The Usefulness of Consulting as a Teaching Tool

Abstract

The recurring theme in the literature about faculty consulting is that consulting brings a number of benefits to the individual, students, and the institution, has a positive impact on teaching and research, but does not figure directly in the traditional reward system of academe. Even though administrators and academicians recognize the benefits that consulting can bring to teaching and give it lip service, the bottom line is it is important to develop research projects from consulting work in order for consulting to be considered a worthwhile use of faculty time (Coulson, 1990; Pease, 1993; Boyer & Lewis, 1984; Patton, 1980). Without going into the is more important, teaching or research? debate, it may be that administrators and faculty believe it is important to derive research from consulting activities because research articles serve as concrete evidence that consulting augments and contributes to traditional professorial duties. The positive effect that consulting has on teaching is harder to measure. This study attempts to provide evidence that private consulting can be used as a tool in classroom teaching in a way that provides direct benefits to students. It reports a concerted effort to use private consulting experience in teaching a public relations course, and to evaluate the effectiveness of using the instructor's current consulting project as a teaching tool. Literature review Pro bono consulting in professors' areas of expertise has long been honored as a public service that helps colleges and universities fulfill their missions. However, when faculty members consult for personal monetary gain, the practice becomes suspect and most institutions have formal policies to regulate it. There are two sides to the debate about for-profit faculty consulting. One side of the argument recognizes that private consulting can benefit students and the college or university for which the consultant works. The other side asserts that faculty consulting benefits only the consultant's pocketbook, and can lead to conflicts of interest and abuse of institutional resources (Boyer & Lewis, 1984; Johnson, 1993). Boyer and Lewis (1984) noted in the introduction to their study that professional consuiting is often regarded as shirking other university responsibilities at the students' or institution's expense, so that even if students may be the benefactors of faculty consulting, this fact is often hard to sell to colleagues who see the time spent consulting as time wasted in regard to teaching and research. A review of the literature found that the perception that faculty members who consult are less productive than those who don't is unfounded; studies based on empirical evidence show otherwise. In fact, no studies were found that provide evidence of the negative consequences of private consulting. Boyer and Lewis (1984) in a secondary analysis of several private and government studies that documented faculty productivity and consuiting practices found that faculty who consult are at least as active in their faculty roles on campus as their non-consulting peers. Patton (1980) found that faculty members involved in private consulting tended to spend more time in graduate instruction while holding the same number of office hours as their colleagues, and did not find a negative effect of consulting on publishing and research. Rebne (1989) found consulting was less a time-scarcity problem and more a role-balancing problem, and that more time spent consulting did not lead to less time spent in other roles such as teaching and research. Mitchell and Rebne (1995) also found that moderate amounts of time spent consulting were facilitative of research productivity, and that teaching, consulting, and research were complementary roles, noting that their findings are at odds with the common assumption that faculty consulting amounts to nothing more than moonlighting. Boyer and Lewis (1984) concluded from their study that faculty consulting has been under appreciated, with too much focus on only the visible costs to the institution at the expense of the substantial benefits to the individual, to students, and to the institution that are harder to measure. …