The Teacher-Scholar Ideal

The Wake Forest teacher-scholar ideal is fundamental to Wake Forest University, along with our motto of Pro Humanitate. It rests on a strong liberal arts foundation and our aspiration to educate the whole person, promote critical thinking, nurture curiosity, and provide meaningful student-faculty engagement. This ideal fosters a vibrant intellectual learning community that advances the frontiers of knowledge across faculty, students, and staff. Intellectual inquiry is evident through individual and team-based research, collaboration and interdisciplinary exploration of complex questions and problems.

Both teaching and scholarship are essential components of a vibrant and effective higher education institution. Key to the teacher-scholar ideal is the recognition of the intrinsic relationship between teaching and scholarship and a belief that intellectual inquiry is critical to achieving excellence in teaching and learning. They actively engage students inside and outside the classroom in research, scholarly and creative work, as well as academically-oriented service learning, community-based research, civic engagement, projects that address real-world challenges and opportunities, and experiential learning.

While individual faculty share a common teacher-scholar ideal, each faculty member may possess unique experiences, skills, academic preparation, and research training that position them differentially within the domain of scholarship and intellectual inquiry. Because of our shared commitment to the ideal, these individual strengths build a robust community of intellectual curiosity, knowledge making, and learning – elements essential to excellence in teaching and scholarship.