Scholarly Agenda

Individual Faculty Responsibility

The process of developing and articulating one's own scholarly agenda is an essential first step for newly-appointed faculty and is a continuing responsibility as faculty seek advancement. Each faculty member, regardless of rank, has the primary responsibility for planning his or her own career and for articulating his or her own evolving scholarly agenda.

1. The purpose of a scholarly agenda is not to limit a faculty member's freedom nor to constrain his or her scholarship, but, primarily, to provide a means for individuals to articulate their programs of scholarly effort. The scholarly agenda needs to be specific enough to provide a general outline of a faculty member's goals, priorities, and activities, but it is not a detailed recitation of tasks or a set of detailed, prescribed outcomes. A scholarly agenda:
   • articulates the set of serious intellectual, aesthetic or creative questions, issues or problems which engage and enrich an individual scholar,
   • describes an individual's accomplished and proposed contributions to knowledge, providing an overview of scholarship, including long-term goals and purposes,
   • clarifies general responsibilities and emphases placed by the individual upon research, teaching, community outreach, or governance, and
   • articulates the manner in which the scholar's activities relate to the departmental mission and programmatic goals.

   As a faculty member grows and develops, his or her scholarly agenda may evolve over the years. New scholarly agendas may reflect changes in the set of questions, issues, or problems which engage the scholar, or in the individual's relative emphases on teaching, research, community outreach, and governance.

2. The process of developing or redefining a scholarly agenda also encourages the individual scholar to interact with and draw upon the shared expertise of his or her departmental peers. This process promotes both individual and departmental development, and contributes to the intellectual, aesthetic, and creative climate of the department and of the University.

Departmental, School and College Responsibilities

The development of a scholarly agenda supports a collective process of departmental planning and decision-making which determines the deployment of faculty talent in support of departmental and university missions. Departments, schools, and colleges have the primary responsibility for establishing their respective missions and programmatic goals within the context of the University's mission and disciplines as a whole. Recognizing that departments often accomplish such wide-ranging missions by encouraging faculty to take on diverse scholarly agendas, departments and individual faculty members are expected to engage in joint career development activities throughout each faculty member's career. Such activities must:

• recognize the individual's career development needs,
• respect the diversity of individual faculty interests and talents, and
• advance the departmental mission and programmatic goals.

Departments shall develop processes for establishing, discussing, agreeing upon, and revising a scholarly agenda that are consistent with the focus upon individual career development and collective responsibilities and shall establish regular methods for resolving conflicts which may arise in the process of agreeing upon scholarly agendas. Finally, departmental processes shall include periodic occasions for collective discussion of the overall picture resulting from the combination of the scholarly agendas of individual faculty members.

The Uses of a Scholarly Agenda

The primary use of a scholarly agenda is developmental, not evaluative. An individual's contributions to knowledge should be evaluated in the context of the quality and significance of the scholarship displayed. An individual may include a previously agreed upon scholarly agenda in his or her promotion and tenure documentation, but it is not required. A scholarly agenda is separate from such essentially evaluation-driven practices as letters of offer, annual review of tenure-track faculty, and institutional career support-peer review of tenured faculty, and from the consideration of individuals for merit awards.