Not all write

If you are in the business world, the bottom line tells the story and one way or another the bottom line often tells the whole story. It’s about making money. If you are a professional athlete, success is the bottom line: you either score under par and win or you don’t and you lose; you hit the ball or you don’t; you make the tackle or you don’t.

How are college and university professors judged? Perhaps you know this issue well and what I say is a repetition; but others may not know how this works at all. So, here’s my basic sketch:

At our school, North Park University, we are promoted and then given (or not given) tenure as a result of evaluating three components: Teaching, Scholarship, and Community service. The first refers basically — and I disagree with the weight given to these — student evaluations, which in many schools are passed out at the end of each class each semester. Without getting into this now, I’ll put it this way: the educrats of this world have convinced us all that outcome based education is the way to go. If this is the way to go, and I’m convinced, then what a student thinks of us is not the point; what matters is what the outcomes tell us. (More of that later.)

The second element is Scholarship, and this more or less means publications or evaluated professional presentations. Art professors often have “shows” of their work with professional evaluations — this all escapes me on how they do that, but still they know what they are on about and it works for them.

Third, community service: this ranges from committee work to participation in events and being present on campus for students and collegial work.

Most schools, and I know ours does this, balance these and some are really good at two and not so good on one but still get promoted and get tenure.

Today I’d like to make some comments about writing. Not all write; many professors have not written much more than a book review of two. Others write up a storm, and I want to mark out what I think are three characteristics of writing professors.

First, writing professors are curious. I believe this is the essence of the university professor than the more teaching-oriented college professors. But either way, writers are curious. The university research professor, say RJS who does chemistry stuff, is driven and motivated by wanting to know something. Wanting to get to the bottom of something. Historians come across a question — say, Did women and children and men all sit together in synagogues and does this shed light on who was at the Passover meal or in church services? — and then they can’t stop until they’re satisfied they’ve both found the evidence and put it all together into a coherent argument. The presentation will often be a journal article. But this is the foundation of all writing: plain curiosity. Let me put it more emotively: there’s a yearning to know, to discover and an unabashed thrill when something is found.

Second, writing professors are interactive. They know what others are saying, they care what others are saying, and they want to be part of the discussion. Someone says something about the New Perspective on Paul — either yea or nay — and the writing professor wants to put what was said into the context of what others are saying, marshall the arguments on one side or the other, and then take stock of where we are. Hence, writing professors are fans of footnotes. (I tire of bibliographies but I like footnoting.) A tell-tale sign of the writing professor on a topic is that he or she is “caught up” or “up to date” on a topic. So, they read catalogs and mull through the book exhibits at conferences to see what’s new.

Third, at the bottom a writing professor has scribbler’s itch. In my experience, this is what creates a difference between the teaching professor and the writing professor: the latter just has to write it down while the former figures out how to use it in class. Many do both of course, but many don’t write — and they are just fine by me. There’s no reason for all college professors to be writing. University professors, of course, have to write to survive (the famous “publish or perish” line), but not all college professors write. Those who do write have less time than university professors (I know a university professor who teaches only on Thurs afternoon from 3-5pm.)

But what is scribbler’s itch? It’s the yearning to write down everything, take notes about what we find or hear or see, and the unconquerable desire to put down what we learn into written form.