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While the aim of the CCI program was admirable, and the funding was generous,
the faculty members coordinating EUI soon discovered that they had received
a mixed blessing. Precisely because CCIs are not housed in traditional units,
for example, they do not enjoy the kinds of institutional support (clerical
staff, computers, phone lines, and so on) that departments and colleges take
for granted. More crucially, EUI, like most CCIs, was the dream-child of faculty
members. None of these faculty members, however, was relieved of other official
university duties, even though all had substantial service and administrative
obligations as well as the usual teaching and research responsibilities. Like
other CCIs, then, EUI could be sustained only by extraordinary effort, and
there have been moments when it has seemed that EUI and EBC have been running
on empty. We name this problem not to make excuses, but to support this chapter’s
interrogation of the processes of research, writing, and reward. Because we
are interested in that gray line between new and creative work at universities
and the activities that appear to be business as usual, we also ask how new
work can draw institutional support without becoming ossified, at one extreme,
or exhausting its producers, at the other. Put another way, we wonder how faculty
can take up the charge to involve students in research, and why they should
do it, if their efforts fall outside conventional structures of evaluation
and compensation. (Chapter
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