Thinking back to our January workshop facilitated by HuMetricsHHS . . . Consider:
- What values are embodied in your scholarship?
- What is your vision for scholarship at BMCC and what counts in tenure and promotion?
- What do you think we (faculty at BMCC) can work on related to reenvisioning scholarship?
Share your thoughts and ideas in a comment below. (Note: Your comment may not appear immediately, as it may need to be approved.)
Resources and readings previously shared:
- HuMetrics Values Framework
- HuMetrics Values Sorter
- For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University (Library login with CUNY credentials)
- Reflection on “For Slow Scholarship” by RaShelle Peck
21 thoughts on “Reflecting on Values and More”
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 obtain 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.
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.
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.
I left the sessions thinking a lot about the HuMetrics reading, specifically 3) Collegiality and 5) Community. I thought about the meanings of these two in academia directly related to our workspace (departments and college-wide) because, in addition to publishing and service, I believe these two are also directly related to tenure and promotion. And, these two can make the process either more nerve-racking than it already is or help us build confidence in the process. I have noticed from others’ experience on a national level how many times tenure and promotion are not contingent on accomplishments and merit but on the relations you build. And this in my opinion adds to the stress of the process.
Second, I would like to echo Aldo’s comment above in relation to the requirements of tenure and promotion and other work that could be considered for the tenure profile. I think that (not necessarily peer-reviewed) digital publications in accredited platforms and/or institutions may be considered for tenure and promotion. For example, I have collaborated with the New York City Department of Education, and while I know that the work may have a positive impact on my profile, all of the research and writing that I have done for their publications is not considered a publication.
Finally, I would like to close with a quote from Prof. Peck’s article for the CTLS Blog, “Slowness in Academia: Reflections on Writing and Time,” where she ends her op-ed with “Joy will be found digging into the soil of my garden and grabbing a paintbrush.” This is how I have managed to survive and not drive myself mad. I have looked deeply for small joys that I include in my routine. However, while this has helped, this only evolved out of the need caused by the anxiety produced by the demands of my job. And, I’ve asked myself why should I be forced to find joy in small things and not just have it.
I think we can work on better supporting early career researchers, and all researchers at BMCC’s travel needs. The work to become a part of a scholarly community is extremely important, for advancing research, and keeping a teacher’s scholarship fresh so that the classroom imparts the most up to date findings in their field to students. The best way to figure out what matters to a group of scholars, and to parse what matters to you as a scholar over an against the conversations going on in your area, is to travel to the professional gatherings in your discipline or field of specialization. The expectation to publish to earn tenure and promotion is very difficult to achieve without adequate funding for travel. As a young scholar, I did not have mentors, and did not understand how publishing works. I went to a few conferences in my discipline, and began to have an idea. Then I learned how to apply to present in specialized cross disciplinary conferences, and met editors and editorial board members for the journals I read the most often and figured out how to approach them to propose my work for publication. Eventually, scholars started reaching out to me, to include my work in their edited volume or their special issue of a journal. All of this was made possible by the effort it takes to travel to the professional gatherings, wherever they may be, even Europe and Asia. Well I didn’t go to the international gathering of my main conference when it was in Singapore. Our travel funding simply does not allow for such a trip. Subsequently, I was stung the next year, when I heard well-meaning fellow scholars, who were ignorant of our travel funding situation at BMCC, commenting that the conference the previous year revealed who was the ‘core group,’ the most ‘dedicated scholars.’ I did not lack in dedication! I was becoming part of the inner circle in several of the topics they were discussing. But I could not attend because we lack adequate funding to travel more than once a year; are discouraged from traveling outside of the United States; and are closely policed regarding our travel dates (e.g. we have to leave no more than one day before the conference starts, and depart from the conference location the day it ends), which obviates opportunities for organic co-authoring opportunities to arise, or for post conference networking. Travel has been a key part of my ability to publish the peer reviewed journal papers, and books that are a stepping stone to tenure. In addition, these publications were part of the CV that enabled me to be part of a team that applied for and was awarded and NSF grant, which as senior faculty is an expected contribution to the BMCC community, now that other forms of advancement are finished (e.g. I am a full, tenured professor). If we are to keep these criteria for advancement, then we need to properly fund scholarly travel at BMCC.
