The Faculty Senate Helps to Start a Scholarship Report
[UHC News - March 2006]

Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Donald J. Foss has distributed to deans and chairs the material to prepare a Scholarship Report. The report is the result of a joint initiative of the Faculty Senate, the Research Council and the Graduate and Professional Studies Council. This is a good hint as to what faculty input into the governance process will look at for years to come, I hope, because all of the relevant groups are behind this effort. 

The Scholarship Report says that UH is serious about being a research university, and we are willing to measure our progress. And, that’s exciting.

If any institution wants to grow, it must be able to document its progress and assess the success of efforts to achieve progress. Achievement, however, is difficult to assess because it comes in so many forms. The Scholarship Report will not be complete, but it is an important step to broaden our current efforts to document and tout what we do here.  

The only current measure of faculty activity is the Research Report. While this is one measure of faculty activity that is crucially important in several fields, it completely misses activities in many other fields. Another problem is that the measure of grant dollars indicates a key input into the research effort, but it does not address what the research dollars actually support. 

            The Scholarship Report is, therefore, a second important measure of faculty activity, which primarily will include various publications. It also takes preliminary steps to measure such activities as lectures and presentations. 

            In the future, I hope UH adds other measures, including graduate student output, news media contacts, campus events that attract outside participants and travel by faculty to other venues to speak and participate in the production of knowledge. It also would be great to quantify the career paths of undergraduate students. One potentially interesting distinction in the journal dimension is that Provost Foss has asked that publications in the highest quality journals be separated from others.

            Probably the best use of the Scholarship Report will be the ability to compare a unit’s accomplishments over time rather than trying to measure the difference between departments.  That is, given the widely disparate ways in which each discipline achieves accomplishment, a publication in one discipline will have very different implications than a publication in another.  Further, several disciplines have very different output measures, such as juried art shows. Thus, the provost is asking for five years of data in this initial effort, which will encourage him to compare output over time.

            My view is that faculty output covers a wide range of activities. We, and more importantly, the people that fund us care about all of them. I believe our progress in scholarship is even more broadly based, and rapid, than has been our progress as measured in the Research Report. Hopefully, we’ll see by the end of the spring semester!

Steven G. Craig
Faculty Senate President