(No. 2)

Some "Whys" Behind the "Hows" of University Teaching and Research by Robert F. Cook Professor of French University of Virginia

"Hows" and "Whys" in Practice

I've presented three cases that are similar but not exactly identical. One is solvable and has been solved; one cannot be solved unless new evidence appears; and one, Camus's suicide, is "moot" in the technical sense, i.e., there is no scholarly reason to bring it up. All of these are legitimate research results, since they all can be applied, even if only in an argument to the effect that some claims are a waste of time.

My reference to my own motives in the Camus case brings out another key aspect of the research business. You do research because there is something you want, sometimes rather urgently, to find out. Academic research is not and cannot be an assignment given you by someone else. If it's not done by a person who is interested in the topic, it will be just as bad as teaching done by someone who is not interested. Believe me, there is a lot of that sort of research out there. On the other hand, as I hope I have shown, there is more than one reason why a topic may be interesting. As one of my senior colleagues used to say, as researchers, we don't take hold of problems; they take hold of us. I want to suggest that the most immediate motivation for your research, and also the one that will help you most rapidly as professionals and also will help your students ultimately, is the plain unvarnished curiosity that is so familiar to you from your legal and forensic work. It is not just curiosity about some fact but an equal curiosity about why people make the claims they do. Research may well start from an experience that you probably have already had and that goes something like all of mine--something like this:

One day you are listening to yourself teach and you realize that you are not satisfied with what you hear yourself say. Or you may be preparing the class and you are not satisfied with what you are about to say, which is neater because you don't have to stop and tell the students there is a problem, but not necessarily better, because it is vitally important for them to know there are problems and that you, their teacher, know a problem when you see one.

In either case, your research starts immediately. Something is bothering you and your first task is to find out what it is. Two textbooks disagree with each other. Or your experience, your reading, your observation, make it clear the textbook is misleading. The picture of the world has a ripple in it. What do you do? The same thing curious people always do; the same thing you would do if your car's maintenance manual told you to dump the oil out of the engine and then test-run it. You aren't actually likely to do that without checking further. You don't proceed blindly in the face of an anomaly. You don't ignore the fact that an uncertainty exists. You don't stop thinking about the problem just because it is behaving in an irritating way, challenging you to get involved.

On the contrary, you and it take hold of each other. You go to the library, where the experts (the intellectual equivalents of Mr. Goodwrench) are immediately available. You go through the specialized procedure that finds the studies on the matter, which will in fact include the sources for what your textbook says. I don't have time to present the wide variety of trustworthy sources in detail, and of course they vary from situation to situation in any case . Usually there are published bibliographies that list the work already done on a given topic in some organized way. Other authors have been through the process of consulting these sources, and while they may not have found everything, the sources they list and the uses they make of them will help greatly.

As I'm sure you know from experience, the World Wide Web is much less handy to use than bibliographies are (it is not very well indexed, by its nature) and it is not necessarily put together, as standard sources are, with the goal of helping you in your mental struggle. Part of getting the work done is finding out what sort of thing you can get electronically--statistics, for example, or certain public documents--and what information, given the expense and complexity of data entry, is not and may never be available outside the library. (Incidentally, I took a look to see whether the police reports on Camus's death are included in the Website produced by the newspaper Le Monde, and learned, not surprisingly, that the archives accessible through the site only go back a short time. You can imagine the data-entry tasks involved in making the entire run of that paper available, and you may also be able to imagine the accountants' reactions to such an idea. Your Web experience may also tell you that just because I didn't find a link to the full archive on the site, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.)

Then what do you do next? You read. In our fields you read a lot, because the answer to your problem may already have been written down without the textbook author's knowledge. If it hasn't been, then you may be about to disagree with some important people. If the problem turns out to be real, and you have the evidence and a fair argument, the ethics of academic research say you have a duty to disagree.

In this work you cannot be hurried. You have to know a lot more, see a lot more sources, talk to a lot more people, than anyone else has ever done before, if you intend to solve a meaningful problem in human behavior, or the history of law, or language and community. It's a full-time job, which we are all expected to carry out while busy with a lot of other jobs. Hence it requires a tremendous ability to concentrate and to shift gears fast and completely. Speaking of myths, it should be clear that professors are not actually absent-minded. They're just concentrating on something, and that something doesn't happen to be taking out the garbage.

