Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate

Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriateby Charles E. Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber, and Gene I. Maeroff(San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Inc., 1997)In the Carnegie Foundation report, Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate, authors Charles E. Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber and Gene I. Maeroff create an even more inclusive vision of scholarship from the late Ernest L. Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, the Foundation's 1990 report. With the blessing of Boyer, The Carnegie Foundation's past president, these authors suggest standards and applications by which the entire range of an institution's scholastic endeavor (research, writing, teaching, etc.) can be documented and evaluated. The new report will greatly benefit institutions of higher education desiring to define and evaluate the academic performance of faculty. The authors are impressively credentialed and each has been, or is currently, associated wit! ! h The Carnegie Foundation. Charles E. Glassick served as interim president of the Foundation between January 1996 and July 1997. Mary Taylor Huber is presently serving the Foundation as a senior scholar, and Gene I. Maeroff served the Foundation between 1986 and 1997. Presently Dr. Maeroff directs the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Teachers College, Columbia University.The report is remarkably thorough and extremely well done. In every respect it supports the paradigm Boyer proposes in his initial work. Therein is both its strength and weakness. One has only to read Boyer's work in order to predict the logic of the new report. This is not to question the merit of the new work, but rather to suggest that as much effort seems to have been spent in reconciling the two reports as in the stated purpose of formulating standards of assessing scholarship and evaluating the professoriate.The report responds to what it considers to be a major societal transition! ! that requires higher education to keep pace and even facil! itate change. At stake, according to the authors, is "the capacity of higher education to meet its responsibilities for teaching, research, and service to society" (p. 5). The mission of higher education must be current, and the activities of faculty must relate "more directly to the realities of contemporary life" (p. 6). The authors link the evolution of higher education with historical precedents and key events from the educational philosophy of colonial days to its pragmatic role in the present. Within that philosophical shift, the priorities of faculty are established. While virtually all institutions continue to address education on the undergraduate level, some enjoy distinction in the areas of research, publishing, and service through the application of knowledge. The report observes that the performance of the professoriate is most often determined by the reward structure of their institution.At the conclusion of the report, the questionnaire us! ! ed