GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Scholarship is the pathway to better teaching

My second guiding principle is that scholarship is the pathway to better teaching. If you are not active as a scholar, if you are not contributing new knowledge to your discipline, if you are not developing new approaches to pedagogy, your teaching will inevitably suffer. If you are not testing your ideas by putting them out there in the marketplace of ideas where others can evaluate your ideas and respond to them, in turn allowing you to respond and enter into a dialogue, the value and viability of your ideas is diminished.

There is no single conception of scholarship. It varies significantly between and among the different disciplines and intellectual cultures that make up the university. Scholarship takes as many forms as there are spheres of inquiry. For a scientist, scholarship is the discovery of a new chemical mechanism, the mapping of a new molecule, the discernment of an unknown aspect of a 500-year-old quest to determine whether or not planets orbit stars anywhere other than our solar system. For an artist, it is the creation of a new painting to express a personal vision, or the completion of a novel that addresses a complex ethical problem, or the orchestration of a new composition. For the literary critic it may be a reevaluation of a short story by Sandra Cisneros, and for an art historian the translation of a treatise on artists’ materials and studio techniques in seventeenth-century Holland. All forms of scholarship in the new American university are equal, and all forms of scholarship are considered significant expressions of the human spirit.

Scholarship is the means by which the institution is continually reinvigorated, but we engage in scholarship with the principal objective of being better teachers. You cannot teach chemistry unless you have the capacity to understand how chemistry is advancing, and you cannot understand that process unless you are helping to advance chemistry as a subject in and of your own right. We are better teachers if we are contributing to the knowledge base of our field. In fact, this is a crucial distinction that separates the university form of education from all others. University teachers are by definition scholars. The university is a setting for scholar-teachers to advance scholarship in given fields and to utilize their research as a primary form of teaching. There are obviously other forms of teaching in which scholarship is not a necessary component of the teaching process, but in a university environment, scholarship is an essential component.