measurable definition of scholarly work

[Vid]

Folks, great insights, thank you very much. You guys are AWESOME!

[jerseyjay]

I am at an open-admissions university that used to be a teachers college that used to have no research requirements for tenure and now is requiring research (with no concomitant reduction in teaching load).

Our dean was explicit that the most important thing is that research be peer-reviewed. The quality of the journal, the impact factor, etc., do not matter, so longer as it is peer reviewed. Chapters in edited volumes count the same as journal articles, so long as they are peer reviewed. There is no explicit number of articles required, although it seems that the minimum is around three. There is a bit of a sliding scale, so one article in Nature would probably be okay for tenure, while one article in the Midwestern Peer-Reviewed Penny Saver would not. However, we were told that it probably would not be a winning strategy to try to publish in high-impact but slow journals, and that we should try to publish in decent journals that did not take too long.

That said, I am in history, and all of the people who have received tenure in my department in the last decade or so have at least published one peer-reviewed book.

Every attempt I have seen to try to classify history journals into tiers tends to break down. I mean, the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History are good, and probably Social History, but then you get in very specialized titles that are important in their subfields but not read by others.  I would assume it is similar in other fields.

[Hibush]

The quality of the journal, the impact factor, etc., do not matter, so longer as it is peer reviewed.

The free market and the internet have stepped up to meet these in-demand requirements. They have had to adjust the review standards in order to keep the customers happy, but the speed is super. "Pennysaver" is perhaps not a characteristic, thought.

How long will it take for people like this dean to catch on?

[Sun_Worshiper]

At my place (interdisciplinary department in a public R1) it is up to faculty to make the case that their work is "scholarly," both for t&p and for annual reviews that inform raises. I've referred to impact factor and to widely acknowledged journal lists in my field, and that seems to satisfy the annual review committee. And for promotion outside letter writers give their input as well.

There have also been sporadic efforts to develop a department-level journal list, but always seems to die on the vine.

[Ruralguy]

The schools/depts that say "the only thing that matters is peer review" are basically just admitting that nobody really cares what the work actually is or how good you are at it.  "Published"="Good Enough for Us to Care."  I personally would value  less work in higher impact journals and volumes rather than lots of work in quickly published crapola, but I believe I am in the minorty, especially at schools like mine.

[jerseyjay]

The free market and the internet have stepped up to meet these in-demand requirements. They have had to adjust the review standards in order to keep the customers happy, but the speed is super. "Pennysaver" is perhaps not a characteristic, thought.

How long will it take for people like this dean to catch on?

The schools/depts that say "the only thing that matters is peer review" are basically just admitting that nobody really cares what the work actually is or how good you are at it.  "Published"="Good Enough for Us to Care."

I think that my dean is not stupid. He understands that there is a variation of quality of peer-reviewed material. And his statement that what is important is that something be peer reviewed, was generally interpreted--and probably intended--to mean what Rural Guy says.

It is also a recognition that at an open-admissions school with a 4:4 load, a poor library, and almost no funding for research, it would be unrealistic and unfair to require high-quality publications. [My colleagues in the sciences have a harder time than those of us in the humanities, since I can do my research in the library of a nearby research school, whereas chemists would find it harder to do their research in a nearby school's lab.] Fifteen years ago, there were no research requirements to get tenure. There are full professors here who have never published a book review. That was not considered a problem, because we were a teaching school.

About a decade ago, the administration decided we had to up our research profile. But they didn't want to make the investment necessary to do that, in terms of giving people time and resources and money that would allow faculty to do research. So even now, when a book is essentially necessary for tenure in history, most everybody has done it by revising their dissertation and not publishing much afterward. New research is quite difficult without the support to do so.

[Hibush]

@jerseyjay
It actually sounds like you have a sensible dean, who has a logical goal. Simplified expression of that goal can be distorted to imply nonsense actions to check boxes.

For a school like yours, what is a reasonable research expectation, and how does that research expectation add value to the overall school enterprise?

Just doing some math for a very different context, a couple incongruities come to mind that makes the answer unobvious.

