The Rise of Fractional Scholarship

Abstract

When people are doing something they are passionate about, they work harder and produce a better product. Thus, underemployed scholars represent, in some sense, a good that is currently trading well below its actual value. Of course, in the course of their primary employment, many of these individuals can and do provide value to the economy outside of traditional scholarship. However, by providing a mechanism for those who wish to conduct research, we can allow these people to engage in their passions while growing the base of scholarly knowledge, which, in turn, has the potential to create further economic growth.By creating an institution devoted to fractional scholarship, we will harness the skills and talents of thousands of underemployed researchers. At the same time, traditional academia will be aided in the creation of a new, attractive career path for people with graduate degrees.Freed from the strictures of traditional academia, fractional scholarship will be able to leap ahead of the departmental structures and artificial boundaries to collaboration too often found in universities. Fractional scholars, drawing on more varied life experiences than those steeped within the ivory tower, will not simply be scratching a research itch. They will be performing creative research, some of which could not even be done within traditional academia, and, at the same time, acting as a newfound scholarly resource for our nation.