The November-December issue of Academe looks at faculty service. It is perhaps the most ambiguous of the traditional triad along with teaching and research, and the articles in this issue seek to describe the different ways that faculty conceive of service, and the different ways that service is (or is not) recognized. Read the issue here.
Thomas Miller has been serving on promotion and tenure committees for decades. In that time, he’s seen how faculty service is taken into account when considering a candidate, and seen it often take a backseat to other faculty work. Research has always been considered a faculty member’s “real” work, he writes, though tenure committees are increasingly taking teaching into account as well. But “service and outreach remain peripheral” to such considerations. Read the full story here, from the November-December issue of Academe.
I think there are two main problems with the role of service in evaluating faculty. The first is that quality is often ignored. Service is treated as a duty fulfilled by sitting in useless committee meetings, rather than something where the quality of service, not just the quantity, can be measured. The second failing of service in academia is the focus on committees and meetings. Faculty who organize extracurricular events, advise student groups, and so on often have their work overlooked.