3.9 Perceptions within the discipline: exceptional scholarship in  (Page 7/8)

For still others, the use of“living scholar”understandably incited confusion and controversy, as thoughtfully articulated:“In good conscience I must say that I find the term living scholar something of an oxymoron. My definition may be outof style these days, but I believe before one can be considered a scholar that person’s writings or orations must have withstood the tests of time.”Interestingly, this decision evoked“considerable difficulty. Every time I visit your email the same questionsprevent an answer—does‘greatest living’mean most frequently cited by other scholars? Most followed by practitioners? Contributed thegreatest theoretical insights about leadership?

Done most to redirect the field of study? Or, added most to the empirical base for understandingleadership?”

My reaction to all of these pivotal concerns is that while the survey question is laden with datable, slipperyconcepts (i.e.,“the field,”“living scholar,”“exceptional,”and even“educational leadership”), so is the profession itself. Further, the question solicited valuable information—it is useful to see the multiple, disjointed, and even contradictory viewpointstaken. Areas of consensus also surfaced from this mixed response, as captured in Table 1. Accounting for the feedback of non-votingmembers as I have done here has made visible issues of contention. Those who provided critiques about the nominating process andsuggestively about its validity performed a probing hermeneutic deconstruction that was treated as data and thematically analyzed,with some attention given here.

Contextual Influences and Background Issues

One crucial insight of survey respondents was,“Who is outstanding in educational leadership and administration or any scholarly field is really framed by the timesand the needs.”In many respects, this resounding message has greater worth than the criteria and even the participants’selections. Certainly, context matters, a reality that keeps the idea of“living legend”and practice of hero-worshipping in perspective. This admission of temporality and contextualitycontrasts with the view that the living legend“finalists”represent a static, noncontroversial choice.

The results, inevitably debatable from almost any angle, are also influenced by the methods I have selected andthe venues surveyed. Regardless of my attempt to appraise the educational leadership field as comprehensively as possible, adisjointedly configured domain required piecemeal,“pick and shovel”sampling. Because no single“repository”exists to which all leadership professors belong, it is currently not possible tocommunicate with the complete constituency and at one time. Such systemic barriers make it clear that any such study should not beconstrued as the last word on the subject of exceptional scholarship.

In addition to systemic barriers to data collection, other contextual issues included political alliances,decision-making challenges, and generational biases. Some scholarly communities hold tight allegiances, making it difficult to know theextent to which nominations were influenced by loyalty rather than informed judgment. In a few instances, junior professors“confessed”that they had nominated their former major professors. Perhaps more exhaustive sampling procedures would have bettermonitored the influence of political entanglements; on the other hand, these seem inherent in the psyche of any discipline. Othercontextual influences underscore how challenging it proved for some respondents to make a single selection. This struggle emphasizesjust how demanding this decision-making process can be as well as—this is the good news—the high number of outstanding leaders from which to select. A few participants even postulated that nosuch scholars currently exist, except as experts within their own domain. But most persons did provide a nomination, even wheredisclaimers had been announced, an admission that supports the contentious notion that leading scholars for contemporary times canin fact be identified, even where tensions and uncertainty are embedded in the conclusions and where debate is inevitable andongoing.