On becoming a scholar

Abstract

In his widely-cited book, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities for the professoriate, Earnest Boyer (1990) gave conceptual flesh to the word scholarship by distinguishing the scholarship of discovery, the scholarship of teaching, the scholarship of application and the scholarship of integration. The value of Boyer’s conceptualization is that it elevates the routine functions of academic work in terms of scholarship. What Boyer does not do, however, is to expand on the attributes of those who do scholarship i.e. the scholar, and this is the short contribution on offer in this article.