The Dual Functions of a University Professor

The Dual Functions of a University Professor

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI]  Guardian

These are tough economic times, and universities share in the pain. The University of Prince Edward Island is going to learn to live with cuts to its provincial funding.

As usual, there will be those who feel that professors "don't work hard enough" and shouldn't complain.

But the "job description" of a professor is unlike that of any other occupation.

Let's say you're an accountant or a salesperson. Your work - most likely done at the place of business - is fairly structured and set down by the people who employ you.

If you work at other things on your own and "off the clock," this would probably have no bearing on how well you perform on the job. Indeed, some employers might look askance at this, feeling you were spending too much time or effort on other matters, instead of on behalf of the company that pays your salary.

But things are very different for an academic. Teaching and administrative tasks are, obviously, done at the "firm" - in this case, the university. There are set schedules for classroom time, office hours, and the various other duties involved in running your courses.

This part of the job is similar to that which one finds in other professions.

But there is an entire second aspect to the work, one which many outside academia are less aware of, and which may, in the long run, be even more important: research and scholarship.

Other than providing a venue, and sometimes, grant money, the university itself has little to do with this. It is done mostly outside the formal university structure.

Presenting papers at conferences, publishing scholarly articles and books, editing journals, reviewing books, refereeing proposals, and interacting in a myriad of ways with others in one's field (scholars who can be anywhere in the world): this is to a large extent up to the individual professor.

There are no set rules or structures in place and much of it is done elsewhere - sometimes thousands of miles away.

In this part of the job, you're in effect an independent operator. By the same token, so is your colleague down the hall. You may have no idea what he's working on.

Yet not only does this part of the job have a bearing on how professors are evaluated, for tenure or promotion, but it might, in the long run, be the most important, and long-lasting, part of our work.

No academic should minimize the important of teaching students and imparting to them the knowledge that we, and our colleagues elsewhere, have worked so hard to create.

But nonetheless, few people, 30 years from now, will remember what we did in the classroom. However, they might still be reading, and learning from, the articles and books we produced as academics. Our true legacy will be our research.