This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Campus Compact, a national coalition of over 950 college and university presidents that promotes community service, civic engagement, and service-learning. For the past two decades the Compact, which features over sixty members from Massachusetts, has contributed to and been a beneficiary of a dramatic thawing of town-gown relations that better positions the Commonwealth and the entire country in today’s knowledge economy. As regions around the world aggressively organize to compete in this economy, it is timely to celebrate the thawing of town-gown relations and suggest ways in which organizations like Campus Compact can further strengthen campus-community partnerships going forward.

Thawing of Town-Gown Tensions

Historically, colleges and universities literally walled themselves off from their host communities. This was particularly the case in urban settings in the 1960s and 1970s as cities hemorrhaged from urban decline. Community and government agencies, in turn, have often viewed colleges as pariahs, complaining about their tax-exempt status, physical encroachment, and noisy students. The term town-gown itself typically conjures up acrimony and tension which has frequently played out when academic and community stakeholders have interacted.

Over the past two decades, a dramatic sea change has occurred, by which institutions of higher learning and their host communities have come to recognize their relationship as symbiotic. There are at least four major forces at play that have helped to bring about this transformation.

The Public Service Revolution

Visionary academic leaders like the founders of Campus Compact challenged the mid-1980s notion that college students had grown apathetic by championing public service in student life programming and academics. The results have been profound.

Over the past ten years, the number of campus-based public service programs in Massachusetts alone has increased 75%. The estimated number of hours students contribute to service on campuses grew from 20,000 to 350,000 annually. The number of colleges with service offices rose from 10% to 85%. Barbara Canyes, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Campus Compact, reports that “Many new institutional structures have been built into systems to allow for better communications to communities.”¹ Universities like Harvard, for example, regularly publish service directories that raise awareness on and off campus about the institution’s commitment to service. Quantifying the full spectrum of an institution’s service provides good fodder for public relations. In the 1990s, Brown University in Providence aggressively advertised that 1 in 4 volunteers in the city’s public schools were Brown students; the promotion of this finding tangibly improved its relations with city officials.

A Greater Commitment to Community & Government Relations

This type of promotion epitomizes a second force strengthening town-gown relations. Two decades ago, community affairs at most universities were handled by the general counsel or public relations officers on a part time basis. But increased demands for accountability by government and community agencies have led colleges to build out specific community and government relations staff capacities. New campus-based institutes and think tanks have also proliferated and are registering new influence on local public policy making.

One precipitating factor is the changing nature of civic leadership. Perceptibly, politicians and other civic leaders are looking to higher education to help fill the void left by corporate mergers and acquisitions. In Boston, for example, many thorny civic issues are now tackled by academic-based think tanks like the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern, the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard, the McCormack Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University.

Another major factor is the growing reach of government in the academy. Historically, the federal government was loath to regulate higher education, but has increased its oversight as financial aid and research funding have grown as sources of institutional revenue. At the same time, state and local governments have become more aggressive in regulating or exacting concessions from colleges as they seek to expand physical infrastructure. Many municipalities have created new academic zoning and master plan requirements. Mayors and city councils have become savvier in prodding institutions to increase community contributions against the backdrop of the tax-exempt debate, particularly acute in the Northeast where many cities are peculiarly reliant on the agricultural economy-era property tax.

College and university administrators are embracing the overtures of government officials out of recognition that positive relations with their host communities are in their enlightened self-interest. In the 1960s and 1970s, universities like Columbia deliberately disengaged from their adjacent neighborhoods. This strategy backfired as many institutions saw their own standing (and applications) fall in direct relation to their communities’ declining fortunes. Former Columbia President George Rupp estimates that the University’s community missteps from the late 1960s through the 1980s may have cost Columbia a billion dollars in contributions.²

Over the past twenty years, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Trinity in Hartford, Clark in Worcester, and many other colleges have significantly invested in adjacent neighborhoods in innovative ways with local groups. Under the presidency of Judith Rodin, the University of Pennsylvania led the rebuilding of West Philadelphia by pursuing five bread and butter strategies: 1) creating clean and safe streets; 2) increasing housing and home ownership; 3) promoting commercial development; 4) fostering economic opportunity; and 5) fortifying public education.³ Those strategies have paid big dividends, including a 31% reduction in crime, an 88% increase in median home values in five years, 150,000 square feet of new retail space, and new businesses and schools.⁴ The University’s standing in national rankings is now soaring. Trinity pursued similar strategies that led to a 77% increase in applications⁵. Clark’s Park Campus School has been called the best urban public high school in the Commonwealth, and in 2004, the University Park Partnership, Main South Community Development Corporation, and Clark received the state’s inaugural Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Partnership Award.⁶

Colleges and universities also increasingly agree to make payments or services or form new strategic partnerships in lieu of paying taxes. In Boston, where local institutions contribute tens of millions in direct payments to municipalities annually on commercial taxes, payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT), and other fees, universities have individual PILOT agreements with the city. In 2004, Tufts University announced a new agreement with the cities of Medford and Somerville that included a $1.25 million contribution to each city to be paid over the next 10 years⁷. In Providence, colleges and universities have agreed to a formula by which PILOT is made on a voluntary sliding scale triggered by certain factors such as endowment size and property purchases⁸. In Worcester, colleges recently participated in a Mayoral task force on town-gown relations that resulted in promising new strategic public-private initiatives. All of these are the products of more sophisticated joint town-gown strategizing.

Touting the Economic Impact of Higher Education

Another major force gaining currency of late is the growing recognition and promotion of the academy’s economic impact. Higher education’s impact on a region’s economy has always been significant. But it has become all the more catalytic locally and nationally amidst the rapid transformation to a primarily knowledge-based economy.

Take, for example, Greater Boston, home to the nation’s fourth largest metropolitan economy. Amidst a changing corporate climate, higher education is ever more distinguished as a major sector in its own right and one that helps to develop other leading knowledge sectors like health care and biotechnology. The region’s 75 colleges and universities employ well over 50,000 faculty and staff.⁹ The eight major research universities in the area alone have an economic impact of over $7 billion and spend nearly $3.9 billion annually on payroll, purchasing, and construction.¹⁰ They receive $1.5 billion in research funds and their affiliated hospitals and research centers attract an additional $1 billion.¹¹ Area universities and their affiliated hospitals represent more than one-third of the state’s largest 25 employers.¹² Leading companies like Boston Scientific, EMC, and Analog Devices were founded by graduates of local colleges. Major companies like Novartis and Merck are moving to Boston to be close to higher education clusters. Students at the eight major institutions alone spend about $850 million and visitors an additional $250 million.¹³ The region’s concentration of knowledge networks rooted in higher education attracts workers to the region and helps to train the local workforce beyond degree programs through a wide range of community outreach efforts.

Higher education’s growing economic impact and heightened awareness about it are natural byproducts of the ascendant knowledge economy and not limited to Massachusetts. Nationally, education and knowledge creation enjoyed the second highest level of job growth by traded cluster in the 1990s.¹⁴ Colleges and universities across the U.S. are embracing economic ventures, incented by laws like the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 that facilitated university patenting and product licensing and led to a tenfold increase nationally in academic activity in this area.¹⁵

The knowledge economy has also placed a higher premium on arguably the most important output of colleges ? human capital. A 2004 study by Robert Weissbourd and Christopher Berry for CEOs for Cities, The Changing Dynamics of Urban America, finds that college degree attainment is the single biggest driver of urban economic growth.¹⁶ States increasingly view higher education as important engines of growth. Despite the recent recession, higher education funding by the States has increased as a percentage of overall outlays nationally in the past decade. Paul Grogan, President of the Boston Foundation, frequently points out that in today’s footloose economy, local leaders from across sectors increasingly recognize colleges and universities as valuable stationary assets and anchors of economic growth.

Colleges and universities are taking note of their rising economic impact and clout and promoting them. Harvard, MIT, and Brown recently produced economic impact statements and the eight largest research universities in Greater Boston published a report “Engines of Economic Growth” documenting their collective impact. Local business and government leaders are also reaching out to higher education leaders for assistance in corporate recruitment, as evidenced by the Commonwealth’s Office of Economic Development’s recent successful efforts to mobilize local university leadership in recruiting Bristol Myers Squibb to Fort Devens. These efforts are inspired by similar strategies to integrate higher education leaders in regional development efforts pioneered by officials in the Research Triangle, Austin, and other fast growing competitor knowledge economy centers.

Innovative Higher Education Alliances

Several colleges and universities across regions are seeking to institutionalize and grow such partnerships to scale by forming innovative alliances within their sector and across sectors. Most alliances like the Colleges of Worcester Consortium provide multiple functions, including promotion of the sector writ large, cross-campus exchanges, and facilitation of economies of scale. Others like the I-91 Knowledge Corridor are more project oriented, marketing regions like the Springfield-Hartford area as emerging knowledge economy hubs. In 2003, public colleges and universities in Southeastern Massachusetts formed the Connect partnership which recently issued a report outlining how the region can better position itself in the knowledge economy.

Another evolving model is that of higher education-civic partnerships that tackle major regional competitiveness issues. As an outgrowth of the Mayor’s task force, Worcester recently formed a new UniverCity Partnership to leverage collaboration between the City, the Consortium and other public and private entities to promote the region’s development. Perhaps the best example of this cross-sectoral approach is Philadelphia’s Knowledge Industry Partnership (KIP), a broad-based coalition of the region’s civic, business, government, and academic leaders working together to maximize the impact of the region’s knowledge industry. KIP promotes the region as “One Big Campus” to prospective students, encourages them to explore the city upon matriculation, and sponsors internships and externships (with over 2,500 placements to date) all designed to bolster the region’s supply and retention of knowledge economy workers.¹⁷ A similar effort called College 360 seeks to “enroll, engage, and employ” students in Northeast Ohio.¹⁸

Building Upon the Momentum

While these four forces hold promise, colleges and universities and their external stakeholders need to build on their momentum. A 2005 Carol R. Goldberg Seminar report co-sponsored by the Boston Foundation and the University College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts reported that leaders across sectors were optimistic about the future of town-gown relations but argued that more strategic, sustained commitments were needed to institutionalize collaborative approaches. As former Northeastern University President Richard Freeland put it, “Our challenge within academia is to shift toward actively working with community leaders for our mutual benefit. The challenge for local communities and civic officials is to move toward seeing such institutions as critical engines of regional development. What is clear, of course, is that these twin paradigm shifts are the mirror image of each other. One can’t happen without the other.”¹⁹

As academic-based organizations like Campus Compact strengthen institutional commitments to public service to meet their part of this bargain, they ought to branch out and/or foster the formation of related efforts to help replicate best practices in community and government relations, economic development, and town-gown alliance building. Specifically, they should encourage colleges and universities to:

1. Marshal institutional resources in support of host communities’ petitions for more state aid to help compensate for tax-exempt property. While colleges and universities are growing the knowledge economy and providing new external value, this doesn’t radically change the fact that many host municipalities are still often strapped for cash due to their excessive reliance on the property tax, meaning that town-gown relations will continue to be raw unless new mechanisms are created to provide relief to municipalities. While many institutions have agreed to make PILOT, they ought to partner with host communities in pursuit of more creative and sustainable solutions to strengthen local government’s financial model. Connecticut and Rhode Island offer best practices examples. The State of Connecticut is mandated to reimburse its cities and towns nearly 80% of tax revenues that go uncollected from nonprofit institutions. The State of Rhode Island reimburses 27%. Such policies recognize the importance of investing in both non-profit academic institutions and municipal governments alike as part of a holistic statewide economic development strategy.
2. Create and commit to community investment goals across all institutional business line functions. Too few colleges set community investment goals across all corporate functions like purchasing, employment, and investments. Regardless of their other good works, institutions that do not incorporate community concerns in all of their operations risk being labeled hypocritical. Colleges should seek to direct purchasing to area vendors, target employment to nearby residents in need, consider joint mixed-use real estate ventures with local stakeholders, and invest in area assets whenever possible like any other major business looking to brandish its corporate citizenship credentials.
3. Document their economic and community impact regularly, highlighting opportunities for further development. Such promotion can do as much to raise awareness and inspire efforts on campus as off.
4. Pursue sectoral and cross-sectoral alliances when strategically advantageous on issues such as regional talent retention. Such alliances are commonplace in the health care sector and would enable higher education to advance its collective interests and offer a vehicle with which related government and business associations could partner on knowledge economy strategies. Private colleges and universities should particularly explore ways in which they can support public higher education as part of a wider strategy to strengthen the sector’s role in a regional economy.

