive’ as measured by number, and maybe prestige, of publications, citations etc. has transformed scholarship from the pursuit of understanding, to the generation of publications for tenure and promotion (and if it happens to be interesting, enlightening, or satisfying to you or anyone else that is a nice bonus). This is an example of what James C. Scott calls a “measure colonizing behavior” (“Two Cheers for Anarchism,” p. 118). My experience as a graduate student and tenure-track faculty has been that the first priority of any scholarship activity is its publishability and how it weighs in the balance of effort and time needed vs the pay-off in terms of getting or keeping a job. I know several people who long to work on projects (and not just research in the usual sense) that they are putting off because they will not count or are too risky for the tenure-industrial-complex. I think that is immoral. So, to be honest, my vision for BMCC would be to junk entirely the way in which tenure and promotion is assessed. Our goal, as scholars, as a community of scholars, should be to increase understanding, in our students and in ourselves, because it is good in itself, and it is against this that we should be judged. Yes, that is vague, fraught, unquantifiable, “unaccountable,” unrealistic, naive etc., but given the damage brought about by the business-oriented administration of education I doubt it would be worse than what we are doing now.

More down to earth, one thing we can do immediately is to begin insisting on quality over quantity whenever we are in a position to judge other people’s scholarship. I’m sure we can all cite examples of scholars who produced little but very influential work; work that really contributed to understanding in some way. “Some things in life, like music, resist all attempts at greater efficiency. While we can produce coffee machines ever faster and more cheaply, a violinist can’t pick up the pace without spoiling the tune” (Bregman, “Utopia for Realists,” p. 119). We can insist, and make the case whenever we have the opportunity, that scholarship is not a coffee machine, and we will all be better off if we stopped treating it like one

Laurie Lomask
Modern Languages

I would like to see more community-oriented work be considered and appreciated as scholarship. To begin with, conferences, festivals, and encounters for conversation and exchange should be regarded as highly as publication. Furthermore, things like participation and/or organization of events in dance, film, and art must enter. Research on the body and on extant communities often leaves no trace. The forced attempt to extract a publication out of these lived experiences puts us in the difficult position of appropriating peoples’ livelihoods and culture. Sometimes being in a supporting role is the most valuable contribution we can make, and I wish these less salient research efforts got more acknowledgement. Not just “slow scholarship,” but also “quiet scholarship.”

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