Editor’s Note: “Scholarship Spotlight” is semi-regular series of posts on Service Fulfilled. The goal of these posts is to highlight scholarly projects that utilize (in part or fully) the resources of the Boyer Center Archives, particularly the digital collection.
Anyone who’s ever spent time working in American higher education has certainly encountered the concept of scholarship. Academics, in many colleges and universities, do more than just teach courses — they also produce new knowledge, a process often called scholarship.
And perhaps one of the most influential studies of scholarship in American higher education comes from a familiar face around this blog: Ernie Boyer. In 1990, while serving as president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Boyer published Scholarship Reconsidered, a bold, groundbreaking treatise introducing an academic model that expanded the traditional definition of scholarship and research into four types.
Twenty-five years later, three recognized scholars of American higher education — John Branson (Vanderbilt University) and Todd Ream and Drew Moser (Taylor University) — have highlighted Boyer’s singular contributions to our understanding of scholarship with an anniversary edition of Scholarship Reconsidered.
The expanded edition of Scholarship Reconsidered is now available from Jossey-Bass Publishers. And in recognition of its release, the latest issue of Advance — the magazine of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities — has published a conversation with one of the book’s editors, Dr. Drew Moser, and Boyer Center director Dr. Cynthia A. Wells. In the interview, Moser and Wells discuss the impact of Scholarship Reconsidered on higher education in general and Christian higher education in particular. Moser also highlights the Boyer Center Archives as “an important resource not only to Boyer scholars but more broadly to American higher education”!
Check out the interview (pp. 29-32) here!