With an eye to Gadamer’s elaboration of Bildung (in Truth and Method), I wrote the following response to a call for members of my immediate academic community to define scholarship. Many have already made excellent points about pedagogic research, etc., through a collaborative padlet. For example, citing the work of Minocha and Collins (2023), Impact of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A guide for educators. The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.000155c1

I felt something was missing:

One of the problems with HE is the sense that time and effort must be maximally instrumentalised, ‘for profit’, ‘to increase productivity/effectiveness’, and pedagogic research may be a case in point… But scholarship has an element of obliging one-self in self-cultivating, keeping oneself open to what is ‘other’, towards an ideal that owns ‘no goals outside itself’; it is no mere means to an end. This implies a strong place for theory, and especially that which is discomforting, even alienating, beyond the immediate and familiar. 
For this, the scholar must enjoy a state of unhurried psychological safety. Until the university patently prizes its scholars’ time, for too many this will remain an irritating pipe-dream glanced at from the treadmill. 

I felt there is a resemblance here to the phenomenological reduction which requires an opening of the self to wonder, as when confronted with the majesty of creation (pic from a recent trip to Cadair Idris). Without this move, can we escape the circular self.