I have a friend at a major research university who teaches on Thursday aftenoons 3-5, and when he learned my hours of teaching he asked with a snarl “How do you get anything done?” I have another friend, a high school driver’s education teacher who never reads a book but who teaches from 7:20am to 3:30pm with a one hour break and who also coaches after school, who asks me regularly, “Is It because you can’t stand the pressure that you don’t do anything?” I have another friend, a manual laborer whose comments to me are of this order: “How can you go through life not doing anything?”
For the first, we liberal arts professors are “exiles from Eden” (the research university), for the second we are “exiles from society” (the real world), and for the third, we are “exiled from work” (the world of manual labor) because we couldn’t handle the work. For each we are “exiles” but I want to contend with you today that it is we, those who teach in a liberal arts college, who are actually in Eden because here we enjoy both a vocation of unsurpassable joy, a constant interaction with young minds who (usually) want to learn and change, and a freedom of schedule that permits us to pursue our passions and loves.
I have been asked to address the issue of the “Professor as Scholar” and I will look at scholarship through the lens of what a “scholar” is and what “scholarship” is in the context of being a “Professor”. But l want to say up front that I do not think we are all alike, I am not going to argue that scholarly publishing is the most important thing we do or that every professor needs to be a scholarly writer on a constant basis, and I am not relegating teaching to a subsidiary task on our campus. I have been asked to address you on the matter of “Professor as Scholar” and, taking that one angle on what we do, quite naturally leads to discussions about publications. I shall do this but I want the right perspective to be acquired before I go on. Not only do I define scholar and scholarship broadly enough to include what we do in the classroom, but I also value the importance of expounding our ideas in print. That’s what I want to contend with you today about.
Scholarship is not about “winning”, about “fame”, or about climbing to the top; most won’t know and many don’t care; it is about expression, about a dialogue, about pursuit of truth, about our own development as humans, and about contributing to the Great Conversation of the Mind – from diverse, but nonetheless fully conscious, Christian points of view.
To read the entire address, follow this link:
“The Professor as Scholar” by Scot McKnight (pdf, 28 pages)
_________________________________
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In