Let me draw you a “word picture” to illustrate what is wrong with scholarly reward systems and where we need to go.
Picture a figure eight: a flattened figure eight, turned on its side. The left-side loop represents a scholarly community of practice—the academic field—with its own questions, debates, validation procedures, communication practices, and so on. The right-side loop represents scholarly work with the public—with community partners, in collaborative problem-solving groups, through projects that connect knowledge with choices and action.
Our problem is that scholarly practice is organized to draw faculty members only into the left-side loop. The reward system, the incentive system, our communication practices—all are connected with the left side only. Work within the right-side loop is discouraged, sometimes quite vigorously.
Our challenge, then, is to revamp the terrain so that the reward system supports the entire figure eight, and especially scholarly movement back and forth between the two loops in the larger figure. Left-loop work ought to be informed and enriched by work in the right-side loop, and vice versa. Travel back and forth should be both expected and rewarded. This is what our project is trying to achieve. But I doubt I will live to see (laughs) the triumph of this transformative effort.
– From Carol Geary Schneider, president, Association of American Colleges and Universities
