Validating public service efforts
Senate committees grapple with service portion of UB's mission

By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor

A Faculty Senate committee reviewing draft revisions of the President's Review Board's policy governing evaluation of professional academic work has praised the document's broadening of the definition of scholarship to include public-service activities.

But the chair of the Committee on Public Service, briefing members of the senate's executive committee on April 7, said his panel found the document's use of the term "professional service" to be confusing, and suggested the section addressing the "service" portion of UB's tripartite mission-currently titled "professional service"-be titled simply "service," or "public, professional and university/community service" to better clarify the various dimensions of service.

Michael Frisch, committee chair and professor of history and American studies, noted that the document uses the term "professional service" in two different senses: service to one's profession and service by a professional. He recommended that the term "public service" refer to applied scholarship, while "professional service" be identified as work to one's profession, such as editorial or referee work on journals, organizing professional meetings or holding office in professional associations.

Frisch said that no one feels that service and research, as discrete entities, will be seen as "parallel in any important sense, certainly not in tenure decisions and not even at associate professorial promotional levels."

But the aim of the committee, he said, is to make "legible-the kind of scholarship and the kind of work that people do that often doesn't fit comfortably into any of these baskets (UB's three missions of research, service and teaching).

It is trying to "provide a clearer set of guidelines so we don't end up endlessly mired in 'is service serving in the church choir or being a volunteer for the boy scout jamboree, all of which are important acts of citizenship but not things that are going to matter very much to the PRB."

John Boot, professor and chair of the Department of Management Science and Systems, told Frisch he was struggling for a precise example of public service. "It is awfully tricky, when push comes to shove, to cite a concrete example" of public service; "it's what he does because he's a scientist, because he's a scholar and he does it out of the goodness of his heartŠjust because he wants to help."

Frisch pointed out that the Office of the Vice President for Public Service and Urban Affairs has published a compendium of numerous public-service projects conducted by faculty members.

Samuel Schack, professor of mathematics, noted that faculty members do not have nearly as many examples of public service as they do of research.

The public-service committee could provide a valuable service for the faculty and the PRB by collecting a broadly based list of public-service projects from various sectors of the university that arose out of scholarly activity. This would give faculty members "a sense of what you're talking about," Schack said, adding that the concept "becomes concrete through examples."

Dennis Malone, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, stressed that university service is not necessarily discipline-related, while public service is related to discipline.

Moreover, he said, there is a difference between volunteerism and work that is done as a result of one's discipline. "What we're talking about, I think, are things you do as a result of your discipline."

Mitchell Harwitz, associate professor of economics, suggested that some service work, such as editing a journal, can range anywhere from paper-shuffling to "something really hard and deeply involved in research.

"And that's where the complication arises. We don't want to make such simple, clear distinctions between Pot A and Pot B when, in fact, even what we clearly think of as service to the university is not just a use of time," he said, adding that it may not be so simple to categorize activities.

Frisch said the real issue to be considered is not the abstract one of "how do we come up with a universal definition (of public service), but the very real one of which examples are going to end up counting before the PRB."

He pointed out that numerous "responses to phone calls" from members of the community-so-called service to the public-will not count much toward tenure in an otherwise weak case.

"What we're interested in in this (PRB) document is to make sure that those kinds of public service that have grown out of and then looped back into real scholarly standing are rendered visible and accountable and countable so people have a chance to have that work validated," he said.

"And in turn, by making that signal, we will be encouraging people to feel that when there is the opportunity to go in that direction with a major project, as opposed to a more conventional one, they won't feel they are cutting their own throats" if they do so, he said