As an upper level and graduate institution our position appears, in key ways, enviable. However, though this structure would seem to call for advanced studies buttressed by active research, the new campuses had to fight to secure a place for their scholarship.

Founded with a somewhat utopian vision that we would serve place-bound and time-bound students, initial funding formulas envisioned a faculty with heavy teaching responsibilities who, if we were to engage in research, would have to eke time out from a bottle. But this we did, at the same time that we also demanded our students write well, read carefully, and think outside narrow disciplinary frameworks.

At UWB this has been done at a cost. The need to coordinate with Seattle, with our communities, with two-year schools (one of which we have been co-located with), to plan a new campus (twice, because the first plan came undone), and to grow each year by more than 10 percent by hiring new faculty, developing new programs, and creating our own governance systems has meant long hours and — quite literally — ill health.

Yet the opportunity to pioneer a new institution is a powerful motivator and the challenge is one that has shaped most of our careers for the better. Nonetheless, the construction of a unique campus with its own distinct priorities is not without its challenges.

Although our faculty are chosen because they are both active scholars and conscientious teachers, it is clear that it will be difficult to maintain this balance. It is easy enough for any faculty to begin to view itself only in terms of its research prowess and covet the concomitant status and resources this provides. When this ethos takes over, faculty begin to pride themselves on how little they teach. To teach is to be handicapped in one’s scholarship.

Soon enough a campus hires teaching assistants, outsources itself with adjuncts paid from grants, creates a two-tiered faculty divided between tenure track professors and lecturers. Given the declining public resources devoted to higher education, research provides one of the few ways a faculty can manage to gain new resources, attain higher salaries, and achieve greater renown amidst the disciplinary networks we participate in as scholars.

Unfortunately, we are living in troubled times, and this model for institutional success is running out of steam. Our production of new knowledge threatens to slip from mere industry to commerce. Surviving as a commercial enterprise places new strings on research and challenges the conception of a university as a place of disinterested scholarship. If scholarship is reduced to a commercial industry, we will quickly find the public wondering why our ventures ought not to be funded through stock offerings rather than as elements of a conventional university.

As this commercialization of the knowledge industry marches forward, scholar David Noble has directed our attention to a second front, one in which the commercialization of coursework is also proceeding forward. Its advance further encourages the University to sell off its public trust. Many of us still believe that instruction is more than courseware. Yet, increasingly the pressures to provide distance learning, along with the expensive investments that go with it, squeeze traditional academic programs.

Distance learning siphons off the lower cost liberal arts degrees that subsidize more expensive technology driven programs. Maintaining the core arts and sciences becomes more difficult, and to do so many of us believe that the University has to define itself in ways that people can understand and trust.

The green fields of the new campuses are good places to experiment. The UW Bothell is a further manifestation of the university’s already-proven commitment to re-imagining itself. Relatively unencumbered by entrenched interests, Bothell’s faculty recently voted on a vision statement defining our campus as a transformational learning community. Such a community involves rebalancing our activities in ways we hope prove understandable to the state.

There is excitement in the idea that faculty, students and staff form a community whose common search for knowledge enters us into dialogue with one another in ways that challenge our preconceptions. Yet, given current pressures, it will take statesmanship, vision, and support from the larger UW enterprise for our community to maintain an appropriate balance between scholarship, teaching and service.

(Note: There are many views on our campus, of which this is one.)

Daniel Jacoby is chair of the General Faculty Organization, UW Bothell