Campus Compact provides an instructive model by which colleges and universities share best practices in embedding engagement in higher education. Building upon this model is critical to enable the Commonwealth and the entire country to maintain its economic edge and to continue to redefine town-gown as a positive term that connotes opportunity rather than acrimony.

Notes

¹ James Davitt Rooney & Julia Gittleman, “A New Era of Higher Education-Civic Partnerships: The Role and Impact of Colleges and Universities in Greater Boston Today”, October 2005, The Boston Foundation at 27. back

² The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) & CEOs for Cities, “Leveraging Colleges and Universities for Urban Economic Growth ? An Action Agenda”, 2003 at 36. back

³ University of Pennsylvania Office of the Vice President for Government, Community & Public Affairs, “Urban Alliance: How Penn’s Dynamic Engagement Transformed the Neighborhood,” 2004 at 1. back

⁴ Id. at 5, 9, 12. back

⁵ See ICIC & CEOs for Cities, 13. back

⁶ See Clark University, Clark and the Community: Education at back

⁷ See Rooney & Gittleman, Boston Foundation, 22. back

⁸ See Rhode Island School of Design, News, Press Releases: Mayor Cicilline Reaches an Historic Agreement with Providence Colleges + Universities. back

⁹ See Rooney & Gittleman, Boston Foundation, 15. back

¹⁰ Appleseed, Inc., “Engines of Economic Growth: The Economic Impact of Boston’s Eight Research Universities on the Metropolitan Boston Area”, 2003, Boston College, et al., 6-7. back

¹¹ See Appleseed, Boston College, et al., 3. back

¹² See Rooney & Gittleman, Boston Foundation, 14 back.

¹³ See Appleseed, Boston College, et al., 6. back

¹⁴ Michael Porter, Cluster Mapping Project, Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard Business School. back

¹⁵ Council on Government Relations, The Bayh-Dole Act: A Guide to the Law and Implementing Regulations, 1999. back

¹⁶ Robert Weissbourd and Christopher Berry, “The Changing Dynamics of Urban America,” CEOs for Cities, Executive Summary, 2004, 6. back

¹⁷ See Philadelphia’s Knowledge Industry Partnership. back

¹⁸ See College 360. back

¹⁹ See Rooney & Gittleman, Boston Foundation, 9. back

Much like other assessment terms, benchmarking has been used appropriately and inappropriately to rate, compare, chart progress, and evaluate. Palomba and Banta (1999) provide a definition that comes close to the processes and potential for the new Carnegie classification — Community Engagement. The authors describe benchmarking as a “promising practice” defined as “the process of identifying and learning from institutions that are recognized for outstanding practices.” They add that benchmarking often includes careful study of “best” or “promising practices.” In contrast, the processes of rating or comparing are not intended with the new classification.

The benchmarking potential of the new Community Engagement classification began with its development processes — using insights about outstanding practices from two major sources:

1. The efforts of major national groups or organizations — Campus Compact’s study and publication of the indicators of community engagement at community colleges, an assessment tool developed by the Community Campus Partnerships for Health, and the Defining and Benchmarking Engagement Project of NASULGC’s CIC Committee on Engagement.
2. A pilot study sponsored by Carnegie to examine community engagement practices as indicators for a documentation framework and conducted at 14 institutions (see Carnegie website for list of pilot institutions).

A framework draft was derived from the first source. That draft then became the focus of a careful study by those pilot institutions as they examined “promising practices” in their self-assessment and documentation approaches. Their work paved the way for the institutions that would later apply for the new classification by determining the significance, practicality, and usefulness of practice indicators. Most importantly, their pilot documentation trials achieved an inclusive framework that would respect and affirm the diversity of approaches to community engagement in higher education. Within that inclusive framework is the potential for self-study and reflection for a wide range of institutions.

The 2006 Community Engagement classification applications reflect that range of fit and exemplify the motivation for and interest in self-assessment of community engagement practices. Just as important as those intentions of campus applications are the intentions of those institutions that have decided not to apply, but to focus on continued development and/or implementation of “promising practices.” The benchmarking potential of the new Carnegie classification is already demonstrated and contributing to the future of community engagement in higher education.

The benchmarking potential of the new community engagement classification can be further demonstrated through three major questions and related issues. Those questions and issues take us into the future of both community engagement and a classification that achieves benchmarking.

Question 1: Why Apply for the New Classification —Community Engagement?

The Carnegie classification has been intensely welcomed by institutions from across the country. The first round of applications derive from a wide range of institutions in terms of type, size, student population, program emphasis, and geographical location. My conversations with colleagues at those institutions reveal a broad list of very diverse reasons for their celebratory wishes and their applications. An exploration of those rationales and/or motivations leads to questions and possible implications for community engagement in general.

Some institutions see the classification as an opportunity for national recognition, a way to honor the efforts of engaged scholars, or as a connection with the cachet of the Carnegie name. The documentation process is extensive and requires time and resources on the part of an institution to meet the requirements. When asked “why?” a number of institutional representatives responded that having a Carnegie classification was worth the work. When probed with a further “why?” the responses included use in grant seeking, communicating with community, and responding to constituencies for accountability purposes.

Other institutions genuinely encourage the inquiry and evidence gathering associated with the documentation required for classification. Again, the issue of work is raised, but most institutions responded that the actual data gathering and tracking for documentation was “long overdue.” It is one of the areas of community engagement that continues to demand more attention and resources than previously realized. Bob Bringle (2006) has assessed the situation on many campuses as “underreported” due to a variety of factors. The lack of common language, even in what we call this concept (community engagement vs civic engagement vs and so on), leads to difficulties in reporting and assessing. The lack of models for assessing and evaluating impact also contributes to the underreporting or lack of reporting conditions.

There are those institutions, labeled prestigious for their achievements in research, grant funding, and related scholarship, who seek to associate their reputation with community engagement to achieve a more holistic description of the institution. There have been some assumptions over the last 20 years that the traditional Research I institutions would probably not pursue community engagement to any significant extent. Thus, some of the interest on the part of those institutions is to demonstrate to their higher education peers that an institution can achieve multiple forms of scholarship. There is also an intent to focus resources and agendas on community engagement from within those institutions.

Finally, there are those institutions, often prompted by individuals on the campus, who want to use the classification to highlight their lack of progress and to increase momentum to improve their engagement practices. I was told by those individuals that they were aware that they could not meet the requirements for the classification, and that such deficits would prompt attention from upper administration and motivate colleagues to dedicate more resources to the agenda.

This discussion of the varied reasons and motivations for interest in and applications to the new classification is not intended as judgment but rather as a description of the ways that the classification can serve higher education. We think that its documentation framework will stand as a source of “promising practices” reflecting the best work in community engagement in higher education. We intend that it be useful for self-study, planning, and guidance to those institutions that are in the early stages of developing an agenda of community engagement. We hope that other reasons and ultimately other purposes are served by using the documentation framework of the new community engagement classification.

Question 2: Inclusive vs. Exclusive Classification?

One of the major challenges of developing a documentation framework for the community engagement classification was the commitment to an inclusive framework. Our intention was to design a framework that respected the diversity of engagement approaches and the differences between institutions of higher education. We identified practices and environmental supports that are essential for community engagement to be institutionalized but did not specify what those practices would look like. For example, the practice of “assessing community perceptions about the effectiveness of the institution’s engagement with community” is an essential practice, but we have seen multiple forms of that practice. There are campuses that use surveys and focus groups, and there are campuses that host a monthly council of community advisors to inform the institution’s role in the community. There are colleges that send representatives to ongoing community meetings to check in on those perceptions, and universities with a community member as an official advisor to the administrative council. We expect that we will see at least a few more approaches to the practice of assessing community perceptions in our first round of applications.

On the other hand, there are practices that most of us would agree are essential to institutionalized community engagement that have not been implemented broadly in higher education. The issue of the scholarship of community engagement being specified in promotion and tenure guidelines is one that caused the most disagreement among the pilot campuses in 2005. Support for the practice was almost unanimous but when representatives considered their own institutions, they agreed that most of their institutions would not qualify for the classification if that practice became a requirement. We returned to the issue many times and could never achieve real agreement. We reached a compromise by including it as an optional requirement, one of four optional requirements to be selected. We expect that if it had been a requirement, the classification would have become an exclusive one with very few institutions meeting the requirements.

That expectation left us with questions…would it be better to include such a requirement and have only a very small number of institutions be classified?…would it prompt institutions to implement such practices for purposes of achieving classification?

The issue of the scholarship of community engagement and its inclusion in promotion and tenure guidelines is a significant one to be revisited consistently in the future of the community engagement classification. It opens up related issues such as the preparation of future faculty, hiring practices, and acceptance of alternative forms of scholarship. It leads to questions of frequency of classification revisions, applications, and depth of documentation.

Question 3: What Kind of Data? Quantitative vs. Qualitative?

In line with the intention to be inclusive with the new classification, the issue of quantitative data became problematic. Unlike the traditional classification system, there are no national data sources for community engagement that could be used for classification purposes. Many of the “promising practices” (mission statements, infrastructure, leadership) do not lend themselves to quantitative data well and those that do (service learning courses, number of faculty and students) are influenced by size, location, program emphasis, and other qualities of the institution. The lack of comparable quantitative data leads to further issues of review and decision making about which institutions are classified and which are not. There are issues of “how much engagement?’ for classification, or “how much involvement constitutes an engaged campus?”

