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What counts as ‘service to the profession’ at your university?

Brian Leiter

The standard requirements for tenure at most schools are scholarship, teaching, and "service," both to the institution but also the profession–but what exactly constitutes service to the profession?  Philosopher Becko Copenhaver (Lewis & Clark) writes:

What do philosophers and their departments and institutions count as service to the profession?  Here is what we might count: service in APA, service in the many other professional philosophy organizations, editorial review boards, reviewing articles for publication, book reviews, editorials, radio and television programs, professional boards, outreach programs, volunteer service that promotes philosophy in the public sphere.  Do departments and institutions recognize and reward this service?  Are there other forms of service to or in the profession that we perform?  How much service do we regard as obligatory, how much do we regard a supererogatory?  More importantly, what are the present obstacles to service?  Are those obstacles ones that we might work on together to ameliorate as a professional group?

Comments are open for readers to comment on any or all of these questions, as well as describe the norms/expectations at their own institutions.

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11 responses to “What counts as ‘service to the profession’ at your university?”

  1. Richard Baron

    I am in the UK, and have no institutional attachment beyond some lecturing on job-by-job contracts, so I have no direct experience. But I would worry a lot if institutions always required all three of scholarship, teaching and service. They are all good things, but it would be crazy not to hang on to a brilliant scholar, or a brilliant teacher, because he or she had done nothing much under one or both of the other two headings.

    So if Brian will allow me to add to his list of questions, how do these decision procedures work? Can the great scholar, or the great teacher, get tenure without much in the way of "service"? I would regard outstanding scholarship, or outstanding teaching, as the highest form of service to the profession anyway. Your papers will be read, or those of your students who stayed in academia will go on being driven by the inspiration that you gave them, long after the committees on which you sat have been dissolved and their minutes have been shredded.

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  2. Michael Cholbi

    At my university, the service requirement makes explicit reference to service to "the department, college, university, or community" (where the last refers not to the scholarly community, but to the geographic region the university serves). Hence, whatever might be counted *as* service to the profession, service to the profession doesn't count from the standpoint or tenure and promotion. With some massaging, some of what Becko mentions (reviewing manuscripts, etc.) can be (and is) treated as a contribution to research. But there is little institutional incentive for faculty to perform service to the profession. I don't know to what extent this is true at other institutions, but this may be an important obstacle that results in faculty foregoing opportunities to serve the profession.

    More generally: The holy trinity of research, teaching, and service seems not to capture a lot of what academics do nowadays. Brian and other academic bloggers are doing something important that doesn't fit neatly into any of the three categories. Perhaps the academic world should rethink the holy trinity as a way of measuring faculty quality?

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  3. David Wallace

    Replying to Richard Baron: we can't have it all ways. If it's not okay for administration – construed broadly – to be done entirely by professionals (and most of us, to lesser or greater extent, feel that it isn't) then academics have to do their share of it. And most of us don't particularly enjoy it, so it has to be done in an equitable way, and that in turn means that some system has to be in place to keep an eye on it. (And don't we all feel that we're such great teachers, and/or such great scholars, that we, personally, should be exempt from such onerous duties, so that they fall on our untalented colleagues?)

    Furthermore, who is to say that one's service contribution is insignificant to the profession relative to one's teaching and research? Someone has to admit that great graduate student ahead of others, or decide that their paper and not others' should be accepted for publication, or choose them for shortlisting for tenure-track out of a field of hundreds, or organise the conference at which they give that groundbreaking presentation.

    Ultimately, and as Brian periodically reminds us, academia is a *profession*, with plenty of aspects of the job and the career which go beyond the purity of research and teaching. Those aspects of the job shouldn't be allowed to dominate, and we should be very careful to monitor them and keep them from growing beyond necessity, but they can't be eliminated. And a sensible academic career framework has to respect that.

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  4. C. Sistare

    I don’t believe it is possible to give a universal, and meaningful, account of what constitutes ‘service.’ It varies so widely among institutions and even across departments.

    At my SLAC, doing review work, serving on philosophical association committees, and such are usually listed under ‘Professional Activity’ – a category that also includes scholarship. Thus, the ‘Service’ requirement does mean service to one’s program, college, or the larger community (with the stricture that the latter should be service in one’s capacity as a professional in a certain field).

    Of course, no one can excel in all three respects all the time. However, we rank the areas: teaching is most important; scholarship and service might be more or less interchangeable in significance depending on one’s home department. To pass muster with the college-wide standards, one has to have shown meaningful activity in all three – but only ‘excellence’ in two.

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  5. Becko Copenhaver

    This is really helpful so far. As C. Sistare notes, along with others, the notions of what counts as service do vary. This is important information. My institution does list scholarship, teaching and service as the three categories on which tenure, promotion and merit pay is decided. But there is a sense that what this requires is excellence in all three, all time. We are all agreed that this is unrealistic and unreflective of what we do, even when we are doing our best.

    Michael points out that at his institution, service doesn't really include service to the profession. I have suspected that this is the case in my own institution but our own measures of the three main categories are not defined well enough yet to make this clear.

    David rightly points out that we have to use practical wisdom with respect to whether and to what degree we serve our profession. Clearly, it is all too easy for us to become free riders, and ultimately members of a dysfunctional organization. This is even more important if many institutions simply do not recognize any service to the profession. That is a positive disincentive!

    At this point (pending further comments – and thanks for folks to responding to this), although I agree that there is no universal way to define service, service is so ill-defined and unrecognized at enough of our institutions that we might learn something about what we – as a profession – regard as service so that we might better communicate to our administrations in a more unified voice about the good work we do to which the systems are, as it were blind. I don't think that philosophy is alone here – this affects the humanities and the academy quite broadly.

