A-HEC: What encouraged you to initiate the “University Teacher Scholar” program at Kansas State and when did it start?

JC: the University needed to address two important issues simultaneously. First, the criteria and standards for allocation of faculty effort and reward, be it annual salary adjustment, tenure or promotion, were too constraining. People are different from one another and change over time. Even though teaching has always been valued at K-State, the criteria and standards skewed the reward system very strongly toward research and made it difficult to reward excellent scholarship in teaching and, for that matter, service. Second, there was a need to constantly increase the quality of the teaching and learning process and to recognize that the nature of that domain was changing rapidly. The biggest impact was coming from the explosive development of instructional technology and distance learning. The program started about ten years ago.

A-HEC: What is the basic philosophy or principles behind the program?

JC: The basic idea was to create a much more flexible role and reward environment that allowed academic units and the university to optimize the best attributes and greatest strengths of each individual. This is very difficult to accomplish but a great deal of progress has been made. This is critical if people are to engage in what they have a passion for and to be rewarded for what they are encouraged to do. Teaching is the biggest issue.

Central to implementing this was the need for each academic department to create its own detailed criteria, standards and procedures for promotion, tenure, annual evaluation and salary adjustment, along with standards for minimal acceptable productivity and procedures for failure to meet them. This must be a complete, integrated package.

Concomitantly, the difference between teaching and the scholarship of teaching had to be defined. Boyer’s work, supplemented by that of Glassick et al on Scholarship Assessed (Glassick et al., 1997), was decisively helpful in the early going. The Distinguished Teaching Scholar award was developed as a means of identifying faculty who truly were leaders in the scholarship of teaching and rewarding them at a high level.

Even though teaching always had been a very important part of K-State, there was a lot of concern about allowing people to place greater emphasis on the scholarship of teaching in their career and rewarding it as such. The reason for this was the belief by a few that this would just provide an easy out for people who were not successful at research. Once people saw the creative work of the successive appointees, and the rigorous level of their scholarship in the form of publication and presentation they achieved, frequently accompanied by substantial grantsmanship, these worries dissipated. And, since the inception of the University Distinguished Teaching Scholars program10 years ago, total competitive grants and contracts have increased by well over100%, the quality of teaching and learning has gone up and a strong distance learning program has been developed. Without the substantive recognition of the remarkable achievement of the teaching scholars, teaching most likely would never have been recognized as rigorous scholarship and their impact on the university’s efforts to provide flexible career pathways, constantly raise the quality of instruction, and develop a strong distance learning program would not have been realized.

One major change was central to this process, and it was the very essence of Boyer’s original work. The university needed to stop using the words “research” and “scholarship” interchangeably and recognize that there is a scholarship of research, teaching and, for that matter (in my view) service and administration. One can observe the principles of good scholarship in all these areas and do better work.