Journal Manuscripts in Higher Education: A Framework

The Review of Higher Education Summer 1982, Volume 5, No. 4 Pages 181-196 Copyright® 1982 Association for the Study of Higher Education All Rights Reserved JOURNAL MANUSCRIPTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A FRAMEWORK Robert J. Silverman The breast beating has stopped, but the problems remain. Once upon a time, not too many years ago, higher educationists were being confronted with their professional immaturity: the poor logic of their prepa­ ration programs and the lack of empirical and theoretical rigor in their schol­ arship. Bloland (1979) viewing the reviews, noted the belief that “ higher education has no consistent collection of assumptions, beliefs, methods and perceptions which define it as a field, and which indicate what to study, how to assess what is studied, and what constitutes the development and accu­ mulation of knowledge in the field” (p. 1). Negative assumptions and the expectation of embarrassing answers no longer follow questions related to field development. We are in a “ mapping” stage. For example, we are interested in understanding the common problems facing professors of higher education (Cooper, 1980); the creation, through ASHE, of a research typology; and the development of options as we select approaches to the disciplines used in our teaching. Yet, in moving to a different stage, we have neglected to address basic definitional problems; we have failed to debate what questions we should ask. Among the curiosities we can add our failure to use the conceptual literature employed to study other fields to understand ourselves in ways that have useful implications. For example, we may adopt the work of Anthony Biglan to appreciate disciplinary behavior but not to ask how we as an emerging applied/life/soft field might function (Creswell and Roskens, 1981). Nor do we consider ourselves, as Jerome Ravetz does, from the perspective of an immature or ineffective field, yet we certainly are aware of the implications of such: . . .genuine insights at their base, which may well be valuable in the education of students whose previous experience is utterly foreign to the area of inquiry, become reduced to cliches as teachers and researchers Robert J. Silverman is professor of education, Ohio State University 181 182 The Review of Higher Education in the field rub them together in an attempt to produce a plausible facsimile of scientific arguments. And their conclusions too, to the extent that they are not vacuous academic jargon, will be nothing but rear­ rangements of the cliches that constitute the materials of the field, or­ ganized for the best performance of the political functions of a result. (Ravetz, 1971, p. 385) We know in our field “ in response to the urgent calls for helpful research, a clever mediocrity can build an empire and attain power and prestige” (Ravetz, 1971, p. 384), yet this realization does not generally affect our appreciation of the scholarship this orientation fosters. One cannot take stock, however, without inventing appropriate ways of doing so. Since every typology, every concept, every fact, every metaphor, every question is accompanied with the framer’s presuppositions, assump­ tions, and values, to develop a framework without explicit awareness of its meaning only allows one to discover after its use that one’s conclusions are as anticipated (e.g., Fleck, 1979). The purpose of this paper is to present a framework through which the products of inquiry that take the form of journal articles can be categorized. It is the author’s belief that we do not have a rich enough language or conceptual scheme to consider our work, and thus we use narrow and often biased terms. We confront a paper and judge it to be rigorous or sloppy, quantitative or qualitative, theoretical or polemical; and usually we believe we know what is good for us as well as for others—and what isn’t. 1 begin with the premise that excellence takes many forms; that there is value, but different value, in well done but alternative approaches to inquiry; that a field such as ours develops most fully when a variety of quality work is disseminated and appreciated for different reasons; when such work rep­ resents the fullness and creativity of persons and allows for dialogue with readers who access the literature for...