Research and Teaching Quagmire

So, I don’t know if you have heard, but recently the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (national accreditor), has proposed to require business schools to show the effect of faculty research on practice, teaching, and theory at the institution. AACSB feels that with the estimated $320-million spent annually supporting faculty research, they think schools need to show more results than just the number of articles that professors publish in peer-reviewed journals. 

At first, it may seem like just another accountability measure coming down on the faculty, but it does present some questions when you think of it in light of full-time and part-time faculty numbers on campus and who is doing the teaching and who is doing the research.

First, AACSB wants to know how the research of faculty members in business schools affects the teaching of students. Well, if you look at national stats, according to the DOE 54 percent of all business faculty and instructional staff are full-time and 46 percent of business faculty are part-time. So whose research do they want when just over half are in the position to do research? And how should research impact teaching when you have 46 percent of faculty part-time and most likely unsupported to do research?

And what if this spreads to other disciplines?

Maybe program areas such as Engineering, Natural sciences and Agriculture could handle the new measurement with over 70 percent of their faculty being full-time; but what about business, education and the fine arts which are teetering around 50 percent?

I am not trying to say that this is not a noble cause and that research should not have relevance to teaching, but the reality is, at many colleges and universities, the “person” connection between research and teaching just isn’t there. The division or separation of “research” faculty and “teaching” faculty is common and can often be determined by the full-time or part-time status of the professor. Maybe this could be a round-about way of reconnecting the two, I don’t know. I just found the whole thing very interesting.