108. In Defense of "Publish or Perish"

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Ah, the ghost of deans past, rising again to speak for the real world, rising to dispute my last post (#107). "You forget, you forget. Sing your song about Socrates, that he didn't publish a single word, that he would never have gotten a Ph.D.  Promote his tradition, concentrate on the good life, make the classroom experience the center of higher education. So in the criteria for tenure and promotion you manage to put teaching ahead of publication. And what do you discover? That teaching is the hardest thing in the world to measure. Nothing is reliable, not test scores, not classroom visits, not student evaluations. Scores can be raised by teaching to the test, visit reports are subjective, and student evaluations can give a very distorted picture."

You mean student evaluations aren't reliable?

"Not enough to make trustworthy comparisons. The year they had him students can complain about a teacher as a crabby futz and ten years later thank him for teaching them everything they needed to know. The 'humane' and 'relevant' livewire can be called, in hindsight, a 'shallow entertainer.' It's all so subjective. Student evaluations are helpful, but they require a sophisticated reading. And that will vary according to the sophisticate.

"Publication can easily be measured and reliably used for comparison. Much can be quantified: how many articles, how many times cited by others in the field, how many long reviews. There may be some subjectivity in the editors' choice of articles but they, the gatekeepers, are guided by the peers of the discipline. That thins out the subjectivity. No matter how strongly you urge a Promotion and Tenure committee to prioritize teaching they are going to gravitate toward publication — just because, in a swamp, it gives them some firm, accessible ground to stand on.

"I know, that's gravitation, convenience, not justification. So forget it. Let's talk about your idealistic principles, the ones you inherit from Plato's Socrates. Socrates left you with no doubt about the right approach to truth. It's through dialogue, debate, what you all later lovingly called 'dialectic testing.' The question is, Do you want tough testing or easy testing? Say you've come up with a piece of truth. Will you test it in the classroom? That's too easy. Your students don't know how to be tough. If you really love truth, and are really committed to the Socratic way, you'll lay your piece out in a journal, where the really tough people can test it.

"That, I think, is what one of Plato's most eloquent spokesmen, John Milton, would want you to do. Truth,' he said, 'can't be won without dust and heat,' down in the arena. 'That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.' He who shuns such a trial 'slinks out of the race.' And you know what? That classroom, for all its connection to the good life, for all it contributes to the examination of it, for all its beauty, is a place you are slinking to."

"That's a hard thing to say, but if you accept it I'll tell you something else. You can't want me, your dean, to let you or any of your colleagues do that kind of slinking. First because you want credit for that piece of truth, and you want the credit to be granted objectively. You don't want it to be based on anybody's report of its success in your classroom; you want it to be based on reports that can be compared with other reports — like number of citations. In other words, you, if you really want to adhere to Socratic principles, want our present system. For all its faults."