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"Faculty help create, participate in, and take responsibility for a vibrant public culture at their institutions."
These words from a recent Wingspread declaration about the roles of faculty members point to the importance of professional service in ensuring the viability of universities and communities. Long regarded as a distant third in the line-up of faculty roles, professional service deserves closer attention.
To do this, a group of faculty members from all IU campuses has spent the past three years studying, discussing and framing guidelines about how each campus can value the kind of professional service that fosters vital campuses and communities. We looked at current practices on our campuses and across the country, debated at length what professional service means and brainstormed kinds of documentation. We examined multiple criteria, honing in on those that helped us test most clearly the quality of the service.
Then we enlisted IU faculty colleagues to test the documentation types and criteria by applying them to their own work. Finally, based on their experiences, we revised the guidebook contents into what is now available to all IU faculty members for further discussion and application.
Why bother, you may ask? We have enough trouble figuring out how to document and reward excellent teaching.
I agree that we have much more work yet to do in that area; in fact, I'm now at the American Association for Higher Education in Washington, D.C., heading a national project on the scholarship of teaching and learning. But, we as faculty members are responsible for research, teaching and service. Until we develop the means of representing and evaluating service, it will remain even more undervalued than teaching in the reward system. And rightly so.
We must create ways to rigorously examine service with the same degree of confidence that we have in peer review of research and the growing confidence that we have in our ability to critique and affirm teaching.
Fortunately, we don't have to start from scratch. When my writing students begin a complex assignment, the toughest part, sometimes, is the blank computer screen or the blank sheet of paper.
The published guidebook produced by your colleagues includes their best thinking to date about the subject of professional service. Although it has come through multiple revisions, you might call it a sacrificial draft, one offered for revision as you wrestle with ways to value and reward service in your own setting for your own purposes.
(See Links section, this issue)
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