On the Scholarly Activity of Higher Educationists.
Despite the comparatively recent emergence of higher education as a field of study, higher educationists already number in the hundreds, and their ranks are swelling annually. Academicians so numerous can be expected to publish a great deal of scholarly work, and these people-our colleagues-do. Our interest in their work is twofold: we seek to develop a taxonomy by which to distinguish among the publications higher educationists produce, and as higher educationists ourselves we wish to argue for a change in the emphases that inform much, if not most, of the scholarly activity presently undertaken by higher educationists. We do not intend to suggest criteria for assessing the quality of scholarly effort. Our attention is directed to the kinds of scholarly work carried out in higher education, not to the competence with which it is pursued. Scholarly production in higher education can be conceptualized in terms of three major categories (with subcategories within them): (1) descriptive materials, (2) value statements, and (3) theoretical statements.