I see from reading posts here, that some of my fellow BMCC participants are not able to travel, and I think that in this case, the idea that there could be several tracks to promotion and tenure makes sense. The research track would maintain the ‘traditional’ criteria of presentation and publication; a service/ teaching track could place more emphasis on service and teaching accomplishments, such as teaching awards, or the number of honors projects mentored, or new courses created, or new programs initiated. Given the teaching culture at BMCC, dividing up the tracks makes a lot of sense, and could help BMCC retain some very strong members of the community who make a tremendous contribution to the college, and so may not have the time to travel, or write to publish, since they are so deeply dedicated to governance, which demands a great deal of time and energy outside of teaching.
I think a ‘public intellectual’ track might also be useful, insofar as some scholar/teachers at BMCC as dedicated to activism, public intellectual debate, and public service. It might be possible to offer this track to promotion as well, in terms of a public impact measure that could replace counting journal articles published or the number of students mentored, etc. These are important issues to think about and discuss further. I am grateful for this opportunity, and have learned a great deal from what my colleagues have posted here.
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 for 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.
What struck me most in the workshop was thinking about what kinds of activity, aside from articles in peer-reviewed journals, can be considered scholarship. For example, when I create works and activities for my students, that can be seen as a form of scholarship, because I use my expertise and experience as an academic to create and modify these works. For example, the textbook/website OER that I wrote and continue to revise for my students, is certainly a form of scholarship, and of great benefit to my students.
Service to the community, and activism in the community, can also be seen as a form of scholarship. It is of much more benefit to our community than a paper that only a few will read!
What the workshop leaders said that really struck home for me was that we are only valuing things that are easy to measure, rather than things that are part of our real core values.
My department (Media Arts and Technology) 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, there’s an ambiguity that is kind of double edged, it creates some more flexibility than it seems may exist in other departments, but it can also feel unclear what aspects of my creative work will ultimately 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 screens at film festivals. Other, more experimental and interactive work that I’m interested in making, like art games for mobile phones, 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 it my work grow in more unpredictable and exciting ways without those concerns?
I had to choose a primary value for scholarship, it would the idea of contribution. I feel strongly that my primary contributions in my own scholarship and creative work are discovery and synthesis. Whenever I think about re-envisioning service, teaching, and publication, my question is what has been contributed to the college and the discipline. I think that because the college is so big, we tend to evaluate ourselves through checked boxes (how many conferences? how many publications? how many committees?) rather than really considering the contribution that we have made.
One of the main values that drive my idea of scholarship is integrity. For me, this means both the quality of my scholarly output, but also the way my scholarly activities are conducted. I believe in transparency, sense of justice, and practical value of scholarship. Very often, at least in philosophy, we can’t articulate the reasons why we conduct scholarly research (beyond our needs for promotion and advancement). But, as I developed as a philosopher and a member of the CUNY community, I came to appreciate the communal value of scholarship. Now, whenever I set out to work on a paper, I ask myself ‘Why am I doing this? Who will benefit from this? Does it have value for someone else except me?’
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 range 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.
Similarly to Keridiana’s response above, I had a narrow idea of scholarship, both as a personal preoccupation and as a broader concept, that primarily relates to my research interests and sharing my findings/arguments of research through conferences, seminars, and publications.
The workshop instead made me think of scholarship through a wider framework of values about power and knowledge relations within our school system. The power dimensions of the neoliberal university – as contextualized within the given article suggesting a feminist politics of resistance through collective action – is terrifying to me as a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, and an adjunct instructor in the CUNY system. It is a reality that I deal with every day through my current position in academia.
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.
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 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 persons go about realising their autonomy, their personhood, and persons 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 another example of what James C. Scott calls a “measure colonizing behaviour” (Two Cheers for Anarchism, pg 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 it 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 that that we should be judged. Yes, that is vague, fraught, unquantifiable, “unaccountable”, unrealistic, naive, but I figure someone needs to say it; and given the damage brought about by the business 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.
What values are embodied in your scholarship?
As a business law instructor, my scholarship often straddles a variety of different disciplines. At its core, I like to think that the values embodied in my scholarship include anti-racism, integrity, equity, and advocacy. Through our group discussions, I found it interesting that in many cases values such as pushing boundaries, intellectual freedom and quality were tempered by institutional expectations and pressures. Currently review, promotion and tenure affect how faculty direct their scholarship, taking away much of the intellectual freedom for faculty to choose their subjects and be creative.
What is your vision for scholarship at BMCC and what counts in tenure and promotion?
