Doing research that makes a difference

[sanantone]

About a year and a half ago, I needed to do a project for a leadership course. As many should know by now, I hate leadership courses, but it's done and I made it out alive. Anyway, I chose to do some consulting for a communications department of a law enforcement agency. Emergency dispatching is not a very well-researched field despite the high stress and importance of the job to public safety. I knew of a department that had a high turnover rate; most communications departments have high turnover rates. I already knew that the department's salary was not competitive despite the county saying that it was. Their salary was competitive with agencies in cities with a tenth of the unincorporated county population. This department also dispatches for several small cities and a federal agency in the area. I also found nearby counties and cities that were much smaller and paid more. Their salary needed to be closer to the large city in its area not just because the size was more comparable, but also because they were mostly losing their dispatchers to them.

A few months after interviewing and surveying their employees and giving management the results, the pay went up about $140 per month. Several months later, the salary went up about another $110 per month. Again, several months later, the salary went up about $330 per month. In total, they saw a monthly raise of about $580. That's almost $7,000 per year, and they're now on par with the large city nearby.

I can put this on my CV, and it will look somewhat impressive to hiring committees at colleges and universities, but what they really care about is publishing in academic journals. They don't even put a lot of weight on applied research published in professional magazines. The issue I see with this is that criminal justice is supposed to be an applied field, but professors are forced to do mostly theoretical research in order to attain tenure and to even be hired for non-tenure track positions. Some theoretical research is important, but the same theories have been tested thousands of times in various ways for decades. Hardly anyone is doing anything new or trying to solve current problems. Also, most journals have a preference for quantitative research that uses complex statistical models. They drool over people who are using the newest, coolest techniques. It really comes down to mathematical showboating being more important than actually making a difference or a significant contribution to the field.

[passit1]

Another case of talking rather than doing. I see this over and over and it hurts my logical brain. One company I worked for trained us to be Lean Six Sigma White Belts and had us run kaizen events in our unit. Good stuff, especially since LSS is really TQM which is a perfect model of continuous improvement in a healthcare department.
But then at a corporate level they decided we needed to implement a lengthy checklist of how to specifically and minutely perform almost all functions. It left no room to modify the program to fit site specific needs and we were not allowed to change (improve) on the system at all. All of this was exactly the opposite of what we learned as White Belts. I called it the Anti-TQM equation.

Say one thing and do another. Especially when the another is the same thing that hasn't worked for ever and ever.
At least that county did the right thing and increased the salaries even if those other close-minded boneheads don't get it. You improved a very important system that affects the health and safety of real people. That's something to feel good about.

[sanantone]

I know the research I did was on a very small scale, but I hope to do more applied research in the future. Becoming a tenure-track professor is becoming less and less appealing to me. Even at "teaching colleges," they're looking for publications in academic journals. I had a professor tell me that he didn't have a lot of time to do the kind of research he wanted to do because he had to do stuff that had a higher chance of being published in order to qualify for tenure. I also had another professor say that she has to settle for be a B-grade teacher in order to be an A-grade researcher because that's what the university is expecting, especially since it is trying to become a Tier 1 school.

[dfrecore]

I know the research I did was on a very small scale, but I hope to do more applied research in the future. Becoming a tenure-track professor is becoming less and less appealing to me. Even at "teaching colleges," they're looking for publications in academic journals. I had a professor tell me that he didn't have a lot of time to do the kind of research he wanted to do because he had to do stuff that had a higher chance of being published in order to qualify for tenure. I also had another professor say that she has to settle for be a B-grade teacher in order to be an A-grade researcher because that's what the university is expecting, especially since it is trying to become a Tier 1 school.

This is something I've noticed for many years. I have to say that the teachers I had in CC or GGU (a small private college that prides itself on having professors who are part-time at the college and full-time working in their fields), all were so much better than a lot (most) of the professors I had at a large state university.

A lot of courses had 250 people in there, or were taught by grad students (many of whom are Chinese or Indian, English is not their first language, and they are all but impossible to understand). it was obvious to me that the school just did not care about giving their students a quality education, but in getting their name in the paper. It was terrible. I didn't see how anyone could thrive in that type of environment; I certainly couldn't.

When I decided to go back to school at the CC, it was SO much better - the teachers all actually cared, were there because they enjoyed teaching, and were experts in their fields. At GGU, the professors ALL worked in different areas of business, leadership, consulting, psychology, etc. They were really, really good, and the courses were meaningful. I never felt like any of the things I was doing wouldn't apply to my job or my life.

I've kind of given up on the university system here in the U.S. I'm not excited for my kids to have to go to these schools, and am encouraging them to do CC first, before making any decisions on whether to go on or not. I think they will get just as good of an education at CC that they would from a grad student teaching them at a large 4-yr college.

[Leherself]

I guess that's the trouble with academia - I know several people who have given up the idea of tenure entirely. They work in industry or government, in positions where they feel like they make a real difference and stay on the leading edge of their fields, and then they adjunct mostly for the joy of teaching. A friend with a PhD in Linguistic Anthropology told me that he wasn't interested in becoming a full time professor, because it would take too much time away from the projects he considers most important to him (working with small communities' native language revitalization projects, for instance). Of course, it doesn't help that he's a Linguistic Anthropology specialist in a University that is primarily interested in Archaeology. Heaven forbid a social scientist be interested in working with living people...

[sanantone]

I do have to say that it is nice to have professors who are available several hours a day every weekday on campus and often on weekends by email. I did have some CC and for-profit college instructors who had to go out of town, couldn't be contacted, and had to delay grading papers in the middle of a course. Because their full-time jobs were doing something else, they couldn't dedicate a lot of time to their instructor positions and definitely did not have enough time to do applied research and consulting. At the same time, it is kind of frustrating to have professors who know very little about the occupations in their fields. Even though I have never been a police officer, I know a lot about them from my work in security, a non-sworn job at a law enforcement agency, and from research. I was appalled that our PhD program didn't have courses in corrections and policing like most other PhD programs. They are going to add those courses soon, but they've already sent graduates out into the world who know nothing about the largest professions in the CJ field. Corrections and law enforcement-related courses make up the bulk of CJ courses.

I don't think it is really necessary for the person to currently be in the field even though it helps him/her stay current. I had a professor who stayed current because she was always doing consulting work with police departments. Organizations often turn to universities for evaluations and consulting because they lack the research skills to pinpoint a problem. There are things people do incorrectly in industry and pass down generation after generation because they don't know anything about the scientific method. One example is arson investigation. The training for the field is very poor, and it took a chemist in a death penalty case to see that the investigation was done very poorly and based on pseudoscience. But, this is the kind of stuff I want to see academics do more of. Even though the person ended up being executed, the Texas Commission on Fire Protection is calling for better training. This chemist's work is having a real impact.

A professor that I've gravitated toward because I don't have to struggle to explain to him what I'm trying to do was a former state trooper. It may have been decades since he was a police officer, but he knows how it is and what it takes to become one. I believe you can have the best of both worlds: a professor who has worked in the field in the past and a professor who is always going to be available to you. The research requirements mostly take away from the time needed to properly develop a course and prepare for lectures.