Ph.D. Colloquium Keynote Speech
Scholarship and the Modern Professor
Dr. Philip A. Wilsey
Abstract
The idea of Scholarship as a concept is easily overshadowed by the pace and intensity of our achievement and assessment-based society. While Faculty historically fit the classification of Scholar, it is easy for this concept to be supplanted by the metric spaces of research, teaching, and service (or whatever metrics an organization might embrace). These metrics are useful for assessment, but not for definition of “what a Scholar is” (or what a Scholar does). Webster's 1913 definition for Scholar is “One engaged in the pursuits of learning; a learned person; one versed in any branch, or in many branches, of knowledge; a person of high literary or scientific attainments; a savant.” Thus, the true reflection of Scholar is a deep embedding of oneself into a discipline and a way of being that extends well beyond simply learning. Achievement of a high level of Scholarship leads one to an embedding of knowledge and understanding to an extent that is difficult to separate the person from the discipline. While this talk focuses on Faculty and Scholarship, not all Scholars are Faculty. In this talk I will review the notions of Scholarship and discuss how the common assessment metrics of research, teaching, and service can be complementary to life as a Scholar.
Biosketch
Philip A. Wilsey's research is in high-performance computing, especially parallel simulation, and high-performance, high-dimensional data clustering. His work in parallel simulation focuses on the Time Warp mechanism and optimizations to its implementation on multi-core processors and clusters of multi-core processors. Dr. Wilsey is a Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Cincinnati.
