Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 14, 1993 TAG: 9309120333
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PHILIP WALZER VIRGINIAN-PILOT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
At the other end of Virginia, two professors listen to hundreds of pop songs, calculating their lengths and number of beats to see if there have been any patterns since the '40s.
They show the two faces of university research: projects furthering our understanding of the world and our ability to control it - and less crucial, some say trivial, exercises with questionable benefit to society.
The less substantial kind of research is not the professors' fault, said Steven Emmanuel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Virginia Wesleyan College. They're forced to write something, anything, to get ahead.
"There's been a proliferation of journals, many of which are not that reputable," he said. "They become vehicles for publication, not necessarily for good work or insightful material. They really help people pad their resumes to keep their jobs or get tenure. It's kind of sad."
Most research is far better, say advocates at universities. "Without the energy and curiosity that characterized most scholars," said Barbara Nolan, a Chaucer expert at the University of Virginia, "we would still be reading books that 17th-cen-tury scholars wrote in our fields."
Across the state, professors are engaged in significant work:
At a Virginia Tech "smart materials" center, more than two dozen professors work with sensitive compounds that can detect strain and even help trigger repairs in aircraft wings.
At Norfolk State University, Michael Woodhouse is developing a back brace to provide better support for athletes and workers.
At James Madison University, Douglas Dennis has gotten a plant to produce plastic by injecting genetically altered genes.
Research has also led to striking changes in society, said Jo Ann Gora, the provost at ODU. "I would remind people that Brown vs. Board of Education [the court decision striking down segregated schools] was based on social research," she said. "If that had not been done, the decision would not be what it was."
But today, says Derek Bok, former Harvard University president, professors are focusing on minutiae and evading the most pressing problems.
"Rarely have members of the academy succeeded in discovering the emerging issues and bringing them vividly to the attention of the public," Bok has written. "What Rachel Carson did for risks to the environment, Ralph Nader for consumer protection, Michael Harrington for problems of poverty, Betty Friedan for women's rights, they did as independent critics, not as members of a faculty."
A look at The College of William and Mary's 1991-92 annual report on publications shows the tendency to take a narrow focus with limited practical applications:
In the religion department, Marc Raphael wrote a book on the history of the United Jewish Appeal fund-raising organization. No one wrote about approaches to end feuding between religions.
In the philosophy department, James Harris wrote an article about "the causal theory of reference and religious language." No one tackled the ethical dilemmas of abortion.
In the English department, Deborah Morse wrote a book about female characters in British writer Anthony Trollope's "Palliser novels." No one examined the best techniques for teaching Shakespeare or grammar.
Even education professors, whose research is aimed at the classroom, get bogged down in irrelevancies, said Gerald Bracey, a psychologist in Alexandria who writes a monthly column on education research for the Phi Delta Kappan magazine. "The overwhelming majority of it is still academics talking to each other," he said.
He recalled an article about multiple-choice test-takers who don't follow standard patterns of getting answers right and wrong. "A more germane question would be: What do these tests really measure?" he said.
At George Mason University, W. Mark Crain and Robert Tollison were the music listeners, scrutinizing more than 900 songs. They found the average length increased by more than one minute in the past half-century. Their theory, explained in a paper titled "Elvis Economics": The big names are trying to hog the airwaves, crowding out newcomers.
"Music is such an important element of popular culture," said Crain. "We think it's something that reveals social attitudes and is worthy of study." Crain delivered his paper at a conference in Venice, Italy, over the summer and has submitted it to the Journal of Political Economy.
Another George Mason professor, Wil- liam Rifkin, has studied meetings. In a press release, he described them as "a modern incarnation of tribal rites." He said in an interview that his most important discovery was that meetings flow like "family dinner conversation" and reveal how relationships work among workers.
Did he need to study that to find that out? "That's the social scientist's job," he said, "to spot the obvious and give us a way to talk about it."
by CNB