Abstract
Professor Antczak refers to the tension between teaching and research in the public research university. My experience is in a private research university. Private institutions face at least as serious a tension, and their experience might offer insight about how to make that tension productive rather than harmful. A private research university has the same commitments to advancing knowledge and insight, and to graduate education, as does the public university, but it also has a strong commitment to undergraduate education. It has to; often more than 50 percent of its budget is derived directly from undergraduate tuition. Since the cost to students and their families is much higher at a private than at a public institution, the private university must demonstrate "value added" to justify the additional cost. The demonstration usually focuses on special undergraduate programs and the quality of undergraduate teaching. Moreover, it is expected that the responsibility for undergraduate teaching will be primarily borne by the faculty; at my university, for example, only 6 percent of the teaching is done by graduate assistants. A department will have fewer teaching assistantships to award than will its public university counterpart, and it is less likely that an individual faculty member will be able to build a research team around his or her particular interests.
Journal Title
Iowa Journal of Communication
Volume
27
Issue
1
First Page
99
Last Page
111
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Zarefsky, David
(1995)
"Teaching, the Communication Discipline, and the Research Community,"
Iowa Journal of Communication: Vol. 27:
No.
1, Article 15.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ijc/vol27/iss1/15
Copyright
©1995 Iowa Communication Association
