Honestly I find the cast reduction build excellent on scholars.
It allows you affectively use both autocast mode along with casting.
Plus, scholars were never really meant to go IC, so having 95% is quite enough.
You'd be even fine with around 80% <-- about what I use. You do have memorize as well which halves your casting times.
& yes, cast reduction gears reduce the casting time of memorize, unlike dex.
So you can run around with a tome with 190 attack speed, some decent flee, a lot of vit, and a whole lot of int.
Course you won't hit as hard as with a kaho, but for me survivability > damage (it hasn't that much lower damage anyway)
Only thing that sucks is if you go against a gtb target in pvp, say goodbye to using strip with 1 dex
