Ellen Rosenberg, Chair of Faculty Rank
August 2014
A History and Explanation of UNCSA’s Vision for an Engaged and Sustained Professoriate (ESP)
At the time we were considering rank for Faculty members at UNCSA, those of us on Faculty Council, in
the Provost’s Office, and on the team that went to be trained by the educational experts at Western
Carolina Universityi in the new model of the professoriate created by Ernest L. Boyer, faced
philosophical and linguistic challenges. In his Scholarship Reconsidered (1990)ii, a study funded by the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Boyer articulated a model of the professoriate
that was aimed at shaking up the lone, traditional, publish-or-perish road to promotion that exists in
most liberal arts and sciences colleges and universities. Boyer’s aim was to establish other roadways to
professional achievement by something he called “scholarship.” But this is not the medieval ideal of
scholarship by a long shot. In Scholarship Assessed,iii it is all brought home. Briefly, his original model
proposes four areas of endeavor to be viewed as scholarship: discovery, integration, application, and
teaching, but in this later keynote address, Boyer adds the fifth element of scholarship of engagement,
and the sixth, scholarship of service.
In particular, the notions of application, engagement and service are seen as interactive dynamics that
extend the role of the teacher beyond the classroom to society at large. In Scholarship Reconsidered,
Boyer
[C]ontends that in addition to valuing the generation of knowledge (the
traditional definition of scholarship), higher education should also support the
application of knowledge through Faculty engagement in community-based
research, teaching and service (Boyer, 1990). Boyer and other leaders in higher
education have strongly advocated that institutions should encourage Faculty
members to use their expertise in new and creative ways to work with
communities for long-term community improvement (Boyer, 1990; Harkavy,
1996; Lynton, 1996). iv
Key to these concepts is Boyer’s particular understanding of the meaning of the word
‘engagement.’ For Boyer, scholarship of engagement
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is the collaborative generation, refinement, conservation, and exchange of mutually
beneficial and societally relevant knowledge that is communicated to and validated by
peers in academe and the community, in order to develop ethical and practical solutions
to social, health, economic, and environmental issues. This scholarship may involve
higher education institutions and communities on and off campus in partnerships that
hold common goals and share expertise and resources. This scholarship serves to
integrate learning, discovery, and engagement.v
In fact, the notion of engagement, as understood by Boyer, has been adopted as the mission statements
of numerous institutions of higher learning.
The UNCSA team, representing a Faculty body consisting primarily of artists, creative technicians and
craftspeople transmitting their knowledge to new generations of artists and audiences, faced several
challenges here. First, many of the Faculty and administration consider UNCSA to be a dedicated arts
conservatory, not a liberal arts and sciences institution. Many of the artists’ curricula vitae reflect deep
experiential, industry-driven arts equivalents to terminal degrees and ivory tower credentials. In the
institution, nonetheless, the Division of Liberal Arts and the High School Academic Program focus on
traditional science and humanities subjects, albeit contextualized by the performing arts. Those Faculty
members often have traditionally recognized credentials and terminal degrees. Many ‘academic’
Faculty members are artists in their own rights, and as a byproduct of becoming integral members of
UNCSA’s artistic collaboration, they are always moving and growing into previously non-traditional areas
of development. The addition of arts and sciences as a co-determinant of artistic production as part of
the mission of the school is important, and also affects the way we have built out the criteria for rank
placement and promotion. The entire Faculty understand that art, by application, is public, and does
not exist in a vacuum. It is the syntonic product of the individual under influence of and in collaboration
with society, and art is often a primary catalyst for changing that society. The language “scholarship of
community engagement,” therefore, seemed redundant when viewed from the perspective of arts
production.
Second, the word ‘scholarship,’ connoting a liberal arts and sciences, academic, research-and-publish
paradigm, seemed to promise an endless future of corrective explanation, both in-house and to the
public and to the private funders and state legislators who underwrite our campus. It became
imperative for the original framers of the new culture at UNCSA to remove the word ‘scholarship’ from
descriptions of the efforts of the artist professoriate.
