Scholarship Unbound for the 21st Century

To provide a conceptual base for reviewing and revising tenure and promotion guidelines a faculty senate task force at Oregon State University undertook the challenge of defining and articulating the core characteristics of scholarship that apply across academic disciplines and university missions. The result was: Scholarship is creative intellectual work that is validated by peers and communicated - including creative artistry and the discovery, integration and development of knowledge.

Scholarly achievement and excellence in performing other assigned responsibilities are the primary categories for evaluating faculty performance, but OSU's new promotion and tenure guidelines describe other aspects of faculty performance that the University values. These include collaborative effort, international perspective and service. Revised tenure and promotion guidelines reflecting these values, and basing faculty performance evaluation on a position description, were adopted by the University in 1995 with unanimous Faculty Senate support. Oregon State University will host a national workshop October 1-3, 1998, to provide a forum for exchanging ideas on the nature of scholarship and the reframing of faculty evaluation and rewards in American universities.

OSU's new guidelines eliminated the need for separate supplemental promotion and tenure guidelines which were previously used to describe scholarship in programs such as extension, international development, library and information services and veterinary medicine where scholarship sometimes does not fit the traditional research model of results published in peer reviewed journals.

In short, Oregon State University's new promotion and tenure guidelines:

• Reaffirm that scholarship is required of all professorial faculty, and articulate a definition of scholarship that is applicable across the arts and sciences. This broad view of scholarship bridges gaps in understanding among divergent disciplines.
• Require that an annually updated position description of assigned duties, relevant areas of scholarship, and the relative balance of effort among assigned duties, scholarship, and service, provide the basis for evaluating a faculty member's performance.
• Identify performance of assigned duties and scholarly achievement as the two primary areas for evaluating faculty performance. Recognize that service performed by faculty members which is not part of an individual's assigned duties, is a less important area of performance evaluation. Assigned duties such as administration, extension, outreach and student advising are not considered to be service when they are responsibilities specifically assigned to a faculty member. By the same token these activities are considered to be service when they are performed by a faculty member whose assigned duties lie in another area, such as research or teaching.
• Recognize teaching, research, and outreach as vital university missions and faculty activities - that are not scholarship in themselves - but which can involve creative, communicated, peer-validated intellectual work (scholarship) in any of its several forms (discovery, development, integration, artistry). This is a significant departure from Ernest Boyer's view of teaching per se as scholarship.
• Recognize that peer validation and communication are two separate processes that can occur in a variety of ways including, but not limited to, peer-referred publications. When peer validation and communication are accomplished in non-traditional ways it is important to clearly describe and document how they were accomplished. The guidelines emphasize "communication in appropriate ways so as to have impact on or significance for publics beyond the University, or for the discipline itself."
• Recognize that teachers and extension educators can do scholarship as researchers in their subject-matter discipline, or as developers of improved education materials, methods, or programs.
• Recognize that the audiences for scholarship in research are usually disciplinary peers worldwide, but that audiences for scholarship in teaching, extension and site-specific field research are often more localized. The promotion and tenure guidelines language was changed to reflect this reality - from "professors must achieve a national or international reputation for their scholarship" to "professors must achieve distinction in scholarship as evident in the candidate's wide recognition and significant contributions to the field or profession."
• Emphasize that the University values of achievements focus whenever possible on what was accomplished rather than how it was accomplished; on substance rather than form; on accomplishments rather than activities. In short, on describing what has changed or improved as a result of a faculty member's efforts.

Citizen advisors value OSU's new guidelines which they feel will do a better job recognizing and rewarding excellence in faculty efforts that will benefit students and citizens in Oregon.

Several universities are finding that the Oregon State University definition of scholarship provides a useful conceptual basis for their institution's deliberations about faculty evaluation, promotion and tenure and post tenure review. This suggests that university faculties, and the broader public, are ready to view scholarship broadly and to alter faculty evaluation and reward processes accordingly.

Additional information, shown below, can be obtained from: Office of Academic Affairs, Oregon State University, 628 Kerr Administration Building, Corvallis, OR 97331, (541) 73-0732 or accessed on the Internet at brakeage@ccmail.orst.edu

• Oregon State University, 1995 Revised Tenure and Promotion Guidelines and Dossier Preparation Instructions.
• Draft paper, 1995 "The Value System of a University -- Rethinking Scholarship" by C.J. Weiser describing in more detail the process at OSU and the changes that resulted.
• Announcement of a national workshop titled "Scholarship Unbound: Reframing Faculty Evaluation and Rewards" that will be co-hosted by Oregon State University and its Faculty Senate on October 1, 2, 3 in 1998.