The question of how much and how to document is not solely in the hands of the Carnegie work group. Fortunately, the classification for community engagement has been introduced at a time when major organizations are also focused on benchmarking and/or assessing engagement. The efforts of NASULGC, Campus Compact, and Community Campus Partnerships for Health and Campus Compact guided the Carnegie developments and the intention is for continued collaboration in future developments. In some ways, the efforts to quantify community engagement for classification is a microcosm of the challenge of assessing and evaluating community engagement in general. There is uncertainty among many engaged colleagues that quantification of community engagement is not even an appropriate endeavor. There are also those colleagues that experience huge discomfort with the lack of quantification.

In sum, it is expected that those questions will be expanded and others will emerge from the first round of review of applications — documentation submitted by institutions seeking classification. The resulting data base of documentation has the potential to guide, inform, and model a wide array of “promising practices” and achieve its benchmarking function. In addition, the ongoing revision of the classification framework, ongoing applications from an expanding cadre of institutions, and ongoing reviews of institutional documentation will be characterized by extended inquiry processes. Those inquiry processes can serve as a reflection of the efforts, insights, and new practices that emerge with the future growth and expansion of community engagement in higher education.

References

Bringle, R. (2006). Personal communication.

Palomba, C. A., & Banta, T. W. (1999). Assessment essentials: Plannning, implementing, and improving assessment in higher education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

I had no idea what the meeting was to be about. All I knew from my colleague was that three community leaders from the Evanston neighborhood, which borders Xavier University in Cincinnati, wanted to talk to us — and it was urgent.

Our offices had become a convenient space for gatherings to discuss various community revitalization efforts between Xavier and Evanston, a proud African-American community trying to recover from years of economic decline. As our relationship grew, the meetings, typically called by those of us at the university, had become feel-good sessions. This one, however, was requested by the three residents — and they were not feeling good.

Essentially, the community representatives, all women, were upset that the housing strategy that we agreed to focus on as part of our partnership with the community had been lagging behind. To get the project back on track, they had mobilized community residents to take over the housing component. They proposed that grant funding through the university that had been designated for a housing non-profit organization to do the work now be diverted to the community council, which was ready to take full responsibility for it.

Our 90- minute meeting ended with an agreement that the community would put together a formal proposal to do the work. As the women left our offices, my colleague and I looked at each other with exhaustion — then we cast broad grins and gave each other high fives.

The evidence of true collaboration with the community finally was becoming evident. Its residents were demanding power.

Power — or at least the imbalance of it — often lies simmering beneath the surface of most university-community relations, however it is seldom explicitly talked about. The parties learn to dance around it in order to realize the benefits of their partnership as best they can. However, as soon as the university expresses its dominant power, even in subtle ways, the underlying mistrust emerges. Left unaddressed, the good will weakens and the partnership begins to break down.

Many university administrators and faculty who desire to genuinely embrace the communities around them talk enthusiastically about collaboration. After years of failed community relations, administrators now recognize that ignoring our neighbors is short-sighted, yet treating them like a case study to be observed or a project to be serviced is offensive. Collaboration holds promise of mutually beneficial engagement built on shared interests.

Yet even with our good intentions, true collaboration is not easily realized and power often is the hindrance. More than likely, we move along a kind of community engagement continuum that has been identified by the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation in St. Paul, Minn., which has done tremendous work researching and facilitating community partnerships. On one end of the continuum is communication, where we seek input and share information. After some success, we move on to cooperation, where the community and university find occasions to work together when it is convenient for both parties. We may regularly include the community in our events, or join community-based activities. Collaboration, which awaits at the far end of the continuum, requires much more of us. (Mattessich, Murray-Close, & Monsey, 2001). Ultimately, for it to take place, power must be shared, which means that any university that wants to embed itself in community must be willing to relinquish it. The Wilder Foundation maintains that true collaboration requires “a commitment to mutual relationships and goals; a jointly developed structure and shared responsibility; mutual authority and accountability for success; and sharing of resources and rewards” The National Academy of Public Administration, in its investigation of successful cross-sector initiatives, replaces the term collaboration with “high-powered partnerships.” It says such a partnership is “a mutually beneficial and reciprocal relationship among entities that share responsibilities, authority, and accountability for results” (Barnett, 2003).

Sharing responsibility, accountability and resources can be difficult, but they are likely to be gradually realized in the course of ongoing communication and cooperation. However, sharing authority — or power — between a university and a community is far more challenging because of the inherent discrepancy in power that already exists between the two parties.

Universities generally maintain among the highest levels of civic reputation, political clout, expertise, and resources of any institution in their regions. On the other hand, their residential neighbors — particularly if they live in resource poor communities — typically hold but one lever of power: the ability to disrupt. Only when the community opposes something — and then vehemently so — does it gain the media and political attention necessary to mitigate the university’s influence.

Having worked during my career both on the institutional side of this predicament in corporate and non-profit community relations and on the community side as director of grassroots neighborhood organizations, I have seen this phenomenon of community resistance play out repeatedly. It wasn’t long after I arrived at Xavier in 2002 that I witnessed it anew.

Xavier had spent a great deal of energy soothing over Evanston’s long-held hostility toward the university that had emerged through the typical set of town-gown tensions: the university’s indifference toward the community’s affairs; disorderly students; and the obligatory capital improvement imposition. In this case, the closing of a major street without community consent.

Having overcome those battles, it was understandable that the university felt good about itself for having purchased and renovated an historic building in Evanston, across from the main campus, for use as university office space. The art deco manufacturing building with marble stairways and terrazzo-tile floors was going to be vacated by a publishing company. Left abandoned, it might have ended up as yet another community symbol of blight and decay.

However, in my initial meetings with community residents, when I touted the building purchase as an example of Xavier’s commitment to neighborhood revitalization, I was met with skepticism. “So, what other properties is Xavier going to buy up in our community?” residents would demand to know. “Is this just the beginning of you taking over our neighborhood?”

It did not take me long to realize that the source of this cynicism had nothing to do with the merits of the purchase. In fact, as I engaged with them, many residents would concede that renovating the building was good for the community. Their real concern was the demonstration of power the university exercised in buying the building. No one in the community could do that. And if the university could, what else might it do? The only tool the community had to equalize the effect was to challenge the university’s motives.

That is what made the evening meeting with the Evanston community leaders some four years so meaningful. The community sensed the university was using its power as fiscal agent for its community partnership grant inappropriately by not insisting certain work be done. In response, they were demanding a share of the power and with it, embracing responsibility and accountability. “Give us control over the dollars,” they insisted, “and we will make sure the work happens.”

Without a sense of empowerment, they probably would have resorted to the disruptive tactics that communities see as their only resort. They would have attacked our motives, charged us with withholding funds for the university’s benefit or exploiting the community for our own gain. You do that when you’re fighting a bully. When you’re taking on your equal, you simply punch back. And we had worked hard to make the relationship as close to a peer arrangement as possible.

It is important to acknowledge here that there are benefits to being the biggest kid on the block. Namely, you get to be in charge. On the contrary, sharing power brings with it risks. The other party might mess up, and if they do, you suffer as well. Worse yet, they may deliberately take advantage of you. It is safer to hoard power if you have that option, and universities often do.

So why share power? The best response I have heard comes from Fr. Howard Gray, a Jesuit priest who has served as a faculty member, administrator and consultant for several Jesuit universities. “If you share power, you risk being abused,” Gray told us recently at an administrative retreat on campus. “If you don’t share power, you are certain to be abusive.”

In other words, if you don’t share power, you get to always win, and inevitably your winning will be at the expense of someone else losing. John McKnight and John Kretzmann argue that it is precisely this kind of institutional imposition that overwhelms and snuffs out the identification and mobilization of community assets, particularly in economically distressed urban communities, which find themselves in their predicaments mainly because institutions have won for decades at their expense through economic and social disinvestment and exploitation (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993).

The community understands this dynamic far better than the university. Residents know that the institution ultimately is trying to serve its self interests and if there is a choice to be made between its own agenda and the community’s, the institution is likely to operate on its own behalf — as long as it holds all the power. So a powerless community is always in fighting mode, ready to pounce the moment it senses it might be taken advantage of.

Collaboration is impossible to achieve in such a climate. Collaboration seeks only mutual wins, but they are hard to identify when agendas are hidden and mistrust lies just beneath the surface. A weak community can be controlled, but it will always seek to disrupt the affairs of the university as a result. A powerful community will make demands — and mistakes — but it will possess the ability to collaborate. Leadership is more consistent. Agreements are more credible. Capacity is greater. Relationships can be sustained.

Part of the satisfaction of seeing Evanston residents boldly demand a share of power — rather than privately scowl or publicly demean us — was that we had challenged ourselves to relinquish power. At Xavier, our Catholic Jesuit values, which embrace the pursuit of social justice, compel us to take this matter seriously. Still, we are not perfect and sometimes take advantage, even unwittingly, of the privilege we have as the more powerful partner, as our friends in Evanston reminded us.

Nevertheless, we have taken several deliberate steps to create a structure where power can be shared with the community and true collaboration achieved. These steps include:

Defining focused, achievable goals

Not everything a university does is open to partnership. Some authority the university will not concede, even as it relates to the community. Likewise, there are community initiatives residents would prefer the university to influence. Collaborative partnerships, therefore, must explicitly define what falls within the realm of shared responsibility, accountability and authority.

Xavier’s move from cooperation with Evanston to true collaboration began with the creation of a community plan that spells out the specific initiatives we would pursue together with measurable outcomes and clear mutual benefits. One aspect of the plan, for instance, calls for commercial revitalization and focuses on a two-block business district in the neighborhood. In reality, the community would have preferred to focus on another area closer to the center of the neighborhood. University administrators were pushing for an area closer to campus. The area we chose was in the interests of both. That doesn’t mean the community and university won’t pursue their own projects on their own, but we won’t do it in collaboration — at least not for now.

Making the university more transparent

Community leaders believe the university is engaging with them out of their own selfish motives. And they are right. The problem is that universities are reluctant to divulge their institutional goals to the community. They might be misinterpreted or, worse yet, the community might interfere.

Residents, meanwhile, knowing full well that the university has an agenda, become suspicious when they don’t hear it articulated. Absent a credible explanation, the community interprets its own agenda for the university. Thus, the well-intentioned purchase of a building appears to be part of a plot to take over the neighborhood.

When Xavier began developing a new facilities master plan two years ago, the administrative vice president tucked under his arms the maps and sketches heretofore only on display in his office and took them to a meeting of Evanston residents focused on the neighborhood’s development. It was risky, but the executive, recalling the backlash from the secret street closing a decade prior, was willing to take it. Amazingly, not one shred of information was ever leaked to the press; no speculator emerged to buy up the property the university had set its eyes on. To the contrary, having been giving a seat at the table — a bit of power that comes from access and information — the attendees at the meeting guarded the information. If it were compromised, so would the power they had been granted.

Several of those residents remained engaged in the entire planning process, meeting with architects and reviewing final recommendations before they were approved by the board of trustees. Rather than mobilizing to fight the plan, several community residents already are championing it.

Creating a table where the community has clear authority.

