Earlier in the semester I wrote what I thought was a research essay, but what was in reality an opinion piece, comparing merit versus need-based student funding in art universities (link).
A research essay or an opinion piece: are these two different entities? I will immediately concede that the distinction is possibly arbitrary, but thinking in these terms has helped me re-interpret what I previously thought I had gotten “wrong”.
I’ll give two examples:
For one, I argue in the essay that in a merit-based funding system, there are more students left with unmet financial need, and their struggles (to keep a part-time job, to deal with the effects of debt such as stress and poor health) have an adverse effect on the classroom experience as a whole. Turning to a need-based system that helps these students first would thus potentially improve the overall quality of education enough for everyone to compensate those who lose out on awards under the new arrangement.
But I can’t prove that this is actually the case. To be able to do so requires some level of research—if not a longitudinal study, then at least a thorough survey of current students on their finances and lifestyles, and on how things might be different if they were given more or less assistance from the university.
Later in the essay I propose that well-publicized non-monetary awards could help kick-start an outstanding student’s artistic career, thereby making up for eliminated merit-based scholarships. This claim is also unsubstantiated. Without an analysis of whether existing awards (such as the Starfish or the Sobey Art Award) actually boost artists’ reputations or help them secure more exhibitions, there’s no telling whether my idea would work either. Problematic, too, are the economics of such an enterprise, which would need to be investigated—is it actually cheaper to hold award ceremonies and publicize winners than it is to just give them modest scholarships?
The two statements I had made in the name of research made me very nervous, because in fact no research had been done—at least not in the scientific sense, where experiments must be drawn up and data must be collected. Instead, what I had written bore greater resemblance to a columnist’s article in a newspaper: given a set of facts and opinions obtained in a journalistic fashion, I proceeded to give my own take funded by personal experience and rational deliberation.
It makes me feel a bit relieved, then, to realize that what I had written was not a failed attempt at research, but rather something that belonged to a different category of inquiry. But what is the purpose of this category? What does the plebeian observer have to offer in the realm of the thoroughly-informed expert?
The answer may seem obvious (it became less so when I had to be the intruding non-expert). As Karin Cope suggests, every observer possesses his or her own unique perspective which is inaccessible to someone else, including the so-called expert. In my case, while I don’t understand NSCAD’s endowment structure the way that the school’s Director of Financial Aid does, neither does she know exactly how the decisions being made at her level affect the experiences of the school’s students—not unless a student shares that experience with her.
In other words, each side can learn from the other. One does not necessarily possess greater knowledge than the other; it is instead more likely that the two sides possess very different areas of knowledge. An exchange of such ideas thus requires that both are allowed to get some things wrong without having an error diminish or invalidate their positions completely. It requires that both are flexible to correcting what’s wrong while appreciating what’s right.
Organizational theorist Russell L. Ackoff makes a similar case in his essay “What’s Wrong with ‘What’s Wrong With’.” Ackoff observes that critics tend to shut down any proposed change to a system by immediately targeting what’s wrong with the proposal. A more productive alternative, he says, would be to seek ways to modify an imperfect proposal by removing the perceived deficiencies while preserving the advantages (78).
Works Cited
Ackoff, Russell L. “What’s Wrong with ‘What’s Wrong With’.” Interfaces 33.5 (2003): 78-82. JSTOR. Web. 9 Dec. 2011.
Research, etymologically, is a matter of "going about seeking." It is, in one way at least, a matter of asking questions--and not always, or at least at first, of answering them. This is why it seems to me your essay counts as research, even if it isn't built from or reporting upon fully funded statistical social science methodologies. These are not the only definition of research; indeed, they're largely useless without adequately formulated questions of the sort you pose. So. Perhaps part of the point here is to say, let no researcher march for too long into the darkness alone? (Poetry is always rearing its head or some other part on the margins of these discussions. Might be worth a question why there too...)
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