It’s been almost fifteen years since the publishing of “Scholarship Reconsidered: The Priorities of the Professoriate”, by the late Ernest Boyer and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Boyer, 1990). This landmark book summarized ideas on how and why to broaden the focus of scholarship beyond research to include integration, application, and teaching. In other words, there are perhaps other ways to demonstrate scholarship beyond basic research and the publishing of it. It seems to make great sense that this expansion of scholarship may in fact be more useful and productive than the many obscure papers generated on ever narrowing scientific topics and disciplines.

While the vision and ideas in Boyer’s book were very compelling, it is questionable how far the higher education community has come in this evolution in the last fifteen years. Some have developed theoretical frameworks to further explain how these different forms of scholarship are complementary (see (Paulsen, 1995) for a human action system framework) and should therefore naturally evolve. The Futures Project, arguing that we have fallen short in attainment, point to the need for creating new incentives, such as competitive grants, to recognize and promote better teaching (Newman et al., 2004). However, others have argued that there are inherent structural factors in today’s hierarchically organized institutional power structure that work against creating alternative avenues of scholarship in the academy (Davis, 1998).

During the course of A-HEC’s recent study on Internet-supported learning, we came across a success story in encouraging the scholarship of teaching at Kansas State University. Jim Coffman, the former Provost at Kansas State was credited with initiating the program. A-HEC recently caught up with Dr. Coffman to find out what our members could learn from the Kansas State experience.

Jim Coffman received a doctor of veterinary medicine from Kansas State University in 1962. After several years in private practice Dr. Coffman returned to academia as a faculty member in the veterinary sciences at Missouri State University. He joined Kansas State University as a professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences in 1981, a position he has returned to after relinquishing the provost position in 2004. Dr. Coffman served as head, Department of Surgery and Medicine, KSU, and dean of the College of veterinary medicine from 1984-1987. He served as Provost, Kansas State University from 1987 to 2004. While provost at KSU he was involved in several task forces within Kansas focused on academic affairs, program review, and distance learning, among others. He has contributed to about 120 scientific and technical publications.