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CORVALLIS - A three-day workshop at Oregon State University that has drawn educators from around the country will look at creating a blueprint for change in American universities.

On the agenda: a series of lectures and panel discussions, an open forum, and even a creative dance about higher education.

Several sections of the Oct. 1-3 "Scholarship Unbound" workshop are free and the public is welcome to attend, said C.J. "Bud" Weiser, workshop organizer and professor emeritus in the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences. Registration for the entire workshop is $260. Registrations received before Sept. 21 receive a $60 discount. For information, call 541-737-2329.

"It is particularly appropriate that OSU is hosting the workshop and providing its perspective as the first Carnegie I Research University to define scholarship broadly and revise its tenure and promotion guidelines accordingly in 1995," Weiser said. "The OSU model is being adapted and adopted at several other universities."

Scholarship Unbound features 36 discussion sessions with speakers, artists and scholars from 16 universities and national organizations, he added.

Included in the free, public sessions is the West Coast premier of "My Own Private Microscope," a dance inspired by microbiologists and plant pathologists and presented by Joseph Houseal, a Chicago-based choreographer, director, producer and writer. Houseal spent eight years as artistic director of Parnassus Dancetheatre, a multicultural, performance troupe from Kyoto, Japan. His presentation illustrates scholarship in the arts and demonstrates how art can express change in how higher education will do business in the future.

Houseal's session is at 3:20 p.m. on Oct. 1 in LaSells Stewart Center. He is preceded at 1:20 p.m. by another public session presented by Richard Sisson, provost at Ohio State University. Sisson will discuss the forces of change that are affecting American universities.

Following Sisson, a discussion panel will explore OSU's experience in changing the institution's values and faculty evaluation process.

Public sessions on Friday, Oct. 2, include: 8:30 a.m. in LaSells Stewart Center, a 90-minute presentation by David Damrosch, professor from Columbia University, discussing the conceptual foundations for change in universities; 1:30 p.m. in the CH2M Hill Alumni Center, a 90-minute program of walkabout discussion sites, organized by discipline and faculty assignments.

The final public session is scheduled at 10:40 a.m., Saturday, Oct. 3, in LaSells Stewart Center and features reflections by John Byrne, OSU president emeritus. Byrne will be followed by an open forum on key ideas from the workshop and evolution of American universities in the 21st century.

More than 200 people from 50 U.S. universities will attend the workshop, which is sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the American Association of Higher Education.