Reviewers' Notebook: The Computer Science Faculty
From CSWiki
Academic institutions commonly categorize faculty activities into the areas of teaching, scholarship, and service. For example, the criteria for contract renewal, tenure, promotion, and salary review address these three areas; the process for merit pay develops separate scores in each category. Also, the basic structure of this section reflects these areas.
Work by the computer science faculty, however, often combines categories. Here are two examples:
- The recent NSF grant to Sam Rebelsky and Janet Davis involves developing a programming environment for the processing of images within Scheme. Many technical issues relate to connecting the existing DrScheme environment with the GIMP and creating hooks and capabilities for easy programmer use; such technical exploration clearly fits within the realm of scholarship. The grant then seeks to utilize this environment within Grinnell's introductory computer science course (CSC 151); and this application clearly falls under teaching.
- Henry Walker's development of software for the submission and review of conference papers began as a student-faculty project — providing an important teaching component to the work. At a technical level, the application has involved large-scale software development, Web interfaces, databases, and human-computer interfaces — all elements of scholarship. With the success of this system, the software now is in use by seven regional, national, and international conferences — providing a service to the greater community.
From time to time, these multifaceted elements confuse attempts for strict categorization of some work by CS faculty into the narrow fields of teaching, scholarship, and service. The department has not always been successful in getting groups outside the department to understand or appreciate the extent to which some projects should count in multiple categories.