My vision for scholarship and what counts as tenure and promotion includes:
–Increasing clarity and transparency regarding the process and requirements. I have noticed that there are not only differences between departments, but also differences with respect to expectations within departments.
–Taking steps to ensure that the evaluation of faculty scholarly contributions keep pace with the rapid evolution of communications and technology
–Taking action to effect changes to acadmia which currently provides a lack of opportunities for community college publications. This is further exacerbated by gender, race, ethinicity and economics. If you don’t have the money to submit your work to multiple journals, your chances of being published are substantially reduced.
–Recognizing, acknowledging and seeking to address the role of racialized power–structural and systemic racism is embedded in the process
–Increasing access to grant and other opportunities is great, but there is also a need to be provided more time to pursue these opportunities
The values in my scholarship have been the same since I started graduate school. I want my research to influence policy for the purpose of social justice specifically regarding children and families who have been marginalized. In addition I am interested in innovative methods that challenge assumptions in psychology and directly counter deficit models of children and families that are still the dominant methods of research in psychology and education today
I would like community college faculty to become the main source of research on community college populations and institutions. I would like to see robust support for CC faculty so that we can develop innovative, meaningful methods to study the complex factors that are relevant to understanding community colleges. I would like more support for CC student research as well.
I think we have to collaborate including interdisciplinarily and we also have to advocate very hard for our own research to be supported and to be the main sources of evidence for policy. Right now the college hires research teams and looks to research groups outside of our faculty for insight that many of us have already published. It would be great if this could somehow be included in contract negotiations as a matter of working conditions. We need all of CUNY to listen to the work and experiences of its CC faculty And students. Telling the stories of our students through research should become a major component of our values work at CCs.
What values are embodied in your scholarship?
I approach my scholarship as contributing to the existing body of knowledge of my field (art history).
What is your vision for scholarship at BMCC and what counts in tenure and promotion?
I think I’ve been inculcated regarding what’s acceptable for tenure and promotion that it is hard to think of anything outside my field of study as possible contribution that should also be recognized as scholarship. For example, ice an interest in pedagogy and how to teach art history effectively, but since no one around me talks about that in publications, it’s not traditionally considered scholarship.
What do you think we (faculty at BMCC) can work on related to reenvisioning scholarship?
I think we need to develop a more inclusive definition of scholarship and what it looks like.
These days I am thinking that while we are encouraged to consider, create and adopt other types of measuring students’ knowledge production than the typical essay or written report, we find that for ourselves, faculty, not all types of knowledge production can be included in the tenure and promotion process. I see incongruence in the way that knowledge production is valued. For instance, how can we truly encourage podcasts or zines creation, and assign them value when they are assigned a different value than a published research article in academia?
I am also interested in seeing more specific ways to support junior faculty in their tenure and promotion process. It is great that we can identify “informal” mentoring, but we deserve to be informed in a precise and supportive manner.
I totally agree! Faculty that express their voices in zines, podcasts, interviews, and social media deserve recognition for their contributions. Also, choosing to post your work on open source platforms should count.
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”.
In addition to recognizing and rewarding innovative ideas, tenure and promotion standards should also be adjusted to reflect the changing world. Currently, tenure is largely based around research-based accomplishments, and promotion decisions often hinge on the same criteria. However, these measures may not always provide a full picture of an individual’s abilities and contributions in this ever-evolving environment. To properly acknowledge efforts for innovation, tenure and promotion processes should diversify their evaluation criteria to include assessment of digital literacy and an ability to lead or participate in collaborative research projects with colleagues from diverse backgrounds.
Moreover, new methods of teaching should be encouraged as part of scholarship criteria. Digital learning tools such as online courses, video lectures and interactive websites have revolutionized how students learn new concepts. By encouraging scholars to explore these new methods of teaching while also emphasizing traditional lecture-based approaches, administrators can create an atmosphere that rewards creativity while enhancing learning outcomes for all students.
Scholarship should aim to recognize individuals for their efforts to push beyond the status quo and encourage them to think critically about how best to utilize the resources available today in order to make meaningful contributions within their fields of study. Administrators must understand that our world is constantly evolving and that rewarding those who demonstrate willingness to innovate is crucial in keeping pace with this change.
To add this, let’s consider that the internet changed access to knowledge and creation of it. The same thing is happening again with ChatGPT. This is another sea change which needs to be considered as we must value faster FLUX in the world.