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Teaching Political Scientists: the Centrafity of Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2022

Charles D. Hadley
Charles D. Hadley*
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University, New Orleans
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Extract

Three decades ago in his analysis of the academic profession, Logan Wilson found that the faculty in lesser institutions as well as the junior faculty in the major universities held teaching to have primacy over research. At the same time, however, “everywhere there (was) an attitude among the academic elite that dismisses meticulous attention to instruction as a deflection from the ‘higher’ purposes of scholarship and science.” Research, not teaching, was found necessary for professional prestige and institutional recognition. Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee identified the conflict between teaching and research as “the leading problem for the individual faculty member.” A faculty member is hired to teach but expected to do research and publish — at the expense of the former; and in fact, “academic success is likely to come to the man who has learned to neglect his assigned duties in order to have more time and energy to pursue his private professional interests.”

Other authors argue from a different perspective. Frank Pinner did not see teaching and research as alternatives but as “part of the same process of education, complementary activities in the academic community.” Pinner went on to explain it was not possible to allocate time to each function due to differing teaching and research demands in different fields and due to individual work habits.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , Summer 1972 , pp. 262 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1972

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Professor Everett C. Ladd, Jr., Director of the University of Connecticut's Social Science Data Center, for making the data available. The analysis was conducted at the Louisiana State University in New Orleans Computer Research Center which is supported, in part, by National Science Foundation Grant GJ-131. This research, moreover, is revised from a paper presented at the 1971 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association.

References

1 The Academic Man: A Study in the Sociology of a Profession (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), pp. 188–189, 205.

2 The Academic Marketplace (Anchor Books; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1965), p. 189. To correct the teaching-research inequity the authors recommend the establishment of lecture ranks (e.g., associate professor equals associate lecturer) and standard teaching loads for all members of the teaching staff. (Pp. 204–205; 207–208.)

3 Pinner, Frank, “The Crisis of the State Universities: Analysis and Remedies,” in The American College: A Psychological and Social Interpretation of the Higher Learning, ed. by Sanford, Nevitt (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1962), p. 963.Google Scholar

4 Jencks, Christopher and Riesman, David, The Academic Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968), p. 532.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., pp. 531–539. Cf. Kerr, Clark, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 103–105, 118.Google Scholar

6 Somit, Albert and Tanenhaus, Joseph, American Political Science: A Profile of a Discipline (New York: Atherton Press, 1964), pp. 80–81.Google Scholar See pp. 77–85 on this point.

7 The data presented here are from a national sample of 1,267 teaching political scientists or one out of five who taught in the spring of 1969. For the questionnaire and a detailed exposition of the sampling see: Bayer, Alan E., College and University Faculty: A Statistical Description, ACE Research Reports, Vol. V, No. 5 (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1970).Google Scholar

8 Moreover, 75 percent of the research committed political scientists teach in institutions that have more than 10,000 students and offer advanced degrees.

9 Political Science Panel, the Behavioral and Social Sciences Survey, Political Science, ed. by Eulau, Heinz and March, James G. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), pp. 83 and 142.Google Scholar

10 Schuck, Victoria, “Femina Studens rei Publicae: Notes on her Professional Achievement,” PS: Political Science & Politics, III (1970), pp. 627–628.Google Scholar The data reported here, in fact, reveal that 66 percent of the men and 44 percent of the women have at least one article. While 22 percent more women (54 percent) than men have no articles, nearly equal proportions of women (37 percent) and men (34 percent) have from one to four articles. Beyond that point, all the women together nearly equal the proportion of men who have published more than 20 articles (5 versus 6 percent).

11 Somit, and Tanenhaus, , American Political Science, p. 124.Google Scholar See especially, pp. 123–136 on this point.

12 For reasonable compactness, the number of articles is presented in the tables, especially since it is most representative of one's whole career; however, other publication trends are examined in the text.

13 “Prestige” political science departments are those categorized “Distinguished and strong” faculty ratings in Roose, Kenneth D. and Andersen, Charles J., A Rating of Graduate Programs (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1970) p. 64.Google Scholar This updates Cartter's, Allan M. earlier study, An Assessment of Quality in Graduate Education (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1966), pp. 40–41 Google Scholar, which was accepted for political science by Somit, Albert and Tanenhaus, Joseph in their The Development of American Political Science (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1967), pp. 164–166.Google Scholar

14 The relationship between number of articles and academic rank persists when age is controlled; that is, the greater one's productivity, the greater is the tendency to hold higher academic rank regardless of age. The Gamma value for the zero order relationship (shown in Table 2) is—.68 while the magnitude of the Gammas for those in their 30s, 40s and 50s or older are —.66, —.61, and —.63. Only 1.5 percent of the political scientists in their 20s hold academic rank above assistant professor; moreover, half that number have “11–20+” articles.

15 Political scientists' article output was graphed due to the strong relationship between the high publishers in each publication category and due to the ambiguity of mixing “books and monographs published and edited.” Hence, articles give the most comprehensive and clear picture of one's entire publication span.

16 Jencks, and Reisman, , The Academic Revolution, p. 533.Google Scholar