ABSTRACT
In 1990, Ernest Boyer issued a challenge to the professoriate. Proposing that we “move beyond the tired old ‘teaching versus research’ debate and give the familiar and honorable term ‘scholarship’ a broader, more capa cious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full scope of academic work,” Boyer suggested that “the work of the professoriate might be thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping functions: the scholar ship of discovery; the scholarship of integration; the scholarship of appli cation; and the scholarship of teaching” (16, emphasis in original).1 It is now eight years since Boyer issued his challenge and universities are still struggling to implement new educational models that will produce the widespread and sweeping reforms Boyer envisioned. Indeed, the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University just recently entered the continuing debate about how best to rise to Boyer’s earlier challenge in their report, Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities. The report calls for the “radical reconstruction” (6) of undergraduate education to include the es tablishment of new institutional student-centered research environments or “synergistic system[s] in which faculty and students are learners and re searchers, whose interactions make for a healthy and flourishing intellec tual atmosphere” (11). The report’s core pedagogical recommendations include inquiry-based learning, collaborative efforts, graduate-student teacher-apprentice programs, field internships, interdisciplinary courses, capstone experiences, and creative uses of new technology. While the re port does not give any concrete examples of how the recommendations could be implemented,2 its authors anticipate that the “recommendations urged in this report will be controversial; some administrators and faculty will protest that they are unreachable or impractical, or that the goals en tertained can be achieved by minor adjustments of existing practice” yet the authors hope their recommendations will “stimulate new debate about
the nature of undergraduate education in research universities that will produce widespread and sweeping reform” (1-2).
