On Defining Scholarship

Academic historians too often seek to impose, in the name of standards, a narrow definition of scholarship. Valuable historical scholarship is only, I’ve been told, peer-reviewed print scholarship about a period of time or place in the past. While oral history makes its way into the definition, public history, history education, and public scholarship are the barbarians at the gates, threatening professional standards. As a director of a graduate program in public history, I could not find myself within this narrow definition. And as an interdisciplinary scholar involved with the schools, historical organizations, and community projects—my work is without a home in my own department. Too often colleagues will brand someone, “not an historian” because their work is interdisciplinary, collaborative, and/or applied.

I want to take a moment to highlight alternative views or scholarship which are alive and well in both the historical discipline and the academy.

The Center for History and New Media, founded by Roy Rosenzweig, advances projects which seek “to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.” The Center for History and New Media democratizes access to history and the humanities through digital media. At George Mason University, Rosenzweig, in collaboration with many other thoughtful scholars, established a center where one could do serious academic history that is both democratic and collaborative. George Mason University has demonstrated that academic departments can expand their definitions to embrace these initiatives without diluting their commitment to support and value more traditional scholarship.

In their commitment to standards, academic historians will suggest that work that is not published in traditional peer-reviewed print publications cannot be properly evaluated for promotion. This argument reflects both a failure of imagination and a lack of information. The Dean of the University of Virginia College of Liberal Arts and Graduate Studies, among others, provides guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship which were formulated by John Unsworth in 2001. The American Historical Association weighed in with a report on “Redefining Historical Scholarship” which offered alternative criteria back in 1993. When public history educators met to look at strategic planning for graduate programs in public history, at the National Council for Public History conference in Santa Fe, last spring, many identified their own departments as an obstacle to progress.

Narrow definitions of scholarship also undermine advances in teaching. The Carnegie Foundation, in the “Boyer Report,” Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professorate (1990), pointed to this problem: “Almost all colleges pay lip service to the trilogy of teaching, research, and service, but when it comes to making judgments about professional performance, the three rarely are assigned equal merit.” The report advanced an integrative view of scholarship which would value “discovery” along with scholarship of application, synthesis, and teaching. Academics will argue that the scholarship of teaching should be evaluated as part of the “teaching” and that public history is a part of “service.” However, there is absolutely no need to produce serious reflective scholarship about public history or teaching in order to receive high marks in these areas which are determined more by the general approval of colleagues, student evaluations, and notches for membership on a long list of committees. Ultimately, definitions of scholarship will often trump almost all other considerations in promotion decisions. The standards argument fragments the work of academia into these three components and devalues the rich vein of work that integrates research, teaching, and service.

Historian Harry Boyte, co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, who I first met while a graduate student in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, argues that professional work should “aim at helping develop the civic capacities of people and communities and contribute to democratic culture.” Boyte found that academics are frequently frustrated by the “cloistered” feel of their departments and by narrow, disciplinary boundaries. There is both a need and the desire “to engage more deeply the urban scene [or the rural scene] and the public world.” Boyte identifies a real fear among academics that they “might jeopardize their reputations for ‘vigorous scholarship’” in the face of departments and colleagues who see public scholarship as purely voluntary, a service, and thus a leisure activity.

Imagining America, is a consortium of colleges and universities to advance public scholarship offers a definition which I have found useful in thinking about my own work:

Public scholarship joins serious intellectual endeavor with a commitment to public practice and public consequence. It includes:

• Scholarly and creative work jointly planned and carried out by university and community partners;
• Intellectual work that produces a public good;
• Artistic, critical, and historical work that contributes to public debates;
• Efforts to expand the place of public scholarship in higher education itself, including the development of new programs and research on the successes of such efforts.

Imagining America is now based at Syracuse University where Chancellor Nancy Cantor spoke in 2007 about universities and change:

This is the right place and the right time to imagine a new America, a more democratic America, because this is where imagination, education, and determination can unite scholarship and action. And Imagining America, I will assert this morning, is as much about transforming the academy as it is about transforming the world.

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Cantor’s speech is available as a .pdf document at http://www.syr.edu/chancellor/speeches/ImaginingAmericaAnnualConferenceRemarks090707.pdf