Inventing a Curriculum for the Social Sciences: Some Presuppositions for the Redefinition of Scholarship

The author takes Ernest Boyer's four‐part paradigm of scholarship: the scholarship of discovery, the scholarship of integration, the scholarship of application, and the scholarship of teaching as his starting point for the redefinition of curricula in the social sciences in an effort to make them more effective in the search for solutions to major human and societal problems. Drawing upon his knowledge of university social science and humanities programmes, he proposes and analyses ten paradoxes regarding the ideals and the realities of such programmes in order to explain what is wrong with academic practice today and to propose a holistic reform.