Nebraska Network 21
Date of this Version
December 2000
Abstract
Action Team on Scholarship, Evaluation and Rewards: The Action Team on Scholarship, Evaluation and Rewards was a component of the Nebraska Network 21 project, one of 13 projects on the future role of higher education in American society funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Given its mission, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation focused its initiative on the land-grant mission of higher education and on food systems, broadly defined to range from the communities that produce the food to the communities that consume it. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), the NN21 project has been centered in the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources (IANR), but the focus has been enlarged beyond food systems to collaboration among higher education institutions, K-12 schools and communities in Nebraska. The purpose of NN21 is to meet the learning needs of Nebraskans in the 21st century. The Action Team on Scholarship, Evaluation and Rewards accordingly did not limit its work to land-grant or food systems issues, but examined how academic work is defined, supported and rewarded across the campus and, to a lesser degree, across the state. Although a majority of the team members were from UNL, other institutions of higher education and the general public were represented on the team and as participants in the roundtable discussions and other activities. As this report indicates, the Team defined scholarship as the focal point for a wide range of academic work and approached evaluation and rewards from a variety of angles. The history of the Action Team is traced in Appendix A.