Show me a room full of administrators and I will easily sort them by their relative power by asking two questions: Who controls how money is spent? Who controls how people spend their time? If the community is to be engaged in collaboration, the partners must define upfront what direct control the community will have over the way money and time are allocated. This is not satisfied by giving residents the opportunity to provide input, where residents hand over information to others so they can make decisions. Collaboration requires defining this area upfront.

When Xavier received its COPC grant, it was obvious that the community needed some evidence that they had some ownership in it. We did two things to achieve this: First, we created a steering committee with a majority of community residents that is co-chaired by me and the president of the Evanston Community Council. Second, we gave the community authority in hiring the staff coordinator.

Investing in community empowerment.

Sharing authority requires that community leaders have a power base independent of the university. Building a cozy relationship with one community representative might seem efficient, but it does not sustain collaboration. Either the representative will compromise the community’s interests in order to gain favor with the university and retain his seat of power, or the community will suspect that he has done so and withdraw support. Either way, the representative’s legitimacy is destroyed and collaboration is doomed.

Communities need a broad base of participants who have access to information, relationships, and are engaged in the decision-making process. In order to encourage this, Xavier holds a leadership academy for residents and has assisted in community organizing efforts. At the same time, we have invested in community organizing training for residents independent of the university in order to equip leaders to engage with the university from a position of strength.

Dispersing community relationships across the university.

It is efficient for the university to create a single conduit for dealing with the community such as one office or one person. It is extremely debilitating to the community to do so. Real power comes from the breadth of networks in which we participate. A resident who knows one person at the university has far less influence than someone who knows a dozen. While it is true some coordination and accountability for partnerships may come from a central office, relationships ought to be spread out to include students, faculty and the senior administration.

The president of the Evanston Community Council often says that the opportunity for collaboration with the university became evident to the community when Xavier’s president ventured out to meetings in the community. That is when she, as CEO of the community, began to engage her “peer.” Now, as partnerships with the community develop, we push different departments and offices to manage them on behalf of the university, with support from my office.

References

Barnett, C. C., et. al. (2003). Powering the Future: High-Performance Partnerships. Washington, DC.: National Academy of Public Administration.

Kretzmann, J. P., & McKnight, J. L. (1993). Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets. Evanston, IL: Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University.

Mattessich, P. W., Murray-Close, M., & Monsey, B. R. (2001). Collaboration: What Makes It Work. St. Paul, MN: Amherst H. Wilder Foundation.

The campus will be distinctive in serving the diverse people of California, especially the working class and historically undereducated and low-income populations…The identity of the university will be framed by a substantive commitment to multilingual, multicultural, gender-equitable learning…Our graduates will have an understanding of interdependence and global competence, distinctive technical and educational skills, the experience and abilities to contribute to California’s high quality work force, the critical thinking abilities to be productive citizens, and the social responsibility and skills to be community builders.
CSU Monterey Bay Vision Statement (1994, emphasis added)

Introduction: Service Learning as a Graduation Requirement

Created in 1995 on the site of the former Fort Ord, California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) was designed to offer its students a model, 21st century education. While many aspects of CSUMB’s innovative educational program have flourished (such as CSUMB’s outcomes-based educational program, its focus on interdisciplinarity, and the integration of wireless technology in learning), CSUMB has been most recognized nationally for its innovative service learning requirement and its commitment to developing students’ capacity and commitment to leading socially and civically engaged lives. This commitment to civic engagement is a central component of the CSUMB Vision Statement, which emphasizes that students will develop the “critical thinking abilities to be productive citizens, and the social responsibility and skills to be community builders” (CSUMB, 1994).

Unlike many higher education institutions that seek to promote an ethic of service through extra-curricular student programs and work-study efforts, CSUMB has made its commitment to service and civic engagement a core educational goal, placing service learning squarely at the heart of its academic program. All CSUMB undergraduates are required to complete two service learning courses: a required lower division course called “Introduction to Service in Multicultural Communities;” and an upper division service learning course in their major. The lower division course gives students a foundation in issues of service, social justice and social responsibility; and the upper-division course exposes students to social issues that are pertinent to their career or field of study. In both cases, students have the opportunity to work with community organizations that are working to address our most complex social issues. Through this two-semester service learning requirement, 50% of CSUMB students are enrolled in service learning courses each academic year, contributing tens of thousands of hours of work to local schools, agencies and non-profit organizations in the Monterey Bay region.

The goal of CSUMB’s service learning program is to have students develop the capacity and will to be multicultural community builders: “students who have the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to work effectively in a diverse society to create more just and equitable workplaces, communities and social institutions” (Service Learning Institute, 2003). While the scope of the CSUMB service learning program is indeed impressive, and the hours of service truly significant, the most important contribution of the CSUMB service learning program is its success in integrating concepts of diversity, compassion, justice and social responsibility at the heart of all undergraduate degree programs. Through the service learning requirement. CSUMB students come to know intimately the rewards of active community involvement, and become more confident and committed to their role as community builders in our diverse, multicultural world.

Implementing such a broad vision for the integration of civic engagement throughout the curriculum has required CSUMB to reinterpret the conventional understanding of service learning. In essence, this has meant moving beyond an understanding of service learning as pedagogy, and emphasizing civic learning outcomes as a core component of all service learning courses.

The Conventional Paradigm: Service Learning as Pedagogy

As it has spread throughout higher education over the past two decades, service learning has largely been introduced to faculty as a pedagogy, a more effective, engaging and rewarding (though also more time consuming) approach to teaching. Faculty development programs have focused on introducing a variety of experiential learning techniques to harness the learning derived from the service experience in a way that is relevant to the academic goals of the course.

While there has been a lot of enthusiasm about forging community partnerships and the positive impact that students can have in the community (number of hours of service, monetary value added, etc.), the driving force for the integration of service learning in higher education has been service learning’s effectiveness as a powerful, engaging pedagogy in helping students meet their course learning outcomes.

Service learning has found a comfortable home in higher education as a pedagogical strategy. In many cases, service learning offices are located within or connected to centers for faculty development. In this context, service learning (along with technology-mediated instruction, project-based learning, and outcomes-based learning, among others) is seen as one of a variety of potential strategies to help faculty members become more effective facilitators of student learning.

Appropriately for this pedagogical orientation, the word most closely associated with the field of service learning over the past two decades has been “reflection.” Reflection is commonly understood to be the collection of strategies that help students mindfully turn their service experiences into relevant academic learning. Reflection is the hyphen in service-learning; the glue that holds these two disparate pieces of the enterprise together. As the emphasis over the past two decades has been on service learning as pedagogy, the field has done an excellent job of popularizing a variety of approaches to reflection. Most significantly, it has helped to legitimate “journaling” as a rigorous academic endeavor. Now ten years old, one of the seminal publications in the field, representing the first decade of learning about the “how to” of service learning, was “A Practitioner’s Guide to Reflection in Service-Learning,” by Janet Eyler, Dwight Giles and Angela Schmiede (1996). This was one of the first technical assistance projects funded by the Corporation for National Service, and was an answer to higher education’s thirst for concrete insights into the pedagogical process of converting experience into learning. In the decade since the publication of “A Practitioner’s Guide to Reflection in Service Learning,” our approaches to reflection have become even more sophisticated as higher education has developed a greater comfort level with learner-center, experiential approaches to teaching and learning.

As has become evident over the past two decades, service learning is a powerful, engaging approach to teaching and learning (Eyler and Giles, 1999). Service learning involves students in real life work in real communities in real time. As a result, learning itself becomes real, and mastering technical, conceptual, and theoretical knowledge matters. When students don’t show up for a tutoring session with elementary school children, or if their newly-developed web-site is not functional, there are real consequences that have a human face. This is very different from the anonymity associated with missing a class or not handing in an assignment. But, as effective as service learning might be in making learning real and helping students to become engaged with the subject matter, we need to be careful not to conflate “engaged learning” with the development of a students’ sense of and commitment to “civic engagement.” Engaged learning is powerful learning, but it is not necessarily tapping into the social, civic or moral realm of student learning and of students’ lives (Ehrlich, Colby, et. al., 2003). While engaged learning is a key characteristic of a service learning course, it is not its defining characteristic at CSUMB. Rather, service learning courses must also include explicit civic learning outcomes.

A Focus on Civic Learning: Moving from the “How To” to the “What” of Service Learning

While it is true that service learning is a powerful, engaged pedagogy, this only represents part of its essence. Over the past two decades the field has spent significant energy developing the “how to” of service learning (the pedagogy piece); but we have overlooked and under-discussed the “what” of service learning (the content piece related to “civic engagement”). What do we want students to learn from their experiences with service and civic engagement? And, how does this learning about service and civic engagement relate to the rest of the academic agenda to which students are exposed in their undergraduate programs?

At CSUMB, service learning is more than just a pedagogy or approach to teaching. It is also a knowledge-base that examines the complex intersection of issues of justice, compassion, diversity and social responsibility with the technical, conceptual and theoretical world of the academic disciplines (Service Learning Institute, 1999). This fundamental re-conceptualization has required a new organizational framework, one that places service learning squarely in the academic main tent as a full partner in the development and implementation of CSUMB’s academic program. At CSUMB, service learning is not housed in a faculty development office. Nor is it a unit of student affairs. Service learning is an academic department, and a legitimate member of the academic community, participating in all aspects of academic program planning and implementation. The Service Learning Institute has tenured and tenure-track faculty, offers courses, and even offers a minor in Service Learning Leadership (a major is currently in development). Like other departments, it has a recognized expertise in a distinctive area of knowledge: in this case, knowledge related to issues of service, social justice and civic engagement.

As part of the founding Vision for the campus, all CSUMB majors devote curricular space to the development of the social, civic and moral capacities and commitments of their students. CSUMB’s goal is to not just educate technically competent professionals, but to educate technically competent, socially responsible, and civically engaged professionals. As a legitimate member of the academic community at CSUMB, the Service Learning Institute has been well-placed to help each major develop this civic dimension of its academic program. Building on CSUMB’s outcomes-based educational framework, service learning courses in each major have integrated explicit learning outcomes related to service and social justice into their courses. Students in CSUMB service learning courses don’t just “do service,” but they spend significant amount of class time “learning about service.” For example, computer science students not only design web-sites and build networks for community organizations, but they examine the phenomenon known as the “digital divide” as a core component of their service learning course. They are wrestling with the question: has the digital revolution lessened or increased inequality in our society? Art students work with museums to collect, preserve and display historical objects. But they also actively debate what a museum’s role in representing a diverse society’s history and culture is. These students struggle with the question: who decides what is worth collecting, preserving and displaying? These are just two examples of how issues of service, social responsibility and social justice have become embedded in the core of CSUMB’s academic programs

With its explicit focus on civic learning outcomes, service learning is one way that civic engagement has become a legitimate and essential component of all academic programs, helping CSUMB fulfill the expectations of its Vision Statement that students will develop the “social responsibility and skills to be community builders.”

