Robert L. Hampel

In 1987, I was a finalist for an assistant professorship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. At the end of my day on campus, I met with the Dean. Seven years later, I only remember clearly one thing she said: "If you're here, there will be enough interesting opportunities that you will have to learn how to say no."

Just say no. Too often people in my field—policy studies—don't say no. They don't even say maybe, or perhaps. Instead they commit to more projects than they can do well. They wind up in the same bind as the schools they study: accepting too many missions, doing few of them superbly, and yet promising the sky.

Most academics extend themselves into new domains and reach for topics adjacent to their major interests. Stretching beyond one's specialty isn't always the same as overextending, and academic life would be dreary if everyone plowed the same patch of the field throughout a long career. The overextender either takes on too much work within his domain, or ambitiously reaches outside his specialty to do work that he isn't fully prepared for. In either case, the odds drop for finishing the projects at the high level that the overextender is capable of reaching given a lighter load.

At first glance, the incentives in higher education seem to push away from overextension. With promotion and tenure still yoked to a focused program of research yielding refereed publications in specialized journals, why would any young scholar want to stretch beyond his niche? Why not devote five years to studying, say, the history of assessment in medical schools at the turn of the century, and turn down invitations to write, consult, and speak about contemporary assessment practices?

It may be that the major causes of overextension are psychological. Aren't compulsive/ obsessive personalities overrepresented in higher education? Don't the helping professions in general attract people willing to go the extra mile?

Even if that's so, there are nevertheless tremendous incentives for an ambitious scholar to overextend. The premium on overextension begins before the first faculty appointment. In graduate school, the dispositions that faculty encourage include stamina, perseverance and long hours. Late evenings, busy weekends, no vacations - having a full plate and then some is praised by senior faculty, who know there's some truth in the quip that the distinction between a job and a career is about 20 hours a week.

The incentives to overextend increase rather than decrease with the first appointment. In educational policy studies, there is the nontrivial prospect of money. Summer salary from a grant and a half dozen workshops might mean the difference between a lean annual income and a reasonable one, even without going as far as one writer who "got so many grants in her day that she was known as the conductress on the gravy train" (Vidal, 1993, p. 857). Universities rarely scrutinize the outside income of their faculty, and the ongoing interest in educational reform has brought many chances to earn extra dollars.

Then there is the incentive of power. Serving on commissions, facilitating retreats, writing background papers, chatting with local and state policymakers all feed the notion that an academic can make a difference in the world out there. Policy analysts don't have to face 30 or 40 cloistered years—they can shape and initiate action as well as study it, unlike their colleagues across campus in Renaissance literature or Baroque music.

Beside money and power, there is the allure of networking. We meet interesting people by virtue of projects with colleagues regionally and nationally. Fewer faces are unfamiliar in the caverns of AERA's Annual Meeting each spring. E-mail pours in, and as an 83-year-old former professor of curriculum at Teachers College said to me at a conference in Oklahoma in 1988, "My phone still rings!" As a bonus, these strangers are usually lively people who often become personal friends, close ones, valued not simply because they have or might bring us money and power.

A fourth incentive is the excitement that overextension gives our lives. Instead of the predictable routine of teaching, service, and advisement, the weeks are full of special meetings, conference calls, budget negotiations, and other jolts of energy. Even if we complain about frequent travel, the inevitable price of overextension, it too adds variety to the weeks. We look at our calendar and feel. the pride of actress Kitty Carlisle Hart checking her datebook - "My dear, it's madness, isn't it? I never say no to anything! It has made such a good life for me" (Brenner, 1993).

All those incentives seem so powerful that it is easy to overestimate their effects. Is membership on a 45-person task force true power? Maybe, but maybe not. Does an extra $20,000 from consulting offset the lifetime income lost by a promotion delayed several years? Not necessarily. And how many in the national network are opportunists or gossips rather than true friends?

More importantly, the incentives to overextend can jeopardize the altruistic habits of mind that undergird excellent research (which overextenders usually claim they are still doing). As the historian Richard Hofstadter put it, intellectuals live for, not off, ideas. In the world of policy studies, is our commitment to inquiry premised on summer salary money? Is scholarship conditional rather than unconditional love of knowledge, done for influence and clout rather than what Hofstadter called the "playful" and "pious" frame of mind the intellectual freely gives his work? (Hofstadter, 1963, 24-33).

Most overextenders have rationalized their exhausting workload. They know what they are doing and can explain why it makes sense. Here are five explanations I've heard frequently:

The university expects overextension. It welcomes the overhead from the grants' indirect costs, and also relishes the good publicity from unpaid involvements. Because the department or college wants to climb a rung or two on the ladder of institutional prestige, administrators encourage the pursuit of new opportunities by current faculty. Unless at least a few faculty are willing to reach for the stars, how will the department rankings ever improve?

If I turn this one down, I might not be asked again. Younger faculty and newcomers at any rank voice this concern. They want to be a good citizen, pull their weight, and join the community. Usually they forget that opportunities will arise repeatedly as long as their work remains first rate.

