Faculty scholarly engagement is necessary for accreditation, rank and tenure, and recognition of achievement. The importance and value of faculty scholarship are clear, yet defining what to accept and how to document it can be problematic. Most rank and tenure committees use the triad of teaching, research, and service to evaluate faculty scholarly engagement for promotion purposes. But in promotion decisions, publications often overshadow exemplary teaching, interdisciplinary creative activities, and public service. As Boyer wrote in Scholarship Reconsidered (1990), “According to the dominant view, to be a scholar is to be a researcher—and publication is the primary yardstick by which scholarly productivity is measured” (p. 2). Although Boyer was criticizing the standard publication yardstick for measuring faculty contribution, his statement is as relevant now as it was 30 years ago.
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