Intentionality: Making Civic Learning a Core Responsibility of Higher Education

At CSUMB we challenge ourselves to be intentional in what we do. This purposefulness came out of our first WASC accreditation experience when the chair of our team, Dr. Judith Ramalay, constantly challenged us with the question, “to what end?” We had to reflect on what we were doing and to articulate the reasons why we thought it was important and what it meant to our students. We asked ourselves what we wanted our graduates to “look like” when they left us as a result of the CSUMB learning experience. We answered that question in a number of ways. Our mission statement says that we are committed to building a multicultural learning community, from which our graduates emerge prepared to contribute productively, responsible and ethically to California and the global community. Our Vision Statement establishes “service learning” as a vehicle to enable students to develop the “critical thinking abilities to be productive citizens, and the social responsibility and skills to be community builders.” Our intention is to educate the future generation of multicultural community builders, so that our graduates will leave with knowledge, skills, and abilities to be productive members of their future communities. They will understand what it means to be part of a community, how to contribute positively to the creation of more just and equitable communities, and to participate in the democratic process.

For students to be well prepared for our increasingly diverse and global society, students must develop the skills to work collaboratively across the differences that have traditionally separated the diverse segments of our society. Because we teach the concept of civic responsibility as a serious academic subject, rather than a voluntary topic explored according to self-interest, CSUMB’s service learning program gives value to these issues and creates a clear expectation that our graduates will participate actively in the communities of their future.

Higher education must make this goal a core academic priority: to make civic learning a serious, legitimate and rigorous academic endeavor. For colleges and universities to truly take their place as engaged institutions, they most boldly adopt a more robust definition of service learning, and make social, moral, and civic learning a core component of their academic programs. Students should not just be “doing service,” but they should be debating approaches to service, and digging deep into the meaning of terms such as “the commons,” “the public,” “social justice,” and “participatory democracy.” If we are to truly have an impact, these terms must become as commonly heard in the halls of our science, humanities and art buildings as in our political science departments. For this to occur faculty across the disciplines need to become immersed in this conversation, and themselves deepen their understanding of their own civic responsibility as professionals in their fields. Higher education must embrace civic learning as a core academic topic, which like “writing across the curriculum,” manifests itself in every corner of the academy.

Building a vibrant democracy requires that each new generation of citizens become inspired to and capable of embracing their civic responsibilities and building our national commons. The challenges which globalization brings to this task in the twenty-first century requires that higher education play an even more central role in fulfilling this civic mission. If we want to live in a society where people are able to move beyond difference and actively care about each other and work to build a new multicultural commons, then civic learning must become a central part of service learning, and a central part of higher education. Our future depends on our capacity to educate multicultural community builders.

Sources:

California State University Monterey Bay (1994). Vision Statement. CSU Monterey Bay Web-site

Ehrlich, Colby, Beaumont, and Stephens (2003). Educating Citizens: Preparing America’s Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Eyler, Janet and Dwight E. Giles Jr. (1999). Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning?, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Eyler, J., Giles. D., Schmiede, A. (1996). A practitioner’s guide to reflection in service learning: Student voices and reflections. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University and the Corporation for National Service.

titute, “What is a Multicultural Community Builder?” California State University Monterey Bay, Service Learning Institute Web-site, 2003, 27 April 2005 Service Learning Ins.

Service Learning Institute , “CSUMB’s Service Learning Prism,” California State University Monterey Bay Service Learning Institute Website, 1999, 27 April 2005.

The mission of the Corporation for National and Community Service, an independent federal agency, is to improve lives, strengthen communities, and foster civic engagement through service and volunteering. Through a family of service programs ? primarily SeniorCorps, AmeriCorps, VISTA, NCCC and Learn and Serve America ? the Corporation provides opportunities for Americans of all ages and backgrounds to serve their communities and the nation. Higher education is a key partner in all of these efforts. Yet, in order to build a more civically engaged society and develop leaders in civic life for today and for the years ahead, National Service and the Higher Education community can work even more closely to set a strong course to the future.

The results of our work with higher education thus far demonstrate the power of our opportunity:

• Roughly one quarter of all institutions of higher education have been supported by Learn and Serve America funding since 1994.
• Since 1994, AmeriCorps members have earned over $1.1 billion in Education Awards to further their educational opportunities.
• In FY 2005, higher education institutions received more than $207 million in Corporation funds.
• Of the 75,000 members of AmeriCorps serving in 2005, over 20,000 performed their service in affiliation with colleges.
• More than 37,888 Senior Corps volunteers serve in 83 projects operated by colleges and universities nationwide.

The Corporation has enthusiastically supported the growth and development of Campus Compact from its inception, as one of our most critical partners and allies. Learn and Serve America has provided over $5 million in support of Campus Compact’s national office since 1994, supporting the Compact’s growth and expansion and leveraging several times this amount to support higher education service, service-learning and civic engagement nationally. The focus of much of this work has been on professional development for faculty and administrators, including community service directors. In addition to the national Compact, Learn and Serve has directly funded 21 of the state Compacts or Compact networks since 1994. With the support of Learn and Serve, the Compact has expanded to 31 states and more than 1000 member campuses.

The Corporation continues to place considerable strategic value on the growth and development of higher education service and citizenship. Most recently, we announced the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll program, a new initiative designed to identify and recognize institutions of higher education that pursue their civic mission through the encouragement and support of students’ community service efforts.

The Honor Roll is sponsored by the Corporation, the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation, USA Freedom Corps, and the U.S. Departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development, and is presented in concert with Campus Compact. The Honor Roll program is intended to increase public awareness of the service contributions of higher education institutions and students to their communities and nation, and to increase the use of service-learning in higher education and the number of college students engaged in community service. The program will also identify and promote exemplary higher education community service programs and practices.
Of the institutions that apply and are designated to appear on the Honor Roll, a limited number, those judged to be of the highest caliber, will be selected to receive the Presidential Higher Education Community Service Award, including a certificate signed by the President. Some of these 2006 awards will be given to institutions that contributed significantly to meeting the needs of individuals and communities in the Gulf Region in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricanes.

Campus Compact’s 20th Anniversary celebration provides a fitting venue to present the inaugural President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll Awards. At a special ceremonial breakfast (from 7 to 9 AM at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place on October 17) members of the Honor Roll will also be announced, along with data about student service projects of the honored institutions.

In February 2006, the Corporation for National and Community Service released its Strategic Plan through 2010. Far beyond simply addressing the work of Corporation programs, the Plan sets forth bold national goals for service and service-learning, goals that USA Freedom Corps, the White House and many in the private, nonprofit and academic sectors have embraced.

The four initiatives set forth in the Plan, including the goals to be achieved by 2010, are:

• Mobilizing More Volunteers: We will expand the number of Americans who volunteer from 65.4 million to 75 million Americans.
• Ensuring a Brighter Future for All of America’s Youth: We will improve the lives of disadvantaged youth in two ways: by engaging 3 million of them in meaningful service; and, by engaging 3 million more Americans as mentors.
• Engaging Students in Communities: We will expand to 5 million the number of post-secondary students who serve in their communities, up from 3.x million; and, we will expand service learning participation from 30 percent to 50 percent of America’s k-12 schools.
• Harnessing Baby Boomers’ Experience: We will ensure that the reach, skills and experience of the Baby Boomers drives positive social change in America, by increasing the number of boomers engaged in service to 28.5 million, up from 25.5.

We look to the higher education community as a significant partner in achieving these national goals, which will frame our efforts for the next five years.

We understand that the Higher Education community has the capacity and the aligned interests to offer significant support to each of these initiatives; of course, we also know that our point of strongest alignment is our focus on increasing the numbers of post-secondary students who serve their communities. From the Corporation’s perspective, this focus on student service is not solely supported by our Learn and Serve America program, but, rather by our entire family of programs ? including VISTA, AmeriCorps, NCCC and Senior Corps as well as LSA. We are committed to building stronger partnerships between each of these programs and the higher education community in our pursuit of this objective.

Together we know we can encourage greater integration of service into the academic mission of America’s colleges and universities and increase the support offered on campus to those students who serve their communities.

In order to reach the goal of 5 million students serving communities from their college campuses over the next five years, we expect that we will engage institutions of higher education in several discrete initiatives, including:

• Use Higher Education assets and students to strengthen and expand our network of intermediaries (Volunteer Centers, Campus Compact, State Service Commissions, national foundations and public service non-profits, faith-based and other community based organizations at the state, community, and campus level)
• Reduce barriers that inhibit students from engaging in service (such as transportation, information, relationships with community agencies, lack of institutional support, etc.),
• Tie service more frequently to academic studies through high-quality service-learning,
• Increase college student participation in services to youth from disadvantaged circumstances (including mentoring and tutoring).
• Provide a national platform to promote the value and importance of service on campus.

Working closely with higher education institutions, the Campus Compact network and other higher education associations committed to service and civic engagement, we look to ensure that at least half of all higher education institutions provide the resources to coordinate service, service-learning, and community partnerships in order to stimulate more service and to improve the quality and coordination of existing activities.

Together with our colleagues in higher education and at the U.S. Department of Education, we would certainly hope to see one important outcome of our efforts be that colleges and universities provide more service opportunities through the Federal Work Study program and other co-curricular opportunities to serve.

In addition, we can work together to encourage higher education institutions to offer more service-learning courses, to increase the number of engaged academic departments, to encourage faculty and students to engage in collaborative community-based research, and to create more avenues for faculty, staff and students to engage in academically rigorous work that also provides benefit to local communities. Together there is much we can do to ensure that service to the community is an essential part of the mission and reward structure of higher education.

The Corporation offers significant benefits, in the form of education awards and stipends, to AmeriCorps members who commit to full or part-time service. Currently, 50 institutions match the education award, and that list is growing daily. Working together, we can expand this tangible recognition of the value of AmeriCorps service exponentially.

In addition, we can highlight the importance of service as a strategy for meeting a variety of pressing community needs. We are concentrating resources and efforts on meeting the needs of youth in disadvantaged circumstances, particularly through mentoring and tutoring. College access and preparedness are among the key issues facing communities today. While meeting the needs of the most disadvantaged, including youth in foster care and those who are the children of prisoners, is a daunting and challenging task, it is not insurmountable. The Corporation for National and Community Service and the higher education community are well placed to address these needs.

Higher education has a special relationship with elementary and secondary education. Here too, higher education can make a significant impact in meeting needs and stimulating greater service. Learn and Serve America programs have been a catalyst for the growth of service-learning activity in our nation’s K-12 schools. In 1984, nine percent of schools offered service learning opportunities. Today, service-learning reaches approximately 30 percent of all schools. Through our Strategic Plan, we have pledged to work to build service-learning into the curriculum of half of all K-12 schools by 2010. Higher education institutions’ help is required. Schools of education can ensure that this cohort of teachers and the next generation of teachers are skilled in incorporating service into the curriculum. While Education departments are uniquely suited to train teachers and work with schools, higher education programs of all types are building community partnerships with schools to assist in their academic and civic activities and to meet a wide variety of community needs.

Our efforts to advance a strategic plan to engage more students and more higher education institutions in service, service-learning and civic engagement make the most of the opportunities available to collaborate with colleges and universities, higher education associations, Campus Compacts, nonprofits and other government offices and agencies. And the prospects look great. Yet our vision of the future is not complete if we do not take into account some of the overarching barriers to collaboration and challenges to action.

