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

DATE: TUESDAY, January 18, 1994                   TAG: 9401180290
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ROBERT R. DETLEFSEN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ACADEMIA'S IDEALS ARE CAST ASIDE

THE AUTHENTICITY of Edward Ayers' account (Jan. 9 front-page Horizon section, ``What I do all day'') of how a professor's workweek can average 55 hours - despite his spending only five hours in the classroom - will no doubt be confirmed by anyone who understands the nature of the modern professoriate, particularly at large research-oriented universities such as the University of Virginia, where he teaches American history. One hopes that his thoughtful and earnest description of how he and the majority of his colleagues spend their time will help dispel the odd notion that classroom teaching is the only useful enterprise to which a university professor can or should devote himself.

Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm to rehabilitate the professoriate's tattered public image, Professor Ayers glosses over some of the most serious problems affecting higher education today.

For example, contrary to his matter-of-fact assertion, it is surely no longer the case that ``academic work is as close to a meritocracy as we come in America'' - not at a time when, for the sake of a spurious conception of ``diversity,'' race and gender have supplanted excellence in teaching and research as the most prominent criteria for hiring and promoting professors. And not when the failure to adhere, in one's teaching or research, to a tacit norm of ``political correctness'' can mean the end of an otherwise promising career - or, more likely, in it being stillborn or derailed. The upshot of this state of affairs, at least in the social sciences and humanities, has been a predictable (and widely documented) political and cultural orthodoxy among the professoriate that has absolutely nothing to do with ``merit.''

Equally disingenuous is Professor Ayers' discussion of scholarly research. Apparently hoping to placate a public that's increasingly skeptical of what passes for ``research,'' Professor Ayers conjures up the image of ``an elderly reader at a public library picking up my book and finding some connection with his own life there.'' If he really writes books for this audience, my hat is off to him. But I doubt whether he earned tenure at a research-oriented university on the strength of such a publishing record. In my field - and, I suspect, in his as well - a professor who writes books that are accessible to the general public is dismissed as mere ``popularizer,'' not to be regarded as a ``serious'' scholar.

In short, not all of the public's dismay over the state of higher education is the product of ignorance. Indeed, much of it has been brought on by the professoriate's virtual abandonment in recent years of once-cherished ideals such as intellectual freedom and scholarly neutrality. At the same time, professors have marginalized themselves and their work by pursuing research agendas driven more by faddishness and careerism than by a sincere desire to inform and enlighten the reading public.

Given these and other problems, I suspect it will take more than a 55-hour workweek for us to redeem ourselves with the public.

Robert R. Detlefsen is an assistant professor of political science at Hollins College.

by CNB