People in the academe know that higher education is much more than test and essay results, but they often forget that basic truth. Over the past two decades they have placed the outcomes of higher education under scrutiny. Accrediting agencies make the assessment of learning a key to appraising institutions. Scholars make their voices heard on the…

The digital dissertation has been here for almost a decade, but people in the academe still don't seem to know what to do with it. How should it be presented? How should it be archived? In August 2005, the author successfully defended a media-rich digital dissertation in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). The…

The success of partnerships between universities and communities, especially partnerships involving Research I universities, is often undermined by divergent goals and timetables. Whereas a community organization might imagine its timetable for achieving a certain goal in years or even decades, the goals of faculty members working at high-pressure…

It makes sense for college and university faculty to ally with the free and open-source software community. They share common values. A marvelous additional benefit is that free software on campuses would significantly advance pedagogy and scholarship, increase efficiency, and save money. Only unquestioning obedience to market fundamentalism--or…

In this article, the authors discuss the hidden epidemic in higher education. They describe the stigma of chronic illness and argue that the invisibility of chronic illness may elicit particularly problematic responses from others, especially when faculty work in a context where people are expected to be highly productive and have unlimited…

The referee system in scholarly publishing offers many benefits and also carries with it attendant problems. The problems need to be addressed. Referees are arguably the linchpins of academic scholarship: they do the heavy lifting for editors, they provide editors with vicarious expertise, and they monitor the gateway to publication and thus to…

The scholarship of teaching has received a considerable amount of attention in recent years, with new recognition that faculty members' research does not necessarily exclude their pedagogy. But research and teaching are not the only parts of their lives as faculty members. Much of what they do on their campuses comes under the heading of service.…

Librarians and scholars who seek to counter the rampant commercialism and consolidation that endanger equal and affordable access to knowledge can learn from the recent successful effort to pass health-care reform. Organizations with a commanding presence in an industry naturally seek to institutionalize their indispensability. They finance…

In a recent flurry of e-mails and conversations about promotion policies in their school of education, the authors realized that their colleagues differ sharply in their notions of how scholarship should be evaluated. They agree on the importance of high-quality work, but they disagree on how to determine whether high quality has been achieved.…

The future strength of the tenure system--and the survival of tenure itself--largely depends on the continuing support of faculty and the capacity of faculty to develop review processes that recognize emerging forms of scholarship. Assessments of the quality of scholarship through internal and external reviews, however, do not always reward new…

The ongoing debate over academic freedom in venues such as "Academe," the "Chronicle of Higher Education," and the "New York Times" frames the issue in terms of a clash between values and politics on the one hand, and scholarship on the other. The idea that pedagogical responsibility requires toeing a line misrepresents the delicate dynamics of…

Over the last decade or so, faculty in a wide range of disciplines have become more interested in and open to the scholarship of teaching and learning. That scholarship has taken many forms, including personal accounts of experimentation and change, descriptions of recommended practices, and quantitative research on students' gains. In this…

This essay argues for ethical inquiry as the essence of true scholarship. Individual sections address: pure reason versus ethics, the current "age of money" in the university, rational choice theory, and the fatal flaw in rational choice theory that all human actions cannot be explained by it. (DB)

About ten or fifteen years ago, faculty search committees began to report that many of the newly minted Ph.D.'s they were trying to recruit had written dissertations crossing disciplinary boundaries in significant ways. When invited for campus interviews, these candidates asked to visit departments other than those doing the hiring. When offered…

Asserts that there are ways in which the religious commitments of colleges and universities can and do serve their academic aspirations: through providing a framework for integration of knowledge and a foundation for a spirit of truth-seeking and free inquiry. (EV)