One of the challenges we face is language. We do not have a common, agreed upon set of terms. The terms we use to signify activities that include service to the community, reflection by the participants, and benefits derived by the individuals served and serving vary widely. In addition, those who refer to programs that contain this kind of reflective service, sometimes aim to characterize it as institutionally driven, sometimes as anti-institutional, and sometimes as ad hoc or a-institutional. We use the terms volunteerism, community service, service-learning, civic engagement, community outreach, community partnerships, civic learning, engaged scholarship, community-based research, community engagement and many others. Attempts to find just the right term to distinguish activities in order to legitimize, raise prestige, signify academic rigor, emphasize broader social aims, or meet the historical mission of a specific institution are important and justifiable in each instance. Unfortunately, when each instance is taken together, those outside “the field” and those outside higher education, often do not know that these terms are part of a single continuum, part of a singular and important drive to ensure that higher education students, faculty, staff, and institutions are solving real world problems and contributing positively to local communities. By using such fine-grained language, we dilute our potential to make a big difference. We must find a way to balance the real need for some rhetorical distinctions among truly disparate service and civic engagement activities with the equally important and urgent requirement for others to understand the strength and size of our common agenda. How will we forge the coalition?

Another barrier to success is the divide separating K-12 and higher education. The lessons learned in the development of service and service-learning in elementary and secondary education have much to offer higher education as of course is true in reverse. We need to treat the conditions in these two educational arenas not as if one were more advanced than the other, but as a lesson in comparative study between two different cultures. Higher education may be able to learn a great deal about professional development or policy advances from K12, if it can be seen not as a developmentally inferior education system, but as a culturally distinct system.

Similar is the challenge faced in teacher education. In order to make service-learning and civic engagement a standard expectation in all educational settings, the professional education teachers receive must include service and civic education as values and methods. While there are pockets of excellence, innovation, and widespread use of service-learning in schools and colleges of education, service-learning has not become a regular feature of teacher education programs across the country. In some instances, service-learning is used as a method to educate pre-service teachers, but they are not taught how to use service-learning in the classrooms they will lead. In order to truly build service-learning into the next generation of schools and higher education institutions, teachers and other educators will need to know how to build the community partnerships and integrate service and learning so that students will be able to perform meaningful and valuable service.

No thoughts about the future of service and civic engagement in higher education would be complete without a discussion of the possibilities and hopes for the future of Campus Compact. As noted above, the growth of the Compact in its 20 years is extraordinary. The leadership exhibited by each of the national Compact’s executive directors, its staff members and national board members have created a strong and powerful organization. The Compact has done much to keep the vision of higher education institutions as civic institutions central and the Compact has done even more to make that vision a reality. In the coming years national Campus Compact should more directly take on the challenge of helping to shape national higher education policy. In addition, while Campus Compact is an organization of higher education presidents, the presidents might consider expanding both the membership and the services of the Compact. Students and faculty deeply committed to service and service-learning could find a home within which to advance networks and build skills. Of particular interest are the new higher education professionals ? community service directors, service-learning directors, civic engagement directors ? that have been created by the expansion of organized service and service-learning. Campus Compact has a boundless opportunity to support and advance this new professional field. Strengthening these individual constituencies will lead to advances in service and can contribute to an increase in the amount and quality of service and service-learning as well as the development of a coherent policy strategy.

National Campus Compact, the state Campus Compacts, individual colleges and universities, and the Corporation have worked together since 1994 to advance higher education’s civic mission. This has brought us close to the “tipping point.” We look forward over the coming years to working collaboratively with higher education institutions and the Campus Compact network to truly make service and civic engagement a common expectation of college students and of higher education institutions.

During recent years, increasing numbers of colleges and universities have engaged in innovative efforts to reinvigorate the civic mission on which their institutions were founded?one that calls on faculty, students, and administrators to apply their skills, resources, and talents to address important issues affecting communities, the nation, and the world. This movement has been fueled largely by community and liberal arts colleges and state universities. Research universities have been much quieter, despite the ambitious efforts many have undertaken to promote and advance civic engagement in their institutions.

Auspiciously, there is growing awareness that research universities, with their significant academic and societal influence, world-class faculty, outstanding students, state-of-the-art research facilities, and considerable financial resources, have the credibility and stature needed to help drive institutional and field-wide change more rapidly and in ways that will ensure deeper and longer-lasting commitment to civic engagement among colleges and universities for centuries to come. In particular, because research universities “set the bar” for scholarship across higher education, they are well-positioned to promote and advance new forms of scholarship?those that link the intellectual assets of higher education institutions to solving public problems and issues.

Although a cadre of leading research universities has begun to embrace and adopt more comprehensive and sustainable approaches to civic engagement such as engaged scholarship, the scholar-practitioners leading these efforts often lack opportunities to convene with and learn from their colleagues at peer institutions. As a result, there have been few attempts to coalesce their energy, intellect, and ingenuity toward creating a group of educators able to promote engaged scholarship as a key component of the larger civic engagement agenda across all of higher education.

To address this gap, in October 2005, Campus Compact and Tufts University convened scholars from a group of research universities that are advanced in their civic engagement work to discuss to how their institutions were promoting civic engagement on their campuses and in their communities. During the course of two full days, this group shared information about the innovative work in which they had been engaged and exchanged ideas about “what works” in advancing this initiative at research institutions. The group also decided to take action and become a more prominent and visible voice for leadership in the larger civic engagement movement in higher education by developing a case statement that outlines why it is important for research universities to embrace and advance engaged scholarship as a central component of their activities and programs and at every level: institutional, faculty, and student. The statement comprises several parts, among them:

A Definition of “Engaged Scholarship”

Engaged scholarship is predicated on the idea that major advances in knowledge tend to occur when human beings consciously work to solve the central problems confronting their society. Ernest Boyer (1990; 1996; Ramaley, 2004; Schon, 1995) described engaged scholarship as an approach that melds:

• The scholarship of discovery, which contributes to the search for new knowledge, the pursuit of inquiry, and the intellectual climate of universities.
• The scholarship of integration, which makes connections across disciplines, places specialized knowledge in larger contexts such as communities, and advances knowledge through synthesis.
• The scholarship of application through which scholars ask how knowledge can be applied to public problems and issues, address individual and societal needs, and use societal realities to test, inspire, and challenge theory.
• The scholarship of teaching, which includes not only transmitting knowledge, but also transforming and extending it beyond the university walls.

Generally, engaged scholarship:

• Draws on many sources of distributed knowledge
• Is based on partnerships
• Is shaped by multiple perspectives and expectations
• Deals with difficult and evolving questions — complex issues that may shift constantly
• Is long term, both effort and impact, often with episodic
• bursts of progress
• Requires diverse strategies and approaches
• Crosses disciplinary lines — a challenge for institutions organized around disciplines (Source: Holland, 2005a, p. 7)

Engaged scholarship also works on several levels:

At the institutional level, engaged scholarship connects the intellectual assets of higher education institutions, including faculty expertise and high-quality graduate and undergraduate students, to public issues.

At the faculty level, engaged scholarship is a vehicle through which faculty can participate in “academically relevant work that simultaneously fulfills the campus mission and goals, as well as community needs” (Sandmann, 2003, p. 4).

At the student level, engaged scholarship can enhance academic learning and knowledge generation because of its ability to blend research, teaching, and service.

Barriers to Engaged Scholarship

Scholar-practitioners identified several barriers to implementing engaged scholarship in their institutions, among them:

A focus on individual disciplines rather than on public problems or issues. Research universities have a long tradition of supporting and investing in objective inquiry whose primary purpose is to add to the knowledge base of a field or discipline. This emphasis also tends to overshadow the multidisciplinary approach engaged scholars employ to addressing problems, which they see as a primary focus of research.

An emphasis on abstract theory rather than actionable theory derived from and useful for “real-world” practice. Research institutions tend to adhere to a Platonic notion of scholarship and education that assumes pure abstract theory as superior to actionable theory derived from engagement in “real-world” practice. This view contrasts with Dewey’s notion of education as participatory, action-oriented, and focused on “learning by doing” — a focus that engaged scholars and teachers embrace (Harkavy, 2004).

Lack of understanding about what engaged scholarship is and how it works.
An uncertainty about what engaged scholarship is and how to assess it has led many at research universities to view this approach as somewhat suspect and less valid than traditional research (Finkelstein, 2001). Because engaged work is largely interdisciplinary and involves partnerships with community-based organizations, the links to academic expertise are not always evident.

Few incentives exist to reward engaged scholarship. Traditional disciplinary-focused research endures primarily because of a strong set of incentives that reward them, including expectations in National Research Council rankings and publication in academic journals. There is also a tendency among those who make tenure or promotion decisions to value individual, rather than collaborative, achievement, and the publication of articles that will help position scholars as leaders in particular fields or disciplines, rather than in solving complex social problems.

Institutions are organized in ways that prohibit engaged scholarship. A disciplinary focus has led to institutions being structured in ways that inhibit engaged scholarship and teaching. Within these structures, fields are emphasized, faculty work in silos, students are encouraged to “declare their emphasis,” and classroom instruction predominates over community-based learning.

Research universities are often cut off from the communities in which they are located. Research universities are sometimes viewed as distinctly separate from the communities in which they are located and, in some cases, where poverty and other social problems are rampant. While engaged scholars see such issues as opportunities to work with communities to design studies that find solutions to these problems, they can face challenges from institutions who view “external” organizations or non-academics as inappropriate to include as part of scholarly research efforts.

Why Research Universities Should Incorporate an Ethos of Engaged Scholarship

There are several reasons that research universities should incorporate an ethos of engaged scholarship in their curricula, policies, and programs:

Research universities were founded and established with a civic mission. In 1749, Benjamin Franklin wrote that the “ability to serve” should be the rationale for all schooling and for the secular college he founded (Penn) — a mission to which other colonial colleges, including Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth adhered, based on their desire to educate men “capable of creating good communities built on religious denominational principles” (Harkavy, 2004, p. 6). Land-grant universities, established through the Morrill Act in 1862, also stipulated “service to society” as their primary mission, as did urban research universities that were founded in the late nineteenth century.

Interdisciplinary, collaborative, and community-based scholarship increasingly is becoming a requirement for consideration for funding, accreditation, and categorization. Growing numbers of major federal funding agencies are incorporating criteria for research proposals that include collaborative approaches and stipulate the public impact or future application of the study. Additionally, regional and national higher education accreditation organizations have begun to introduce new accreditation standards related to engaged research and teaching (Sandmann, 2003).

Students and other higher education stakeholders increasingly are asking for engaged scholarship curricula and opportunities. Increasingly, research universities that fail to incorporate civic engagement into their work “risk having younger people, who see this as a new pathway to achieving a learning society, go elsewhere” (Minkler, 2005, p. 12).

Demographic, cultural, economic, and knowledge shifts in American society, as well as globally, are demanding new approaches to research and problem-solving. Rapid and complex developments in technology, science, business, and other domains, both in the United States and globally, have prompted a need for research that incorporates the contributions of many disciplines, addresses public problems, and is sensitive to increasingly diverse populations and communities.

