Faculty Priorities Reconsidered: Rewarding Multiple Forms of Scholarship,
KerryAnn O'Meara & R. Eugene Rice, John Wiley, 2005.
Reviewed by Ellen L. Nuffer, Ed.D., Director, Faculty Resource Center, Keene State College

When it was first published, Ernest Boyer's book Scholarship Reconsidered (1990) had a profound impact; its influence is still being felt. Boyer based the book's fundamental premise, that descriptions of the work of the faculty should be expanded beyond the traditional tripartite definition, on the ideas of Eugene Rice, then a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Foundation. Rice proposed that faculty should no longer be narrowly characterized as working in the three arenas of teaching, research, and service, but could be seen as having responsibility for discovering, integrating, applying and representing their knowledge. Boyer utilized this idea to develop his now famous framework for four types of scholarship: discovery, integration, application, and teaching. Soon after Boyer's book was published, Rice would become the Director of the American Association of Higher Education's Forum for Faculty Roles and Rewards and in that capacity helped to shape the way in which faculty and academic affairs administrators conceptualized tenure, promotion, faculty career paths, and reward structures at their institutions. Faculty Priorities Reconsidered: Rewarding Multiple Forms of Scholarship provides a fascinating overview of the context in which Scholarship Reconsidered was developed and published, and of the ways in which it has been studied ever since. O'Meara and Rice's text asks us to ponder the many different ways in which faculty can demonstrate scholarship, offers us a myriad of examples of how individuals at different types of institutions do so, and describes the systems and processes that encourage them in that work. However, it gives short shrift to the difficult question implied by its subtitle: how should the struggling peer, department chair, or dean judge the worthiness of different manifestations in determining a justifiable reward? Despite this, Faculty Priorities Reconsidered is an outstanding volume for encouraging individuals, as well as entire faculties, to reflect on the activity that we call "scholarship," so fundamental to the professoriate and so misunderstood by the public.

The book begins with Rice's context-setting and moves on to chapters authored by "pioneers of the movement" (p. 5) in which each of the four forms of scholarship is defined and issues related to the cultural shift necessitated by accepting these definitions are explicated. It is interesting to note that Boyer named "application" as one of the forms of scholarship, yet it is consistently referred to here as the "scholarship of engagement." The shift in wording is never explained. Rice does describe the scholarship of engagement as calling on faculty to engage in collaboration ("learning and teaching [should] be multi-directional and the expertise shared, ...moving beyond outreach as it was conceptualized in the land grant colleges with their agricultural roots" p. 28) and one can surmise that the term "application" implied an unhealthy uni-directionality. Still, some more in-depth background for the changes in fundamental terminology would have been enlightening.

The next section of the book presents the work of nine campus study teams and the history, processes, methodologies, and changes that occurred as a result of their campuses engaging in the process of defining scholarship and considering the reward system for faculty. O'Meara and Rice are to be credited for choosing to highlight the work of nine very different campuses. There are two moderately selective private liberal arts colleges with religious affiliations (Franklin College and Madonna College), an historically black university (Albany State), the for-profit University of Phoenix, two large public universities (Portland State and Kansas State), a smaller public university (South Dakota State), a doctoral-extensive university (Arizona State), and a specialty campus (University of Colorado School of Medicine). This section of the book provides commendably honest portrayals of the nature of this work as well as fascinating glimpses into the cultures of these nine different institutions. It would also have been interesting for comparison's sake to read of the processes and potential struggles encountered by an institution where traditional definitions of faculty research have long been entrenched and are expected to be upheld by the public at large.

Rice's conclusion calls for a "genuinely transformative approach to change" (p. 306) and states that in the next decades the role of faculty must be significantly re-conceptualized, some traditional faculty work reassigned, and the faculty reward structure shifted from attention to individual achievements to the contributions of collaborative units. This volume, with its invaluable overview of context, excellent descriptions of processes, and comprehensive review of research should provide plentiful inspiration for the higher education community as it wrestles with that charge in the future.

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