I have been talking primarily about the structure of scholarship as it manifests itself in teaching and research, because the structure is the part that is least visible on the outside, and even some practitioners in fields like mine don't have a clear idea of how research serves teaching. I do not mean thereby to neglect the importance of research results and data, only to point out that they are not the entire picture. Since they are often the most visible parts, they are also likely to be the best understood. Still, it might be worth mentioning some areas in which broad or general research can have useful applications. A first example that comes to my mind, because I have been involved in the training of my department's language teaching assistants, is the rapidly expanding research into how languages are acquired. The initial questions are abstract ones of this type: do we learn a second language in the same way we learn our mother tongue? What about people who learn two languages more or less at once, or in rapid sequence, as is the case in older bilingual communities? For speed and accuracy of acquisition, does it matter what the first language is? (Of course it matters for the type of error the learner might make, and hence for what the teacher needs to point out.) Can you learn a third language quicker and better once you have learned a second? Does the age of second language acquisition matter; do adults find pathways through a new grammar and culture more easily than children, or vice versa? In order to work toward answers for these questions, you need a whole toolbox. You have, in particular, to be able to design a study that meets well-known but pretty tight rules of validity. And despite my simplifications, the answers are likely to be something besides a simple "yes" or "no."

Foreign language study tends to be thought of, even inside the university, as the acquisition of a short-term practical tool. You learn a language only because you have to talk to someone who doesn't speak yours, and as we all know, people all over the world speak English, so the whole thing is a waste of time. Given the variety of language and culture groups in the world, that might seem logical, but in fact the variety implies there must be something more to the process. That something we take away from foreign language acquisition is the usual something we take away from an academic discipline: the general knowledge that can be used whatever the specifics of the situation. After all, even if "they" all speak English, the conversation is still being carried on in a foreign language. That is so obvious that it is constantly forgotten, thus getting Americans into trouble all over the globe. I submit to you that if you do not know what it means to speak a foreign language--if you have never tried to learn one and to express yourself adequately and completely in it--you will never understand what is happening when you converse with a foreigner speaking what is for that person a foreign tongue. The only thing that hides the logic of that reality is a lack of experience. Until recently most Americans only rarely encountered foreigners and often did not have to do serious business with them. Now America itself is a multi-lingual and multi-cultural place. And so research into language acquisition, based on the one end in formal linguistics and on the other end in classroom innovations, turns out to be practical in multiple ways. It allows us to see the principles behind multi-cultural conversations and at one and the same time allows us to prepare students to succeed in those situations.

This is a fair example of how the "whys" and the "hows" relate to each other. The preparation I refer to is an indirect one because there is no way to put the student into all the situations that are going to arise. A lot of our work is necessarily indirect--in the humanities we don't always do experiments, but experiments are similar in that they are indirect tests. There is no point in burning a lot of fuel and breaking perfectly good airplanes when we have wind tunnels. The student has to have a broadly applicable background that comes from study and reflection because experience, while also a great teacher, is both unorganized and inefficient. It is broad background, once acquired, and not the grammar of German or French, that is the tool for communication; the latter are tools for teaching. Distinctions of this sort are built into the framework of professorial thinking, and they define the relationships between study, writing, training and practice without allowing us to neglect any of the four.

In what areas can we apply the process? Because it is a matter of principle, of method, of orderly investigation and exposition, the process of academic research can be applied to a wide variety of areas while both contributing to knowledge and also training your mind to serve as a model to your students. The topics on which research is done may seem bizarre, but that is sometimes because some of their numerous functions are being forgotten. You may remember Senator William Proxmire and the Golden Fleece Awards. With great fanfare, the Senator used to read out the titles of research projects given Federal funding and hold them up to ridicule as a waste of public money--the citizens were being "fleeced" by irresponsible and greedy scientists. The projects thus criticized did not start to make sense until the scientists went before the cameras (with much less fanfare) and read off something besides the title. One of my favorites was the set of NSF-funded studies on the sex life of the butterfly. One of the issues in that case, if I remember it correctly, turned out to be plant pollination and ways to increase our food supply. Butterflies were chosen as subjects because, precisely, they allowed the researchers to isolate parts of the pollination process in a useful way. That is easy to understand once you hear the explanation, but in order to understand it you have to care enough to read beyond the title. I needn't insist that the agency that granted scarce funds to the project made sure it was read in full, over and over, by highly qualified experts who judged it as a whole. In my field the federal endowment rejects scores of applications for every one of the rare ones it supports, mostly on the basis of readers' reactions.

