Policy, Praxis, and Research in the 21st-Century University

• In Event: Critical Qualitative Research and the Corporatized University: On a Collision Course

Abstract

Once upon a time faculty conducted research, analyzed their data,
presented a paper at a conference such as AERA, wrote an article, and
eventually their work was published. Faculty wrote to and for one another.
Although productive faculty always may have been busy and consumed with
their work, the pace and tempo of their writing seems foreign in a world of
twitter and texting. Our scholarly journals still have a leisurely pace of
reviewing: an individual may submit a text and the article may finally see
daylight three years after the initial interview occurred. In service to
science, validity, and reliability may well have been useful purposes, but
the 21st century surely needs alternative formats if we are to be involved
not only in academic life, but also with regard to societal change. This
paper focuses less on the past and more on what the academy needs to do to
rethink the role of the engaged intellectual - one who not merely studies
problems, but tries to resolve them.

Author

• William G. Tierney, University of Southern California