Content area
Full Text
Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate. By Charles E. Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber and Gene I. Maeroff. San Francisco: Jossey Bass and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1997. pp. 130, $15.95. ISBN 0-78791091-0.
Who is the better scholar: the faculty member who publishes esoteric papers in specialized academic journals or the faculty member whose classes are full of actively-engaged students learning to make decisions in a globally-interdependent world? Most people would say the former, and in most colleges and universities, the former would be more highly regarded and rewarded. But this book, which moves beyond the Carnegie Foundation's 1990 report, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, argues persuasively for broadening the meaning of scholarship, and consequently for rethinking the reward and incentive structure in higher education.
This rethinking extends the meaning of scholarship to include what goes on in the classroom- and the community at large- and returns to an older tradition of American higher education. This older tradition sees the role of the scholar as one who "shapes young lives," and who is also involved in shaping the community outside the campus.
What makes the report so timely is that it coincides with many pressures on universities, pressures which force them to rethink their roles and what they can expect from their...