This brings us to yet another stage in the long process of scholarly communication: reaching out to other interested and involved specialists. Let's say you now have come up with a solution to the question that was bothering you in my earlier example, or at least you can make a contribution to solving it. You will not, of course, keep the work to yourself and your students. If the problem was indeed real, other teachers and researchers, your peers, also have it. Your work has to be written up so it can be widely shared--that is, for publication. Again, I am sure I am not presenting some novelty to persons involved in law enforcement. I am told most of a good officer's time is spent at the keyboard these days. The differences are in the details. What a scholar writes is a form of report, but it follows different rules. Scholarly publication, via books and articles, is costly--in human time and also in printing, distribution, and archiving expenses. Even those of us who don't download dirty pictures never seem to have enough hard disk space. Reading and assimilating scholarly work is time-consuming, and professors do not have a lot of time on their hands. And that is why footnotes, for example, look the way they do. They are a sort of code that actually promotes efficient communication--once the code is learned and the conventions are familiar. That is also why many articles and books follow a logical sequence: present the problem, then present what is known about it, then present your hypothesis and data, then your argument, then your conclusion. A reader thus knows where to look for the parts of your work he or she will have to judge and eventually repeat or reject. The blanks you are filling in are loosely but usefully arranged for quick review as well as deeper study. At the risk of repeating myself, when you write an evidential argument or a critique, you are doing what you ask your students to do.

Writing for scholarly publication is an exacting and challenging task. It requires a great deal of concentration--you are writing for the permanent record as an expert, to be judged by other experts. But if you set the differences in audience aside, you realize the act has a lot in common with teaching. It is another phase of an activity that would not be at all hard to see as unified. I began today with a description of students watching how you teach and absorbing what you have to say about your topic not only for the information involved but for the method. What authorizes you to say what you say, what are the areas where you suspend judgement, even expert judgement, where do you disagree with other qualified experts, what arguments do you make and what is their validity? A moment's thought makes it clear that other experts are also hoping to learn from your work and that the channels on which they are listening to you include these same ones.

What I've just said is a reminder that you share the scholarly world with a number of other people with the same interests and the same degree of involvement in a discipline and its problems. Some of them you may never meet. But the investigators you deal with are not just in books. Many you will exchange ideas with in correspondence and face to face at conferences. Conferences are expensive to attend; they involve travel costs, registration fees, and often organizational dues. It is in everyone's interest for your institution to offer you some financial support for this part of your work. But expensive and time-consuming as they are, conferences can be essential for the kind of debate and discussion that even email, useful as it is, doesn't allow for.

And so you work for yourself and for students but also as part of a scholarly community. All communities have ethics, and so does this one, ethics that derive from all the various uses to which your work is put. I've mentioned the ease with which a teacher can abuse a student's trust. Lying to colleagues is harder: they may very well catch you. And they need to keep their guard up, since they are about to apply your conclusions and use your data. That implies yet another stage in this complex routine. Not only do we meet and debate with each other; we submit our work to each other's judgement. No piece of scholarship is circulated formally without passing through numerous hands first. Again, that is done to avoid wasting people's precious time and resources.