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  6. V. Alan White

    My experience parallels that of C. Sistare's–my institution typically "rewards" excellence in at least two of the three service areas.

    (Caveat–by "rewards" I mean that I and my colleagues have been subject to a state-controlled "merit" system all my decades-plus career; that includes several years like the past two that have been no-pay-raise years due to pay-cut furloughs or 0% "raises" in several other years, and all that despite consistent "highly meritorious" ratings or better for most my career. Sorry about that bile, but I just had to vent about how little I think my state appreciates performance. Ok, enough of that.)

    In service terms much of my early career was in speaking to community groups and the like, which was good enough in terms of making philosophy relevant to particular interests like the Elks or Unitarians.

    Then by pure serendipity I was nominated to my state's Office of Lawyer Regulation district committee, which oversees ethical and legal complaints about lawyer conduct. I accepted and have served 12 years and have reviewed dozens of cases.

    What a rich and rewarding experience–not just in terms of my contribution to the system of oversight, but my own appreciation of the subtleties and intricacies of law.

    If relevant opportunities like these arise–take them. You may not get all the rewards you monetarily deserve from your time-commitment, but you will grow in your own appreciation of how your larger culture operates, and how that relates to your profession. I do not regret a moment of service to my community in this regard.

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  7. Student

    One thing that I think should count greatly: as long as women and racial minorities are underrepresented in philosophy, many of the female/minority faculty there are will carry a heavy formal and informal advising burden. (As a female student, I know that I have tended to see women professors as role models and seek out their support, particularly when other aspects of my academic environment have been less than supportive.) Some may also feel highly motivated by their experiences to take on other service roles like serving on a university-wide diversity committee.

    From what I can see (granted, as a student) in my own department, this dynamic has produced a greatly unequal distribution of certain kinds of service. So if we're serious about diversity — at the faculty level as well as the student level — being an institutional goal of departments and universities, then I think we need to make sure that this kind of service is rewarded, not something that creates an additional burden for women/minority assistant professors.

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  8. John Fischer

    Becko,

    I think we would count as service all of the types of activities you mention. We would also count running an academic blog, or perhaps participating significantly in such a blog. Also, of course, we would count giving talks at various kinds of venues: dept. colloquia, conferences, and so forth.

    We do indeed require service in order to get one's merit advancements and promotions, but there is no clear way of quantifying this. We tend to look for some service at the various levels: departmental, campus, and professional, with more or more high quality service at one level compensating to some extent for less strong service at another level. In the UC system, I think the primary driver of one's advancements is research, with teaching and service somewhat less significant, but still required. Whereas research is the primary engine for one's advancements, poor teaching or service can be a "defeater".

    I think that there may be different obstacles to service at different institutions. So, for example, at a research university, such as a UC campus, one knows that research will be the primary way in which one will get advancements; perhaps some will think of "excessive" service as a way of avoiding one's research or as an attempt to compensate for weaker research. This is unfortunate, and may be an obstacle to doing important service.

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  9. Becko Copenhaver

    Just a quick response to the student. I have often wondered whether and to what degree women and other under-represented people (say, first-generation college graduates, people from under-represented ethnic and cultural groups, etc.) face more service obligations. I have only personal and anecdotal evidence of this but it certainly would not surprise me.

    I should say that from experience much of this is result of the very best of intentions – people want committees, boards, reviewers, etc. to be maximally representative. I believe on the whole that this is true. But because there are fewer of us, that means we end up taking a larger share of the burden. This is where mentoring from senior colleagues and chairs becomes very important – yet another example of service…perhaps the most important?

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  10. Kathryn Norlock

    Wonder no more; it has been repeatedly established in Journal of Higher Education, Review of Higher Education, the Higher Education Handbook series and the APA Task Force (the other APA, that is) that women and non-white faculty perform and are requested to perform more 'student-centered' service, that is, the advising and mentoring stuff as opposed to leadership/governance of the faculty. Junior scholars, whose ranks are disproportionately likely to include more women and minorities, are also usually overexploited for such service. (When my own previous department turned its attention to this, we made a concerted effort to share a great deal of the service more equally; the quality of life went up for everyone.) In response to the original post, I would echo the suggestions in those journals that the overuse which women and minorities may then suffer is an obstacle to doing different (or less!) service more excellently, which departments can dedicate themselves to ameliorating once they recognize it.

    The question as to what profession service we regard as obligatory lingers in my mind. Since most of us depend upon peer-reviewed research for advancement, it seems to me that taking one's part in refereeing for journals is an obligatory form of service for anyone who benefits from it. Since professionals tend to rely on some central organizations for conferences and job-search-related services, I take it to be something like a Kantian "imperfect duty" to regularly offer one's service to professional organizations, as well.

    Not that you have to agree with me to be Kantian, but the imperfect duty remains!

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  11. David Owen

    I hope this isn't a red herring or an unwelcome digression. I would be interested to know how may of my colleagues in philosophy think their institution treats them as professionals? My institution treats all faculty simply as salaried employees. So for instance, when I want to find out anything about my current status, I have to log on to a site, and choose between "Employee/ Manager Self Service and Administrative Staff". The right choice is the former. And when I want to find out anything about my teaching, I choose among "Student Center Guest Center Instructor Center Administrative Staff". The right choice is "Instructor Center". This is just an indicator, of course. The real issue is how choices are made about power and money. There is some effort to consult faculty, but most of us think that the important decisions are made quite independently of faculty wishes. It is not clear to me how to improve matters at a large state institution. In any case, I am only a professional to my friends and colleagues, not to my institution. Does this matter?

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