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Taking into account the very nature of the performing arts as public and intended to articulate, mirror,
correct and propose solutions for the individual, the human condition and society at large, we asked
how we could introduce that idea into an unfolding culture of value and rank promotion based on the
quality of work of the Faculty. At the end of the process of assimilating the Boyer materials, the ways in
which the Boyer model was integrated at other institutions, being sensitive to the special use of
language, and taking into account the singular character and vision of UNCSA, the Boyer team set out to
define engagement in a particular way.
We understood the dynamic commitment that we wanted to foster, so our definition was built with that
notion in mind. “Engagement,” for the purpose of rank promotion, means that a Faculty member‘s
professional efforts in areas of evaluative criteria are propelled by heightened intent, purpose and focus.
“Engagement” creates what Boyer calls “a special climate” in which Faculty efforts in all areas of
evaluative criteria are committed, vigorous, dynamic, energetic and sustained over time.
Sustained activity is the persistent, consistent, continual or regularly recurring value-driven involvement
in focused creative activities, research, service or teaching path objectives. Sustained activity may take
different forms. It is the responsibility of the well-prepared Faculty member applying for rank promotion
to make her/his "case" by providing strong context and solid documentation for consideration.
Sustained activity may be publically manifested and subject to peer review or other reflective feedback
recognized in the profession, field or domain. Sustained activity may also be pursued through
unpublished – but documented – work, research or project interests that demonstrate the abiding
interests, professionally-related values, and/or plan of development of the Faculty member. In all cases,
whether the sustained activities are failed or successful; singular or collaborative; moving toward one
conceived goal or multidirectional (e.g., teaching/learning), or if they are reiterations of activity
dedicated to ever-refining, strengthening, bolstering or sharpening professional skillsets or path
objectives, they must clearly be carried forward over time.
It is possible to demonstrate work-related interest, applied values and activities that are kept up or kept
going – that is, maintained – on a regular or recurring basis. How much vital interest and dynamic
engagement constitute sustained engagement is difficult to assess in general terms, since different
Faculty have their own views of what that work means and because a large number of contextual
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characteristics may influence its longevity or usefulness. It will be up to the Faculty candidate for rank
promotion to demonstrate the sustained activity through articulated context and documentation.
One-time events and projects are generally not considered sustained, although they may be evidence of
engaged activity on the part of the Faculty member. Such one-time events may, however, be taken
together to demonstrate a greater unifying and sustained interest in engagement of a certain type or
category or built upon a certain content.
The vision of an Engaged and Sustained Professoriate (ESP) allows for the process of the Faculty
member. Student, peer, community, industry and domain acclamation are commendable and may be
acknowledged as the marks of a dynamic candidate for rank promotion. Nonetheless, we recognize that
the journey of the individual engaged in sustained activity is sometimes beset by obstacles that turn the
path to a new direction or that provide invaluable lessons that inform the individual’s next efforts. For
that reason, with Boyer, we endorse and expect the practice of reflection to be used by faculty applying
for promotion in exchanges with deans and peer evaluators as well as in the Self-Evaluation section of
the promotion application. These are opportunities to detail a large picture of the faculty member’s arc
of development and perception of his/her connection to UNCSA, and to explore the value gained from
challenges as well as celebrate the successes of the process.
UNCSA does not only value research and publication. We value creative activity and/or research,
teaching and service equally. These touchstones are seated in a belief that the individual’s arc of
development and connection to the school is going to take a unique form in every case. These are the
building blocks of the evaluative system we call Engaged and Sustained Professoriate (ESP). In this
system, the individual architects his or her own pathway. And in every case, these touchstones will be a
result of intentional engaged and sustained activities.
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i
Integrating Boyer into Your Institutional Culture: An Executive Retreat. Asheville, NC. June 25-27, 2012.
ii
Boyer, Ernest L. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Princeton, N.J. : Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching, c1990.
iii
Boyer, Ernest L. "From scholarship reconsidered to scholarship assessed." Quest 48.2 (1996): 129-139.
iv
Calleson D, Kauper-Brown J, Seifer SD. Community-Engaged Scholarship Toolkit. Seattle: Community-Campus
Partnerships for Health, 2005. http://www.communityengagedscholarship.info.
v
Integrating Learning, Discovery, and Engagement through the Scholarship of Engagement: Report of the
Scholarship of Engagement Task Force. North Carolina State University. Raleigh, NC. June 2010.