Engaged scholarship aligns traditional research methods with teaching to enhance student learning. Offering a combination of community-based research and service-learning courses can, together, provide extraordinary opportunities for students to obtain more meaningful experience with the inquiry process and to marry theory and practice. Through community-based research courses students gain understanding and expertise on social issues by engaging in cross-disciplinary inquiry and action, accessing community situations, asking significant questions, collecting data and information, analyzing the data using appropriate disciplinary methods, and drawing conclusions that are transformed into strategic action steps.

Research universities provide the bulk of graduate education and, thus, can serve as a major pipeline for tomorrow’s faculty and administrators skilled in engaged scholarship approaches.

Engaged scholarship helps research universities align their focus on high-quality research with the civic missions on which they were founded… Working with communities to help solve universal local problems — such as substandard schools, lack of affordable housing, poverty, crime, access to health care, and others — allows research universities unprecedented opportunities to create the kind of institutional alignment that is needed to fulfill their civic missions since the resources and expertise of virtually every university unit are needed to identify and implement more effective solutions to these problems (Harkavy, 2006).

…and, in turn, can enhance their credibility, usefulness, and role as important institutions in civic life. A focus on civic engagement through service-learning, community-based research, or engaged scholarship can help burnish the image of research universities that, in recent years, have suffered from decreases in public funding and questions about their role in society. By speaking publicly about engaged scholarship — and encouraging other institutions to implement similar approaches to research — research universities not only help to promote these models but also, send a message to the public that they are responsive to community needs and committed to contributing more meaningfully and directly to public problems and issues at the local, national, and international levels.

What Research Universities Can to Promote Engaged Scholarship

Scholar-practitioners also developed a set of action steps that leaders in research universities can take to advance and promote engaged scholarship. Among these are: engaging and involving the institution’s senior academic and administrative leadership in promoting engaged scholarship; ensuring that such approaches are valued in tenure and promotion decisions, grant awards, and public recognition; providing training to graduate students in these approaches and giving them opportunities to meld engaged scholarship with teaching and curricula; securing funding streams for this work; developing a set of standards for what constitutes high-quality engaged scholarship; creating journals dedicated to this approach; establishing national or regional institutes for faculty interested in civic engagement; encouraging disciplinary and other education associations to advocate for engaged scholarship; and others.

Endnotes

Boyer, E. (1990, re-released 1997). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Boyer, E. (1996). The scholarship of engagement. Journal of Public Service and Outreach, 1 (1), 11-20.

Finkelstein, M.A. (2001). Toward a unified view of scholarship: Eliminating tensions between traditional and engaged work. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 6, 35-44.

Harkavy, I. (2006). Foreword. In Creating a new kind of university: Institutionalizing community-university engagement (S.L. Percy, N. Zimpher & M.J. Brukhardt, eds.) (pp. viii-xvi), Boston: Anker.

Harkavy, I. (2004). Service-learning and the development of democratic universities, democratic schools, and democratic good societies in the 21st century. In New perspectives on service-learning: Research to advance the field (M. Welch & S. Billig, eds.) (pp. 3-22), Greenwich: Information Age Publishing.

Holland, B. (2005a). Scholarship and mission in the 21st century university: The role of engagement. Remarks made at a University of California Symposium sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education on June 10, 2005. Berkeley: University of California.

Minkler, M. (2005). Remarks made at a University of California Symposium sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education on June 10, 2005. Berkeley: University of California.

Ramaley, J. (2004). Higher education in the 21st century: Living in Pasteur’s Quadrant. Presentation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Network for Academic Renewal Conference, March 4, 2005 (Long Beach, California). Retrieved on June 18, 2006.

Sandmann, L. (2003). When doing good is not good enough. Good to great: The scholarship of engagement. Address to the National Extension Director/Administrator Conference, February 12, 2003 (Fort Lauderdale, Florida).

Schon, D. (1995). The new scholarship requires a new epistemology. Change (Nov./Dec.), 27-34.

Campus Compact’s celebration of its 20th anniversary provides an opportunity to envision ways to embed engagement across institutions. This ambitious charge will facilitate institutionalization of service-learning and other forms of civic engagement while enhancing students’ educational experience to prepare them to be good citizens as well as competent professionals in a career. I would like suggest that there is an important concomitant step. This time for celebration also affords us a chance to pause and reflect on the important role of individual faculty members in the process institutionalizing service-learning and civic engagement. Specifically, this is a time to explore why faculty members choose to take the path of service-learning. There have been comprehensive empirical studies to identify demographic factors that might predict faculty predisposition to teaching service-learning. One study by Meaghan Mundy (2004) identified a single factor — faculty’s positive perception of service-learning. So, what constitutes these “positive perceptions”? The scientific exploration of faculty motivation is extremely important and merits continuation. At the same time, the Campus Compact celebration also affords an opportunity to reflect with a less empirical lens at a deeper, personal level.

I had the opportunity and pleasure of facilitating this type of a personal reflection process with about 90 faculty members from various institutions of higher education during a retreat hosted by Utah Campus Compact under towering red cliffs along the banks of the Colorado River near Moab, Utah in February of this year. In this inspiring setting, all of us were able to ponder our own inner geography of what guides us down the path of service-learning and civic engagement. We did this by simply asking a series of questions and allocating snippets of time to respond in writing. The process consisted of ping-ponging between posing the questions with brief moments of silence for written reflection and followed by small and large group dialogue for about 90 minutes. What emerged was profound, deep, and personal by diverging from traditional academic modus operandi when considering our scholarly work.

Coincidently, some of the motivations of faculty that emerged were similar to what Ann Colby and her colleagues (2003) identified as factors that motivate students for becoming civically engaged in their book, Educating Citizens. These include political, moral, identity of self, and spiritual factors. Through the course of reflection and dialogue, it became apparent that most of these factors were intertwined. Many participants in the discussion were unable to separate their political and moral reasons for teaching service-learning from their professional and personal sense of self. To an extent, teaching service-learning became a political act as it facilitated student awareness and action. Similarly, faculty discovered they felt compelled to use their knowledge and expertise to help make a difference. Hence the moral dimension of their work, without necessarily imposing any particular “morality” on students. In other words, their commitment to facilitating student awareness and action toward important social issues through service-learning reflects who they are — not merely what they do.

Initially, faculty discovered and shared they viewed service-learning as an effective pedagogy. This seems a logical starting point for academicians as they would naturally be drawn to this dimension of service-learning. They recognized its value for applied learning in authentic settings to address real issues in the real world. They saw service-learning as a “good way to teach and learn.” Over time and through experience, instructors became gratified to see immediate results and impact of their students’ work beyond test scores and grades. Faculty seemed to vicariously derive satisfaction for “making a difference” through their students and with community partners. This “difference” was a diversion from traditional academic products of things that “matter” such as publications, presentations, and high ratings of course evaluations. Skeptics and critics within the academy tend to scoff at this and characterize it as service. It is not; for two reasons. First, the traditional notion of service within the academic trilogy is associated with governance (serving on committees such as the curriculum committee in a department) or as being a good citizen within one’s discipline (serving on an editorial review board). Second, the service is tied to instructional objectives rather than merely doing “good deeds.” Because of the focus on learning outcomes, it is, in fact, part of teaching and is often integrated with research as well.

In essence, faculty began to recognize the same rewards that explain the current trend of students engaging in voluntary service as an alternative to conventional politics (e.g. voting) because they readily see they were making a difference through their efforts (Long, 2004; Rimmerman, 2005). Amazingly, faculty began to discern a sense of personal identity apart from professional identity of traditional faculty association with their discipline. Through exploration of connections and relationships, faculty suddenly discovered their own sense of self, and interest in others and society coupled with intellectual and epistemological activity. As such, students and faculty are co-creating new knowledge as wall as addressing critical social issues.

Curiously, all of these factors reflect what might be characterized as a spiritual dimension of learning — not to be confused with religion — which are related but not synonymous. English (2000) characterized 3 dimensions of spirituality in adult learning: 1) strong sense of self, 2) care, concern, and outreach to others, 3) continuous construction of meaning and knowledge. While these could be associated with religion, they certainly can be extended to secular contexts as well, particularly the last dimension within academic settings and even service-learning. A strong sense of self evolves by learning from and with others, which service-learning certain affords. This creates relationships that provide an opportunity to learn about alternative views and ways of being, which in turn, provides insights about our sense of self. Care, concern and outreach to others are important dimensions as learners acknowledge a world outside one’s self. This represents transcending “self” to be a part of others. This facilitates faculty and students’ role to be civically engaged as global citizens and to discover their place and role in the world. Continuous construction of meaning and knowledge is the discovery that life is greater than our self and that we are bound and related to others.

Retreat participants also spoke of community of colleagues this work evokes. There are very few other contexts (other than computer technology perhaps) in which professors from Architecture, Engineering, English, Family Consumer Studies, Health Sciences, Political Science, Philosophy, and Social Work can find a common interest, language, purpose, and commitment. As one colleague articulated, “I am drawn to the people who do this work. They bring out the best in me. Interacting with and learning from each other helps me become a better person as well as a better academician.” This act of coming together suggested serving a social and even a psychological support network for faculty. Participants consistently indicated how much it meant to them to find a colleague who shared their interest and passion. Comments like, “It’s nice to know I’m not the only one out there,” were common. Perhaps this discovery and affirmation of sense of self (professional and personally) is one of the most profound revelations of our collective reflection as we move beyond our disciplinary silos of isolation.

Extending beyond the inner landscape to the external world, this work brings the emergence of civic engagement within the revised Carnegie classification system. Likewise, there are more and more professional associations and accreditation bodies that “look” for service-learning. Both of these trends provide pragmatic validation whereby faculty can now say to colleagues, administrators, and to themselves, “See, this work does matter.” Similarly, discussions included how to articulate what it means to be a “civically engaged scholar” and how those scholarly efforts meet departmental criteria in the personal statement of the faculty member’s review portfolio. Again, this type of dialogue truly reflects an exploration of self and purpose. One participant described how he used the 6 standards of civically engaged scholarship compiled and articulated by Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff (1997) in his personal statement and then offered copies as a model to his colleagues. My hunch is that some of these external and pragmatic factors coupled with community-based research within service-learning will begin get the attention of more faculty and administrators.

It’s also important to note what themes did not emerge. Curiously, retention and promotion issues did not play a prominent factor. While non-tenured faculty were certainly sensitive to the political and professional ramifications of their review, it became clear that their motivation for doing this work was not entirely driven by this factor. In fact, many participants in this dialogue admitted they had been counseled by peers, department chairs, and deans to avoid the risk of this “seductive activity” (an actual term used) until they had earned tenure. Yet, faculty members choose to engage in this work for other reasons beyond personal and professional advancement. In a nut shell, faculty didn’t choose this path because they thought it would help earn promotion and tenure — they did it for some of the reasons articulated above. They also recognized taking this path had the potential of facilitating promotion and tenure as long as other scholarly expectations were also being met.

