Is Research Useful?
English Professor Rises to Scholarship’s Defense
The role of research in public higher education may be under serious attack as state support continues to shrink, but Stephen J. Mexal is one of academe’s defenders. In two recent forays on this contentious subject, Mexal has penned provocative rejoinders in research’s defense in recent issues of the Chronicle of Higher Education.Capti
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STEPHEN J. MEXAL
Assistant professor of English,
comparative literature and linguistics
Residence: Tustin
Education: Ph.D. and M.A. in English
from the University of Colorado, Boulder;
B.A. in English literature from the
University of New Mexico
Year joined CSUF: 2007
Books: “Reading for Liberalism: The
Overland Monthly and the Writing of
the Modern American West,” (University
of Nebraska Press, scheduled to publish
in 2012); working on his second book
about the western fiction of Noah Brooks
(1830-1903), a writer, editor and journalist
who was one of Mark Twain’s earliest
editors and a close friend of Abraham
Lincoln.
Research interests: 19th- and 20th-
century American literature, periodicals
and the popular press, classical and
contemporary liberalism, the history of
wilderness, the literature of the
American west, literary realism
and naturalism, racial and ethnic
formation, masculinity studies,
ecocriticism and popular culture
Classes taught: “Nineteenth-Century
American Literature,” “The American
Frontier in Literature” and “Realism
and Naturalism in the American
Novel”
Syllabus: Students in Mexal’s
“Nineteenth-Century American Literature”
class are expected to:
- Read James Fenimore Cooper’s “The
Last of the Mohicans,” Herman
Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” William Wells
Brown’s “Clotel,” Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Harriet
Jacobs’ “Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl,” Mark Twain’s “Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn,” Helen Hunt Jackson’s
“Ramona” and Stephen Crane’s
“Maggie, A Girl of the Streets.”
- Write an 8- to 10-page research essay.
- Complete two written exams and eight
reading quizzes.
Favorite author and why: “Mark Twain has
been fascinating me lately, because many of
his novels are uneven at best and undisciplined
at worst. But, it’s amazing how far he got with
a lightning wit, a perfect ear for the American
vernacular and a white-hot sense of righteous
anger.”
“Either research matters, or it does not,” Mexal wrote in the May 22 issue of the Chronicle, one of the leading venues of education journalism.
“Critics of academic research never claim that research doesn’t matter at all, just that not all of it matters equally — a proposition with which most people will heartily agree. Yet, we cannot know in advance which projects will matter, or in what way,” he noted.
If that is the case, Mexal argued, then what’s the downside to producing as much work as possible and letting the future worry about quality or utility?
“Defending a surplus of research doesn’t mean defending something useless,” he said in “The Quality of Quantity in Academic Research.”
“It just means recognizing the limitations of our own knowledge and defending the possibility that something might one day be lauded for ‘quality’ we cannot yet see.”
Mexal does not shrink from asking whether academic research is useful. In fact, he devoted an earlier essay to that question in “The Unintended Value of the Humanities” published May 23, 2010, in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“It is foolish to suggest that its importance can be determined on the basis of particular utilitarian outcomes,” he argued. “We can’t know the ultimate instrumental value of research in advance. But we perform that research anyway, because we have decided that, on balance, it is good to learn new things, whether or not they eventually lead to new technologies or other useful things.”
The criticism — that professors produce too much useless academic research and waste time and resources doing so — comes in waves, especially when the economy suffers, Mexal said.
“We’re in one of those periods right now,” he noted. “But, even research that the public finds useless can have an indirect utility.”
For example, Mexal pointed to the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Through his own research, he found that research in history and literary studies shaped the world of national intelligence. When the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA’s predecessor) was established in 1942, Director William J. Donovan, staffed the agency with humanities professors. More than 50 historians were hired to develop the OSS’s analytical methods.
The scholars’ research techniques — use of footnotes, end notes, bibliography and cross- and counter-indexing — gave order and form to the practice of intelligence analysis, Mexal noted. That, in turn, enabled the OSS to do things like compile a list of foreign targets in order of importance on less than a day’s notice.
“James J. Angleton, who became chief of counterintelligence for the CIA, understood that the interpretive skills he had cultivated by studying works of literary scholarship like I.A. Richards’ ‘Practical Criticism’ (1929) and William Empson’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ (1930) could help create new methods of intelligence synthesis and information management,” Mexal wrote. “Research methods developed by humanities scholars, in sum, essentially invented the science of intelligence analysis.”
He cited a number of other examples in his Chronicle articles that he decided to write in an effort to rebut the anti-research pundits.
“It concerns me when people say, ‘let’s get people reading and thinking less,’” he said.
While Mexal’s “well and wittily argued essays on the values of research, and of research in the humanities, respond to critics both inside and outside universities,” Thomas P. Klammer, emeritus dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, said, “some of those critics are, in fact, very thoughtful.”
For example, Klammer finds it hard to dismiss the critique offered by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus in “The Self-Exam That Higher Education Would Rather Not Conduct” published in the Aug. 7 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
He stressed Hacker and Dreifus are troubled by research that is not being conducted in universities.
“They list a number of higher education topics that seem ‘off the table’ among university professors,” Klammer noted, such as “ever-higher tuition, growth in student loan debt, inflated executive pay, inequity among faculty, high dropout rates, the ‘sacred tenure track,’ and, yes, overvaluation of research and publishing ‘when it's done to bulk up resumes and reputations.’ As persuasive as Mexal’s arguments are, the very nature of the academic world demands that we challenge even our own most passionately held views … and, we wouldn’t want it any different.”
August 16, 2011
