While academia praised Ernest Boyer’s idea in Scholarship Reconsidered (1990) to abandon the traditional “teaching vs research” model, most campuses were paying only lip service. Tenure and promotion decisions are still based on traditional measures of research success: books or articles published about new knowledge, or grants won.
Western Carolina University has taken a major step to adopt Boyer’s definitions for scholarship. Broader definitions of scholarship will be used in hiring decisions, merit reviews, and tenure consideration.
John Bardo, chancellor at Western Carolina, said that a good example of the value of this approach comes from a recent tenure candidate who needed a special exemption from the old, more traditional tenure guidelines. The faculty member was in the College of Education and focused much of his work on developing online tools that teachers could use in classrooms. He focused on developing the tools, and fine-tuning them, not on writing reports about them that could be published in journals.
Read more at the Inside Higher Ed
Perhaps more campuses will follow suit!