
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 19, 1993                   TAG: 9312220003
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RESEARCH-BASHING

IF VIRGINIA'S higher-education officials have an obligation to find ways to do more with less, state policy-makers and the public have obligations, too.

Among them is the obligation to avoid the kind of mindless yahooism that evaluates colleges and universities as if they were widget factories.

It would be foolish, for example, to expect every faculty member to teach the same number of undergraduates - or, in some cases, any undergraduates - regardless of his or her status in the field, the nature of his or her academic discipline, or the level of instruction and research he or she is expected to contribute.

The Nobel economist who by his mere presence draws dollars and scholars to campus may well be doing his job even if he never sees a callow undergraduate. The engineering professor supervising 12 dissertations in a doctoral program may well be working as hard and contributing more than the faculty member teaching four sections of introductory geology.

It would be foolish, too, to judge all programs by the same yardstick. Not all programs have the same aims.

A central purpose of Virginia Tech's College of Engineering, for example, is to produce professional engineers. Hence, how many Tech students graduate with engineering degrees is useful to know in measuring the college's productivity. But the aim of having a philosophy department is not principally to produce professional philosophers; it is, rather, to provide a basic element of a liberal-arts education for students majoring in other fields. In measuring productivity, counting the number of philosophy majors isn't meaningful.

Finally, it would be foolish to denigrate the role of research in higher education. Academic research is one enterprise in which America leads the world; in a number of research fields, Virginia institutions are among the top in the country.

Not every institution in Virginia should be a research institution. But research universities - the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech being the commonwealth's two obvious examples - should not be begrudged for doing research. It's their job.

by CNB