Since that spring evening, unveiling and closing the gap between talk and action has become my mission. Based on my own efforts and on phone interviews conducted with twenty-five academic administrators during the summer of 1994, I pose these two challenges. We need to give teaching greater visibility, and we need to develop better assessments of teaching quality. Teaching is an inherently private act, an exchange among consenting adults behind closed doors. Scholarship, on the other hand, is public, available at any hour, stackable, countable, shiny, visible.
Grants are trophies in our reputation rooms, evidence of our intellectual prowess.
Even service activities are performed in the presence of peers and are easily counted and evaluated, if one has a mind to do so. Meanwhile our campuses have become addicted to this kind of visibility and external evidence of success. State college campuses especially have gradually modified their missions from serving local clients and needs to competing in a global marketplace. We once devoted enormous attention to excavating the talents of our local students and now we spend more time developing the potential of our faculty members, as THEY compete in the international game of who's best. In fact, we seem to look for faculty who will enhance our University's reputation, not necessarily our students' comprehension.