French, Mass Comm Faculty Earn Top Spots in Research Review

As Boston University takes an in-depth look at its faculty’s ability to balance research, teaching, and life with the faculty climate survey, new research by the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that BU professors are, in fact, finding ways to do it all.

Eight Boston University departments earned top-10 rankings this week in the publication’s Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, earning two number-one spots on a list of nearly 400 institutions. The third annual index ranks research universities according to the productivity — publications, grants, and awards — of their faculty in different disciplines. In the 2006 academic year, BU’s French language and literature and mass communications/media studies departments earned first-place ratings, followed by second place for English language and literature, fourth for bioinformatics and computational biology, sixth in social work/social welfare, seventh in mathematics, ninth in music specialties, and tenth in biostatistics.

“It’s very nice to be recognized,” says T. Barton Carter, a professor and chairman of the department of mass communication, advertising, and public relations at the College of Communication. “Our department is a mix of professionals and academics, so what this shows is that we’re able to maintain that balance and achieve in both areas: professional training and professional recognition, as well as scholarly recognition of our faculty’s research and writing.”

Jeffrey Mehlman, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of French and comparative literature and a University Professor, says that the recent division of modern foreign languages and literatures into two separate departments, romance studies and modern languages and comparative literature, has helped raise the French department’s profile, both within the University and in the academic community.

“Previously, we had been the thin man caught in the pleasantly bloated body of modern foreign languages and literatures,” Mehlman says. “We’re out now, et voilà!”

The index, compiled by the for-profit company Academic Analytics, which is operated by the State University of New York at Stonybrook, includes 375 research universities that offer doctoral degrees and ranks 164,843 individual faculty, some of whom appear on the complete list twice due to dual appointments. The productivity of each faculty member is measured by publications, federal grant dollars awarded, and honors and awards. Academic Analytics assigns different weights to each variable — a Fulbright award, for example, counts only if it was awarded between 2002 and 2006, but a Nobel Prize is eligible if it was awarded within the past 50 years.

The index numbers reflect the program’s performance compared to the national mean. A score of zero indicates that a discipline is at the national mean; BU’s score of 2.5 in French language and literature means that the department’s performance is 2.5 standard deviation units higher than the national mean.

BU joins an elite group in each discipline. The University’s first-place rankings in French and mass communication — the highest received by BU departments — is higher than that of Johns Hopkins and Yale in French and that of Northwestern and NYU in mass communication. The second-place ranking in English puts BU one spot — and .02 standard deviation units — behind Harvard and ahead of Columbia, Stanford, and Duke. And in fourth-ranked bioinformatics, BU is flanked by the University of California at San Francisco and the University of Pennsylvania.

The University’s results are also noteworthy considering the size of several departments; the top-rated French department has just 9 faculty, compared to 15 at second-ranked University of California at Los Angeles.

The ranking system does not offer an all-around analysis of the University like that of the Best Colleges reports published by U.S. News & World Report, and university leaders around the country have pointed out that a high ranking in the Chronicle index does not provide an all-around view of a program or of a student’s experience at a particular school or college.

Nonetheless, Carter says, the recognition remains meaningful to the faculty in the mass communication department, largely because the methodology includes citations of the BU faculty research that has appeared in peer-reviewed journals. “What it signifies is that not only have we been producing work, but that others recognize it and think it’s significant,” he says.

Dorothy Kelly, a CAS professor of French and the associate chair of the romance studies department, says that she hopes the rankings will help BU get more recognition for quality research and teaching. “It’s really hard to change your reputation — I will go to colloquia and give talks, and mention the other people at BU, and people will say, ‘Oh, you have a really good department,’” she says. “But it’s hard to get that message out, so I hope this will be a wake-up call."

To view the complete index, click here.

Jessica Ullian can be reached at jullian@bu.edu.