Benefits of Scholarship
Faculty scholarship is an endeavor in excellence and quality in higher education. It improves quality of teaching by deepening and broadening content area knowledge; it ensures not only academic currency but professional currency; it improves critical thinking and communication skills; it revitalizes, inspires, and motivates teachers; it increases professional collegiality.
Its benefits extend across all kinds of institutions, including teaching institutions. Scholarship is, at its core, an ethical endeavor that improves not only faculty and IHE, but has far-reaching results overall. The benefits of scholarship to faculty, students, the institution, and society are:
Subject Matter Currency and Authority
Knowledge is dynamic, not static; scholarship keeps professors current in their academic fields which are constantly changing. Faculty are more knowledgeable, authoritative, and competent, and receive greater respect from students and peers as a result (Axtell, 1999).
Faculty Vitality
Research is intrinsically pleasurable and enjoyable, providing a much needed creative outlet and intellectual challenge to professor. Scholarship encourages faculty creativity, combats boredom, and prevents burnout; it invigorates, renews and revitalizes the professor, and so brings enthusiasm to teaching (Axtell, 1999; Boyer, 1990).
Honesty, Humility, Accuracy
Subjecting work to the scrutiny of colleagues through the scholarship process brings honesty, humility and accuracy to faculty intellectual life. Peer review of publishing and conference response provides an intellectual rigor necessary for teachers and academicians. This process refines faculty work and ideas as well as the critical thinking skills through a jury of qualified peers. This process creates professors whose study, command and conveyance of their subject material to students is more honest, humble, and accurate.(Axtell, 1999; Mitchell, 1999; Rose and McClafferty, 2001).
Example to Students
The teacher's engagement in the same activities as students, in creating and advancing knowledge, provides an example to the students of life-long learning. Students are excited and respectful to learn that their professors are involved in creating or just exploring knowledge with other authorities in the field. They draw on this example, and apply it to their own lives. (Axtell, 1999).
Career Path and Diversity
Unless professors choose to go into administration, teaching does not usually have a "career path." For teachers, scholarship can provide a professional career path showing a forward progress. The result may be a measure of independence and identity in the individual's work in that, while the institution indirectly benefits, the academic work remains uniquely the accolade and laurel of the professor. Reading, research and writing can provide rewards for the professor in any setting, whether affiliated with the institution, as an independent scholar, or in retirement. This allows for a healthy diversity in faculty's career life (Axtell, 1999).
Objective Evaluation of Competence and Excellence
While teaching is often difficult to assess, scholarship is, to a certain extent, a more objective means of career progress: the number and quality of publications or conferences, the prestige of publishers, are somewhat quantifiable. In addition, it provides professional status and recognition, both within and without the institution. Furthermore, "higher education is the only learned profession that requires no recertification at suitable periods after the award of the terminal degree and no regular upgrading of skills and knowledge" (Axtell,1999, p. 53). Participation in scholarly activities of all sorts serves as the "recertification" teachers lack.
Professional Networking
Traditional scholarship, that is, publishing and presenting at conferences, expands faculty's professional world; professors meet people from many different organizations and fields and institutions. Besides knowing those in the discipline better, professional opportunities arise for faculty to engage in new experiences such as giving speeches, attending different events, and often, receiving monetary reward (Axtell, 1999).
Institutional Recognition
Faculty scholarship brings recognition to the institution at which the professor is employed. Studies show that professorial publishing productivity is positively linked to an institution's prestige and public perception of quality of teaching.
Intellectual Community
Scholarship creates an intellectual community within the institution, between faculty and, often, between teacher and students. Scholarship also connects the professor to the intellectual community of the world outside the institution, within his discipline. The intellectual collegiality provides a psychological support for the professor, but also provides a professional support and challenge, unites an otherwise disparate faculty and gives access to and ideas for research and resources that are much more difficult to find alone. This makes for a much more fertile atmosphere of knowledge exchange and production (Axtell, 1999; Jarvis, 1991).
Social Benefit
Scholarship also brings a concrete benefit to the whole country. According to Axtell (1999), in the United States, "Advances in knowledge account for about one-third of the increases in the gross national product" (p. 53). But more importantly, scholarship creates significant and needed advances in world knowledge, benefiting society as a whole. There is a moral imperative to this facet of scholarship.
What about "teaching institutions"? Does scholarship have any benefits for faculty at schools that emphasize primarily teaching?
"Teaching institutions" find scholarship as valuable to their priorities as much as any other kind of faculty development. Faculty scholarship activity has many benefits, apart from the recognition and knowledge advancement normally embraced by research universities. Faculty scholarship improves teaching directly and indirectly in the variety of ways cited above: it improves content area knowledge, ensures professional and academic currency, revitalizes faculty, facilitates networking, improves critical thinking skills, improves communication skills, and increases collegiality internally and externally.
See The Awareness of the Need for Scholarship Mentoring by Institutional Classification for more discussion of scholarship need by institutional differences.
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Works Cited
Axtell, James. The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998.
Jarvis, Donald K. Junior Faculty Development: A Handbook. New York: MLA, 1991
Rose, Mike, and Karen A. McClafferty. "A Call for the Teaching of Writing in Graduate Education." Educational Researcher (March 2001): 27-33
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