Issues driving reform of faculty reward systems to advance professional graduate education: The need for criteria that support engineering practice and technology leadership

This is the first of four papers in the special panel session focusing on issues driving reform of faculty reward systems to advance professional graduate engineering education for creative engineering practice and leadership of technological innovation to enhance U.S. competitiveness. This panel session is in direct response to the urgency of engineering education reform and improvement of faculty reward systems, voiced by Wm. A. Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering at the 2002-Main Plenary Address to the American Society of Engineering Education. Since the Grinter Report, scientific research has become a primary condition for tenure and promotion at many of the nation's schools of engineering across the country. In his seminal work, Scholarship Reconsidered, Ernest Boyer identified the need to broaden the range and the definition of scholarship beyond the limits of scholarship of research and discovery. As the panel overview paper, this paper introduces the need to implement a comprehensive faculty reward system for those professional-oriented adjunct faculty from industry and for those professional-oriented core faculty within schools of engineering and technology, who are at the leading edge of advancing the practice of engineering through their teaching, industrial engagement, and original professional scholarly work relevant to creative engineering practice and its leadership for technology development. The paper raises fundamental questions that must be answered to design a complementary faculty reward template of creative professional scholarly work, teaching, and engagement for high-caliber engineering professionals in parallel to the academic scientific research template, which predominantly exists at schools of engineering and technology across the nation.