At my R1 place, the total cost per TT-faculty research FTE is a couple million dollars a year.
That's not the kind of money you spend without a pretty clear idea of what you want from it. It also means that asking someone too do a 4/3 teaching load with a 1/8-FTE research expectation would require a quarter million dollars a year in spending to be competitive. I don't imagine that budget is in the realm of possibility for anyone at a teaching school with a nearly-full teaching load.

A lot of that money goes to pay accoutants in grants management, purchasing and human resource also auditors, lawyers, safety officers, plumbers, electricians, hazardous-waste disposal techs and fees, government-relations staff, rent and renovation of research space... It is an expensive business! A teaching institution isn't going to have most of those positions. But a lot of research can't happen without them. Do you ask the chemists to go to a nearby school that has all that? But then how do you involve undergrads in the research...which is usually a major benefit?

[Morris Zapp]

Any thoughts on those types who don't do any scholarship but have a tictoc, an insta, thousands of Twitter followers,a vlog, a podcast?We have one of those coming up at our uni and Icant imagine how this would be evaluated.

[downer]

Any thoughts on those types who don't do any scholarship but have a tictoc, an insta, thousands of Twitter followers,a vlog, a podcast?We have one of those coming up at our uni and Icant imagine how this would be evaluated.

If they don't do any scholarship, then then don't produce any scholarly work. Seems very simple.

[Morris Zapp]

I completely Agree with you but have this feeling that others will.see it differently.

[downer]

It will be interesting whether they say that that non-scholarly work is scholarly, which would be bullshit, or whether they say that there are other things that are important aside from scholarly work, which might be true, but redefines the job description.

Seems that there are plenty of real scholars who are active in social media. Why not hire one of them instead?

[Morris Zapp]

Yes.I have suggested that one can use social media to amplify ones scholarship but not in place of scholarship.  Problem is with the charismatic schmoozing individual that everyone likes who produces no scholarship.

[jerseyjay]

Yes, I think my dean is sort of sensible. That is to say, I do not agree with the overall policy of trying to make my school more research-focused without putting the necessary resources into it. I am not sure that making it more research-focused is for the best interests of the school's mission as a school. But if you take this shift as black letter law, then what he says makes sense. (And to be fair, the shift to a more research focus predates the dean, and comes from above him.)

If tenure requirements at my open-admissions used-to-be a teachers' college school were copy-and-pasted from the state's flagship R1 with no changes while the old teaching requirements were kept, this would be really dumb. Sure, somebody would make it: after all, with the academic market being what it is, somebody would be able to meet double Harvard's tenure requirements with double a community college's teaching load and half of our current salary. Heck, there are probably some PhDs who would agree to not get paid while on the tenure track if they would have a full-time job afterward. So the dean's official acknowledgement that increased research requirements does not mean we've turned into an R1 is a sensible acceptance of reality, even if that reality is not that sensible to begin with.

In terms of social media. Even my school would not count social media as scholarship. In fact, the dean's policy is meant to eliminate what some people had in the past done to check off the (minimal) "scholarship" box for tenure before. Book reviews, conference presentations, columns for the local newspaper, articles for the in-house faculty journal are not discouraged, but since they are not peer reviewed, they do not count for scholarship at tenure.

[Sun_Worshiper]

Any thoughts on those types who don't do any scholarship but have a tictoc, an insta, thousands of Twitter followers,a vlog, a podcast?We have one of those coming up at our uni and Icant imagine how this would be evaluated.

I can't imagine someone like this getting through successfully at my university. While they might have a few supporters, the old guard would be opposed - rightly so, imo.

[Hibush]

Yes.I have suggested that one can use social media to amplify ones scholarship but not in place of scholarship.  Problem is with the charismatic schmoozing individual that everyone likes who produces no scholarship.

Amplifyng your scholarship through various channels that reach people who care is pretty standard practice these days. How else will you scholarship be found?

But you do need to have scholarship to amplify. The measure of whether it is effective is not the number of retweets but the number of references (in relevant venues) to the actual piece of scholarship that results from those retweets.

Can you separate the colleagues output into categories of primary scholarship, publicity about that scholarship, and public-service publications (based on that scholarship)? That could help your colleagues assess it better.