Dandelions, Prestige, and the Measure of Scholars

By Barbara Fister. Two of the communities I hang out in talk a lot about publishing. For academics, being published in the right places and enough times is a measure of worth. The peer review system attached to scholarly publishing is widely presumed more unbiased and less prone to the vagaries of local politics than peer evaluations of teaching, even at institutions at which student learning is more central to its mission than research. It’s also more fungible. The reputation a scholar builds for teaching tends to be a local currency. Scholarship is the currency of an entire discipline. Read more...