University of Illinois-Chicago November 9, 2000
Okay. We're going to get started. Lights, camera, action. Rolling.
My name ís Gerald Graff and Iím, have the title of Associate Dean of Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIC. I'm here to make a few welcoming remarks. My office is helping to support this conference. I want to just say a few brief things about undergraduate research and the specific topic of this conference. Iím a convert to the cause of undergraduate research. I think itís the right solution to the big long-standing problem of the whole split between teaching and research in research universities. Iím sure you all know the complaints and maybe even have made them yourself, you know,
'Why are university professors so deeply engaged in their research that they often neglect teaching or are bad teachers or arenít even around, you know, arenít even on campus when you come, and pay your tuition money to study with an illustrious professor, the professor isnít even around? Heís, he or she is on research leave. And, of course, these are real problems. Up until recently, the usual solution, proposed solution has been, or the usual exhortation has been to somehow get professors to pay less attention to their research, and more attention to their teaching, you know, shift the whole emphasis away from research and more toward teaching. But it seems to me, for a lot of reasons, that ís self-defeating, especially for a research university, where much of the point of what the university is doing centers on research.
One hopes, cutting-edge research, advanced research, and so forth. I think a much better solution to this research/teaching split is to bring our academic research into our classrooms, to teach our research. And to start exploiting what I think has always been a vastly underutilized kind of potential in faculty research in teaching. Which has, I think, a transformative effect on students, often. That is, it positions students as co-researchers with the faculty. Which I think is a very important and remarkable change, if you think about it. Seeing the student, the undergraduate student, and one could think of extending this into high schools as well, as collaborators in the research efforts of educators. And of the discipline.
The more I think about this idea, undergraduate research and student research, the more strange it seems to me that we havenít always thought this way, or that we still, a lot of us still donít think this way. I mean, undergraduate research is still a somewhat new, and novel and innovative kind of idea. Which seems to me kind of bizarre, if you think about it, because whatís the alternative, whatís the alternative to seeing students as co-researchrs. It seems to me that if we donít see students as collaborators in our research, then weíre sort of expecting students to be alienated from academia. We're saying, in effect, Well, research is for the faculty only and the students, really, undergraduate, high school students really arenít supposed to be involved in that. Weíre really saying then, that the faculty and the students donít really belong to the same culture. That what the faculty is doing is not necessarily of any concern to the students that weíre teaching. It seems to me that not only bizarre, but kind of perverse, and anti-educational and subversive to the whole, the whole set of educational ideals that weíre supposed to hold.
So not to see undergraduate research as normal kind of normalizes alienation in universities, kind of sends the message that, Well, the faculty is involved in kind of high-level intellectual activity and the students arenít supposed to be. At the same time, I think the, maybe the real beneficiary of undergraduate research is not only undergraduate students but also the faculty itself, because teaching our research, to teach our research well, means taking the responsibility to make it interesting, make it clear, explain it clearly, explain why itís important, why it might matter.
I know that when I started assigning my own, at some point in my own teaching career, I started assigning a lot of my own writing. And it had an interesting affect on me. I realized that I had to write, to start writing the stuff better, my own publication. If I was going to expect students and people outside my immediate colleagues and people in my field to know what I was talking about or why I was talking about it, I had to start writing it better, doing it better. So I think maybe the faculty has the most to gain from undergraduate research.
Now, no topic could be more useful, I think, and more pertinent and urgent for undergraduate research than the topic of gangs, gangs in Chicago, specifically, that we're here to talk about today. And the related, all the related urban social problems, poverty, violence, inequality and so forth, the state of the criminal justice system and so forth. I, my own gang research was very informally conducted growing up in Chicago in the forties and fifties.
I, and correct me, in thinking ahead to this conference, I started thinking that when I was in high school and college, I went to Nicholas Senn High School on the northside. There was emerging at that time a big discourse about juvenile delinquency, and juvenile delinquents. And a lot of talk and concern about that. Although I was a good, respectable Jewish boy, respectable neighborhood on the way to the suburbs, as it turned out, I ran for awhile with some kids who, and at that time there was no terminology of gangs. It was tough kids, "toughs," or "hoods," they were called then. All the terminology has changed.
And suddenly, at some point--and I'd be curious, I'd be curious to learn why this happened, and why it happened when it happened--the pheneomenon of juvenile delinquency morphed into organized gangs, something much more organized, and eventually more dangerous and threatening, or at least scary to people outside gangs. So I sort of feel that I have lived through this moment of transition when juvenile delinquents and bad kids, and so forth, morphed in...made this transition into gangs.
I at some point realized that it was a lot safer for me to channel my own impulse toward gang activity into academic work, and academic kinds of gangs. If you think about it, and I don't mean to be frivolous about any of this or to make light of a serious problem, but if you think about it, academia is very much organized like the way street gangs are organized, in terms of packs and clubs and rivalries, that play themselves out, usually, in arguments and verbal attacks or written attacks rather than with switchblades or guns. But we have our gang labels and our various kinds of gang language, signalling systems, that signal which gang we belong to, like the quantitative researchers versus the qualitative researchers, or in my field of humanities, it's traditionalists who believe in the Great Books versus feminists or deconstructionists or other "gangs" who believe in interrogating the assumptions of the classics and so forth. But there's an interesting question in my mind, of to what extent gang... the kinds of thinking that go into investments in gang activities might be rechanneled into intellectual and academic kinds of work. I've seen it happen in, maybe it happened, in some ways, in my own case.
In any case, I do think that, or I hope that undergraduate research is an idea
whose time has come. And so, get ready to make some history at this conference.
Thanks. And Iím going to pass this on to John Hagedorn, Professor John
Hagedorn, Criminal Justice department, one of the leading figures in gang research,
and coolest dudes in the field. And John will introduce our speaker.