Therefore an article or book, once complete, is sent out into the community for a first set of Others to read and judge. The first stop is on the desk of an editor, a sort of executive officer representing either a press or a journal. (In practice, there is probably an editorial assistant who gives your work an initial reading primarily for appropriateness; it's surprising how many articles on twentieth-century poetry get sent to journals on the Middle Ages, for example.) The editor does not decide on the work's future all alone, but (if impressed) selects persons with the right qualifications and sends copies of it to them to read and critique in detail (right down to the punctuation sometimes, depending on the reader). If the article is not accepted for publication, the journal owes you an explanation; if the article is accepted, the next phase begins: you negotiate any proposed changes with the editor, you read one or more sets of proofs, you wait for the journal to catch up with itself and print the article, which can sometimes take months and even years. Once your work is out, it may well be reviewed again in print--books are commonly given extensive commentary in the journals in the field, and the value of that commentary can vary widely. Then after a while, you start getting letters from editors yourself, asking you for your opinions on yet other submissions. It's a complex business, but not an arbitrary one in structure.

All of these readers are within the process, not outside it, and their judgement is supposed to function the same way yours does. Still, not everybody plays by the rules. I need not try to hide from you the fact that in practice, scholarly publication is sometimes affected by various forms of social and ideological bias. Extensive study has shown that the fate of submitted articles--acceptance for publication, or refusal--depends in some, not in all, cases on the institution with which the writer of the article is associated. There is no point in lying about this: there is a chance it will be harder for an author signing "FBI Academy" to get articles accepted. I have the problem myself, partly because of the type of subjects I work on (heroism is currently out of favor), but also, to my surprise, because I am associated with what many of my colleagues consider a conservative institution. There are, in the academic world as everywhere, a few small people with large egos, who will try to block you simply because they don't agree with what you are saying. Allowance has to be made for these difficulties, which can be very frustrating, coming as they do at the end of a long and arduous process of study and writing. But I hope I have indicated that the process is, in the long run at least, designed to be self-correcting, since the experts involved are always numerous. Despite some upsetting experiences of my own over the years, I am still convinced the solution is to furnish work of the highest quality possible, clear, logical, well-documented and with an important point to make.

So far I have not formally defined the term "academic discipline," which is the official name of our areas of study. I hope I have given enough details to let the definition come to the surface by itself. Careful writing and fair-minded lecturing about complicated and sometimes controversial topics; long and detailed preparation through reading and debate; reflection that is never day-dreaming; these activities develop in the practitioner a network of habits. The habits (clarity, organization, logic, the energy required to obtain full documentation, the concentration necessary to hold multiple concepts and conflicting arguments in the mind at once and give them fair treatment) are needed just about whatever topic is at hand. The history of the law is an academic discipline; so is the history of popular entertainment. The law of the sea may be called a subdiscipline, and the same can be said of the history of comic books. The uses and forms of foreign languages are a discipline, and so is the nature of language itself. And, as I have suggested, we not only teach but study teaching in itself as an act and as a function. The myth to which I referred at the outset is a powerful one. Politicians, journalists, public agencies sometimes treat university teaching as a limited mechanism for the transmission of what is known-for purveying a body of knowledge whose origins are distant and whose nature is not at issue. But knowledge goes beyond the "whats" to envelop the inseparable "hows" and "whys" that are all present in the specialist's mind at once, from beginning to end. We discipline ourselves mentally and we offer students pathways to their own habits of investigation and communication. And I have a secret for you. To anyone who enjoys a challenge, it's a lot more fun than the myth says it is.

I have touched today on some major points about a complicated process, much of which is not frequently talked about if at all. I'm very conscious of the many aspects I have slighted or simply omitted--a sense of incompleteness that is there every time we teach, and that is part of the professor's mindset too. It is risky indeed to give a summary of a summary, but here goes. In summary, the practices and principles hidden by the myths of teaching and research turn out to be useful, shareable, and intertwined with each other. There is no opposition between teaching and research; they are two manifestations of the same ways of thinking and working. These ways of thinking involve collecting information, arranging it, judging it, judging what others have said about it, and reporting on the outcome for the public record. They serve teachers by keeping our skills of evaluation and argument in good shape, and they serve students through the model they inevitably furnish. They serve the larger community at the same time, because despite all I have said to bring out other aspects of the process, the results--our claims, our proofs, our suggestions for further research where it is needed--fit into growing and evolving bodies of knowledge about people, phenomena and events. It's a big job, and its very bigness, the claims it makes on us, is part of what makes it worthwhile.