If Professor X can do it, so can I. Some faculty overextend year after year and always come through with remarkably good work and no obvious personal duress. Ralph Tyler, for instance, thrived on this regimen: "In the morning I would be in the office of the education department [which he chaired], in the afternoon in the board of examinations [which he ran], and in the evening I would teach graduate courses" (Tyler, 1987). Overextenders may have assistants, grants, and other support, but they nevertheless continue to push themselves unrelentingly, proudly living what Martin Duberman recalled as "a happy nightmare of impossible deadlines, harried conferences, maximum mania" (Duberman, 1991, 234). If Ralph and Martin can pull it off, why can't everyone?

It's all the same project. Even if others cannot see the interconnectedness, the overextender feels that it coheres. His mind is supposedly at work on one big central problem, and the workshops, board meetings, occasional papers, and other frenzy circle back to that key topic. The glue may seem thin—for instance, how schools change, or why they don't change—but that's not the overextender's sense. The "one-project" rationale is particularly useful for a Chair or Dean who continues to write. Even dreary committee meetings or routine business can be related to the overarching issue.

I can't extend myself any more now, but I can put together a team to do more work. Often a grant is designed that way from the start; sometimes help is recruited midway. Graduate students or junior colleagues can be lured with money and promises of publications. Because teamwork and collaboration are fashionable now, necessity can be sold as a virtue.

Those five rationalizations can be voiced openly, without apology. But there are several other excuses that usually remain private. They spotlight less attractive effects of overextension. Here are two:

Overextended people invariably find time for writing grants and initiating new projects. They "front load" by devoting their energy to getting things started. The excitement of bidding for competitive grants, the teamwork of writing the proposal, the dreams and fantasies of what might happen . . . so much more exciting than the day-to-day humdrum of actually doing the work once the grant is in hand. (I knew one policy analyst in Boston who predicted her reincarnation as a professor of marketing.) We shortchange implementation as often as the policymakers we criticize (Pressman & Wildavsky, 1984, 143-146). The "implementation" that gets compressed for us is the year—years!—needed later to reread, write, rewrite, and rewrite again. As a rationalization, we tell ourselves we'll someday come back to these data. It's all here, and when I have more time, I'll make good use of those packed file cabinets. Some extraordinary archives are accumulating in faculty offices as overextenders push into new projects instead of revisiting old data.

Another quiet compromise turns on the interpretation of the significance of the work once it's done. Because so many results are mixed, ambiguous, or even contradictory, the overextender has a welcome opportunity: He can define the outcomes as either more or less impressive than is the case.

On the one hand, it is usually possible to declare victory. Claim significant findings, wrap up the project, and move on to something else. Most funders prefer success to failure, and politically it's hard to admit that a large grant simply told us that life is complicated and nothing is straightforward. Perhaps every project is doomed to succeed.

On the other hand, the same ambiguity allows a different spin. This work was only a first step, an exploration, a promising beginning, and now we need the major dollars for the all important big push to learn more. Instead of declaring victory, we claim to have opened a new front in the war.

All these rationalizations eventually face the test of the quality of the work itself. Rationalizations can hide but not justify shoddy work. Sooner or later it becomes clear whose work is hasty, thin, and unoriginal.

But unfortunately the penalties for overextension, on balance, are weak. Most overextenders are talented enough that when they fall short, the loss is a missed opportunity, not incompetent work. Losing the chance to write a potentially important book is a very modest punishment; if painful, the hurt is more personal and private than any public peer sanction. And if the shortfall is more blatant—broken promises to colleagues, missed deadlines, recycling old work as new work—usually only a small fraction of one's network suffers. There will still be colleagues around the country who in the future will want to work together, if only to get the name on the grant proposal. Some eminent scholars develop a local reputation as unreliable, then move to a new university where their publications are better known than their undependability, offering a fresh start if they want to change, or a fresh set of victims if they don't. It may be that the personal disincentives to overextend—the physical and emotional costs of working around the clock—are stronger than the professional sanctions (Schor, 1991).

Critics of the American university think professors are "grotesquely underworked" (Sykes, 1988, p. 5). By my account, the problem is just the opposite. We say yes to too many tempting opportunities. The critics like to cast students as the victims of the professorial emphasis on research. But policy courses usually benefit from the real-world experiences of busy professors who pick up lively stories and anecdotes as they scoot from task force to review panel to workshop and back home for the Tuesday evening seminar (Saal, 1992). In my view, the research itself is suffering the most. Not because it's bad work, but because it's less than it might have been, given more time and focus if the authors had just said no.

References

Brenner, M (1993). The art of Mrs. Hart. The New Yorker, 69(20), 39-51.

Duberman, M. (1991). Cures. New York: Dutton.

Hofstadter, R. (1963). Anti-intellectualism in American life. New York: Knopf.

Pressman, J., & Wildavsky, A. (1984). Implementation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Saal, F. (1992). Finding room on the rack for one more hat. In A. Vaux, M. S. Stockdale, & M. J. Schwerin (Eds.), Independent consulting for evaluators. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Schor, J. (1991). The overworked American: The unexpected decline of leisure. New York: Basic Books.

Sykes, C. (1988). ProfScam: Professors and the demise of higher education. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Tyler, R. (1987). Education: Curriculum development and evaluation. An oral history conducted 1985-1987 by Malca Chall, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Vidal, G. (1993). United States. New York: Random House.