The Pros And Cons Of Scholarship

"Scholarship is not an esoteric appendage; it is at the heart of what the profession is all about..." and "to weaken faculty commitment for scholarship is to undermine the undergraduate experience, regardless of the academic setting" (Boyer, 1990). When faced with this paradigm Boyer (1990) and many other researchers that came after him, agreed on one thing, scholarship is a wider term that includes other activities besides what is conventionally seen as pure research (Higgs et al., 2013). Boyer (1990) insists on three ideas: faculty talent should be celebrated and not restricted, all faculty should establish their credentials as researchers and all members of the faculty should remain professionally alive. It is no secret that academic work

When Boyer’s model was released in 1990, the first element was the “scholarship of discovery” which is simple terms refers to the academic version of “research” (Boyer, 1990). In essence, the scholarship of discovery takes into account “publications and research as the yardstick in the merit, promotion and tenure system” of higher education in the US (Hofmeyer, Newton & Scott, 2007). Also, the scholarship of discovery is understood as original research that expands or challenges current knowledge in a discipline (Hofmeyer, Newton & Scott, 2007). According to Boyer (1990), scholarship is held at the highest regard in higher education because it resembles the commitment to “knowledge for its own sake, to freedom of inquiry and to following, in a disciplined fashion, an investigation wherever it may lead” (Boyer, 1990). Scholarship is one of the three pillars of the role of faculty, and the academic leader’s role is to support

Perhaps one reason is that every college and university manage the concept of faculty research differently or perhaps the role of the academic leader has not been clearly defined in higher education. A study conducted in Canada revealed that in order for faculty to embrace scholarship, four key structural factors needed to be in place: protected time, mentors, feedback and leadership support (Reader, Fornari, Simon, & Townsend, 2015). Although Boyer (1990) states that “the quality of scholarship is dependent, above all else, on the vitality of each professor, the role of the academic leader in supporting the process is paramount to success. Colleges and universities that flourish help faculty build on their strengths, sustain their own creative energies, broaden reward systems, but also create flexible and varied career paths that support scholarship (Boyer,