Closing the Gap: Networking the Policy and Academic Communities

[ 16 ] asia policy Closing the Gap: Networking the Policy and Academic Communities Emily O. Goldman The Gap as Culture Attempting to “bridge the gap” that exists between those who produce academic scholarship on international relations and those who are charged with formulating and carrying out foreign policy is a worthy enterprise . A reasonable consensus exists on the sources of the gap between the academic and policy arenas—namely, the marked differences between the cultures and the incentive structures of the two worlds. The culture of academia • A culture is defined by the beliefs, behaviors, and practices of a particular group. In the academic community, nothing epitomizes academic culture and priorities better than the tenure system. Most U.S. universities and colleges, and virtually all research universities, have a tenure system. In 1998, 66% of all institutions had tenure systems in place, as did 100% of public research, private not-for-profit research, and public doctoral institutions. Tenure is an innate part of academic culture, and represents a faculty member’s rite of passage into the professoriate. Thefacultyrewardsystembasedonadvancementtowardtenureenshrines the professional academic culture. This system rewards research above all other types of academic output, warning young scholars to “publish or perish.” Tenure is linked most closely to research in the service of scientific inquiry that is published in peer-reviewed venues. The mission of scientific inquiry that has come to dominate U.S. institutions of higher learning can be traced back to the German research model, which took hold in the United States in  Tenure systems were still present in the majority of private comprehensive (58%), private liberal arts (66%), and public two-year institutions (61%). See Andrea Berger, Rita Kirshstein, and Elizabeth Rowe, “Institutional Policies and Practices: Results from the 1999 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, Institution Survey,” Department of Education (NCES 2001–201), 2001 • http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/2001201.pdf; and Rita Kirshstein, Nancy Matheson, and Zhongren Jing, “1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF:93): Institutional Policies and Practices Regarding Faculty in Higher Education,” Department of Education (NCES 97–080), 1993 • http://nces.ed.gov/pubs/97080.pdf. Emily O. Goldman, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis, is a specialist in U.S. foreign and national security policy, and military affairs. She has authored books and articles on U.S. strategic, military, and arms control policy; strategic adaptation in peacetime; military innovation; organizational change; and defense resource allocation. Her current research focuses on the strategic and foreign policy implications of revolutionary military change, and the impact of the information revolution on national security. She conducted a study for the Director of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense on the international consequences of military revolutions from the year 1500 to the present. She can be reached at . [ 17 ] the nineteenth century. The Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876, was the first institution in the United States set up expressly for the purpose of advancing science and promoting the research mission. Emergent with the research university was an increasing emphasis on professionalism. For the university scholar, professionalism quickly came to mean the advancement of knowledge in one’s chosen field, the attainment of which has often come at the expense of teaching and community service. In Making a Place for the New American Scholar, R. Eugene Rice observed that by 1974 a consensus had emerged on what it meant to be an academic professional: research is the central professional endeavor and focus of academic life quality in the profession is maintained through peer review and professional autonomy knowledge is pursued for its own sake the pursuit of knowledge is best organized by discipline reputations are established in national and international professional associations professional rewards and mobility accrue to those who persistently accentuate their specialization the distinctive task of the academic professional is the pursuit of cognitive truth The cumulative social forces at work over the past century and a quarter have worked to embed deeply into the academic psyche the belief that research and scholarship are more prestigious endeavors than teaching and service. Equally important, the incentive structure of the academy encourages scholars to engage in a particular type of research and scholarship, namely highly...