Focusing on Faculty Research
An Essential Element of Liberal Arts Education

By W. Rand Smith
Acting Provost and Dean of the Faculty   

On October 8, the first Faculty Symposium was held in conjunction with the dedication of the Donnelley and Lee Library. It was an opportunity to feature the rich scholarly and creative talents of the Lake Forest faculty and to make use of the new library facilities that support this work. A random sample of topics demonstrates the diversity of faculty interests:

  • “The Sex Life of Guppies: Student-Faculty Collaborations” (Anne Houde, Biology)
  • “Energy Politics: Crude Oil, MNC’s, the Nigerian State, and Corporate Social Responsibility”
    (Paul Orogun, Politics)
  • “Nelson Rodrigues: Brazil Discovers Its Greatest Playwright” (David George, Spanish)
  • “The Many Uses of Codes” (David Yuen, Mathematics and Computer Science)
  • “Neuropsychology of Personal History: Do Brain Wave Harmonies Underlie Working Memory?” (Robert Glassman, Psychology)
  • “Jesus as a Jewish Wisdom Teacher” (Ron Miller, Religion)

With nearly 50 faculty participating, the symposium highlighted a key feature of the Lake Forest faculty: its commitment to research and artistic creation. A few years ago, I tabulated the publishing records of the faculty which, at that time, comprised about 80 full-time members. They had published over 50 books in the previous decade, along with scores of articles in major scholarly journals. Faculty had also won competitive fellowships and awards from such institutions as the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright program, MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, ASCAP, and National Institutes of Health. Since I conducted my study, faculty productivity has remained at a high level.

One might reasonably ask: So what? Why should research and artistic creativity matter at a liberal arts college whose primary mission is undergraduate instruction? Shouldn’t Lake Forest professors be spending their time with students, not pursuing their individual research and creative agendas? At a time when politicians, administrators, and even many parents of college students are criticizing higher education for neglecting a central mission—undergraduate teaching—how can we justify an emphasis on faculty research and creativity?

The short answer is that faculty research and creative activity are essential to our mission of educating undergraduates. Far from being antithetical to teaching, research and creative work are necessary, indeed they are preconditions for effective liberal arts instruction. This is so for three main reasons.

First, Lake Forest faculty do much of their research in collaboration with students, and thus many of our students participate directly in the creation of new scholarly knowledge. A prime example is the Richter Scholars Program, a seminar and research initiative for about 30 of our most capable first-year students. In the summer following their first year, these students work full-time, one-on-one with professors over a ten-week period, helping the latter carry out their research. Other students often collaborate with faculty as research assistants. This is especially true in the natural sciences, where grants from the National Science Foundation and other funding agencies help support students working with faculty in biology, chemistry, and physics labs. These are often transformative experiences for students, leading them to pursue graduate study and careers in research-related fields.

Second, engaging in research and artistic creation makes us better teachers. As scholars and artists, we join, in effect, a global conversation in our disciplines. This is an ongoing conversation that challenges and informs our assumptions, guiding questions, methods, and final products—be they scholarly writings, poems, or musical compositions. To be cut off from such a conversation—and the intellectual community that is engaged in it—would be like being left alone in a room with no sources of stimulation. Little by little, our intellectual and creative faculties would atrophy, and eventually, to put it simply, we would cease to be interesting.

Finally, faculty members engaged in research and artistic pursuits serve as role models of liberal learning. The goal of liberal education is to learn to think critically, which means the capacity to question, evaluate, and draw independent conclusions. Knowing how to think critically implies the ability to function effectively in a world of uncertainty, spin, multiple meanings, and competing verities. As scholars and artists, we must develop and constantly use this ability, or we will surely fail. If we want our students to become critical thinkers, we must demonstrate how critical thinking is done. Thus sharing the messy, sometimes maddening process of research and artistic creation with our students provides them a direct window into the “how” of critical thinking.

For all these reasons, projects presented at the Faculty Symposium were a visible demonstration of the liberal arts in action. Scholarly and creative initiatives help bring students and faculty closer together and serve to enrich the mutual interchange that constitutes learning in an academic community. In such a demonstration there is much to celebrate.