Likewise, strategic and institutional power did not seem to play into personal decisions. Faculty at this retreat did not see that engaging in service-learning or civic engagement would necessarily garner prestige for the department or institution, let alone themselves. This doesn’t mean that other faculty not attending the retreat or administrators dealing with pragmatic issues don’t view service-learning in this way. For example, when academicians do see prestigious institutions practice and embrace service-learning and civic engagement, it tends to legitimize the practice. In fact, despite of its apparent flaws, the US News and World Report listing of institutions with exemplary service-learning programs garners considerable weight. When administrators and faculty are informed that their institution was included in the list, there is the inevitable and predictable follow-up question, “What other schools were included?” When prestigious institutions are named, eyebrows go up in surprise typically followed by a smile. As a result, service-learning is not seen as “fluff” once academicians understand what service-learning is and what it is not. From personal experience at my own institution, it is often useful to begin the dialogue with the latter as faculty and administrators assume they know what service-learning is.

Beyond basic enlightenment, the discussion must also include a deeper exploration of how service-learning can facilitate the role of higher education in promoting civic engagement. Therefore, an important strategy is to promote the reading and discussion of important documents such as the Presidents’ Declaration on the Civic Responsibility of Higher Education published by Campus Compact and the newly published white paper entitled, Research Universities: A Needed Voice in the Effort to Return Higher Education to its Civic Mission, which is the product of a gathering of scholars from research institutions to see what other institutions are doing.

Faculty members at this retreat in the desert began to see that they were not merely scholars creating and disseminating knowledge. Instead, participants discovered they also have a responsibility to others in the local and global community. This discovery is in keeping with theoretical tenets of civic engagement articulated by educators such as John Dewey and Ernest Boyer. Service-learning enables us to remove ourselves from the confines of an abstract and theoretical world to become meaningfully engaged within the real world. Service-learning balances and combines an empirically-based pedagogy with something intangible and deeply personal. Perhaps more importantly, service-learning also allows us to become engaged with our own sense of self. This is the inner geography that often goes unexplored or uncharted. Service-learning promotes a deeper educational experience that helps students and faculty members discover who they are which, at the same time transcends their own needs to meeting the needs of others.

So, where do we go from here? Naturally we want to continue to explore the complex array of administrative, systemic, and cultural factors within academia that promote and impede service-learning and civic engagement if we hope to embed this within institutions of higher education. We need to continue to explore service-learning as a pedagogy. We need to examine how the act of service can be an effective teaching and learning tool. In particular, we can begin to consider how faculty can incorporate various perspectives such as politics, culture, health, economic, and the environment through the reflection process to broaden students’ understanding of their experience. Tapping into instructors’ personal interests and reaching out to colleagues and experts in the community from related disciplines in these domains can enhance the pedagogy. This has already been done through team teaching in one class at my own institution whereby faculty from economics, communications, environmental studies, and political science interacted with chemical engineering students in a service-learning course with high school science students to create solar-powered hydrogen cells. This approach went beyond the mere mechanics of assembling a power cell to consider the broader implications of their work.

Similarly, we should provide technical support to faculty who engage in this work through workshops on what service-learning is (and isn’t) and how to effectively incorporate it into their teaching. Simple education through brown-bag workshops for faculty and one-on-one discussions with department chairs can be effective mechanisms. These discussions should include concise “primers” of service-learning addressing definitions, theoretical foundations, and myths.

And obviously we want to conduct research to develop the field. Specifically, we need to encourage faculty to consider ways of conducting research ON service-learning as a way of integrating their research and teaching. The Michigan Journal of Community Service-learning and the annual conferences on the Advancement of Research in Service-learning and its accompanying volume series have made important strides in this arena. Conferences and publications are important. But in addition to these political, pragmatic, and scholarly strategies, I would suggest we also make and take time to go deeper. I believe we must continue this reflection process through dialogue and conversations — internally and with colleagues. It has already begun at a national with the creation of a group known as the Higher Education Network for Civic Engagement (HENCE). This group is in the early phases of dialogue and exchange of ideas to help promote the civic role of the academy. Equally important are small, informal conversations at each of our campuses as most of us do not have the luxury of escaping to the serene confines of the desert.

How and why do I believe this to be an important next step? Because participants at this gathering consistently shared in the dialogue and in post-session evaluation surveys that this exploration of the inner geography was both profound and rejuvenating. They confessed they rarely have the time or opportunity to engage in this type of reflection. It was they who proposed we must continue to make time for conversations (not just meetings or conference presentations) and for reflection (not merely research). This reflective essay merely conveys their hope and suggestion. Therefore, it seems we must continue to ask some of the same questions that were posed in the desert of Utah — specifically asking at least one critical question: “What would it mean if we didn’t do this work?” The answers have implications for our selves, students, institutions, disciplinary fields, society, and the global community. So above and beyond workshops, conferences, and journal articles, we need to gather for conversations. We can do this by sponsoring informal “brown bag” lunches or book clubs at our own institutions. Threaded on-line discussions could provide a “virtual community” of scholarly dialogue. The group of faculty from the University of Utah who attended the retreat in the desert has continued to meet informally with participants taking turns hosting the group at their homes. We might also consider allocating time at regional and state Campus Compact conferences to include affinity groups as well as traditional presentations and workshops that focus on important technical information. As mentioned above, the initial effort through the creation of HENCE is a good start for networking and dialogue. Another important dimension is to begin this conversation at the doctoral level. We need to begin to instill this form of scholarship and the ethos of civic engagement with the future professoriate (Billig & Welch, 2004). A service-learning center or a center for teaching and learning might sponsor doctoral seminars for credit or informal interest group discussions.

So, I would suggest we continue the exploration of our inner geography and these conversations into this next era of the Campus Compact and the next generation of the professoriate. It allows us all of us a chance to remind each other and ourselves of why we choose this path.

References

Billig, S. H., & Welch, M. (2004). Service-learning as civically engaged scholarship: Challenges and strategies in higher education and K-12 settings. In M.Welch & S.H. Billig (Eds.), New perspectives in service-learning: Research to advance the field (pp. 221-242). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

Colby, A., Ehrlich, T., Beaumont, E., & Stephens, J. (2003). Educating citizens: Preparing America’s undergraduates for lives of moral and civic responsibility. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

English, L.M. (2000). Spiritual dimensions of informal learning. In L.M. English & M.A. Gillen (Eds.), Addressing spiritual dimensions of adult learning: What educators can do (pp. 29- 38). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Glassick, C.E., Huber, M.T., & Maeroff, G.I. (1997). Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Long, S.E. (2001). The wingspread statement on student civic engagement (2nd ed.). Providence, RI: Campus Compact.

Mundy, M. E. (2004). Faculty engagement in service-learning: Individual and organization factors at distinct institutional types. In M.Welch & S.H. Billig (Eds.) New perspectives in Service-learning: Research to advance the field. (pp. 169-194). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

Rimmerman, C.A. (2005). The new citizenship: Unconventional politics, activism, and service. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

It is natural for those scholars and practitioners who are interested in the effectiveness of civic engagement programs in colleges to think about results in quantitative, “head count” terms. We talk about how many people vote, or participate in political parties, or join in community improvement campaigns. There is, I find, less attention to the quality of those engagements. I think this is unfortunate.

There are at least two reasons for this focus on quantitative measures. One is that quantity is much easier to define and measure than quality. It’s far easier to find out how many people attended a meeting than to assess the quality of the discussion that took place, or the quality of individual contributions to the discussion. It’s easier to find out how many of a college’s graduates lead civic organizations than to find out how good they are as leaders. This is a perfectly good reason to track these quantitative measures and indeed there is good reason why we should want to see numbers like these go up. High levels of democratic participation, whether in voting, in community affairs or in political activity are good for society and low levels of participation can put democracy in jeopardy. But of course the fact that quality matters, doesn’t mean it is all that matters.

I suspect there is a second reason for the focus on the “countable”, one of a very different kind. This is a sense that focusing on the quality of civic engagement is itself undemocratic and unacceptably elitist or judgmental. It’s easy to feel this discomfort: imagine a discussion not of whether somebody voted, but of “how well” they voted — or claiming that college graduates are not only more likely than others to vote, but that they actually vote “better”. John Stuart Mill in fact argued that persons with more education should get more votes than those with less — a proposition that to modern eyes appears (rightly) both self-serving and shockingly undemocratic.

Yet I think that if we limit our appraisal of civic engagement to head counts, we miss out on something important. After all, if college is, in important measure, about expanding students’ capacities for critical thinking, analytical reasoning and effective expression, we should be concerned that those qualities show up in the public lives of our students, and not only in their work lives and private leisure. And when we think about designing programs in colleges that aim to promote civic engagement, I think we want those programs to encourage the application of these developed capacities to problems and issues of civic life.

If these more qualitative dimensions of civic engagement are to be pursued purposefully by colleges, there are two big problems to address. First, we have to find ways to appraise the quality of civic engagement that are, so to speak, “content neutral” — that don’t simply define quality in terms of our own particular political values or prejudices. And second, we have to find constructive ways to “operationalize” these qualitative aspects — to actually measure how well colleges promote high quality civic engagement.

Neither of these problems is easily solved, and all I aim to do here is to get them squarely on the table and perhaps to offer some starting points in thinking about them.

Let me turn first to this issue I am calling “content neutrality” or “impartiality”, bracketing for now the question of whether we can observe or measure the qualities I am going to describe. Tempting as it may be, we can’t simply say that voting for the “wrong” candidate is ipso facto low-quality civic engagement. To begin to get a purchase on quality, we have to somehow get behind the bare act of voting (or of showing up at a political rally) to learn more about the basis for the act undertaken. I think we can identify three elements that contribute to the quality of a civic or political action or decision (of which the third is controversial). In shorthand, these are information, reasons, and empathetic imagination.

Information is easiest. What is the informational basis of the voter’s choice (or of the participant’s contribution at a community meeting)? What did she know about the candidates’ positions, past voting records, honesty? What was the informational basis of her intervention at the community meeting? Had she read the newspaper articles on the matters under discussion; were the claims she made in her remarks consistent with the known facts?

Yet facts alone are not enough. It’s possible to have a great deal of information and still reason poorly. No doubt it is a fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger could bench press more weight than his opponent in the California governor’s race. But it would be hard to conceive of an argument that would make that a reason to vote for him. And someone who voted for him for that reason would not exhibit a high quality of civic engagement. This is a trivial example, but there is plenty of evidence from campaign commercials that candidates (or their handlers) believe that people often base their voting decisions on poorly reasoned arguments. And, of course, when people join in community meetings or political discussions, the quality of their reasoning is more directly on display.

To be sure, judging the quality of a person’s reasons for his or her position is less of a black-and-white matter than judging knowledge of relevant facts (which admittedly is not itself entirely free of dispute). We are less likely to encounter pure logical fallacies in people’s political arguments than we are matters like overgeneralization, excessive weighting of particular pieces of evidence, reliance on claims that are poorly supported by evidence, and so on. Rather than simple mistakes, these are failures of judgment. Some might argue that we cannot fairly evaluate the quality of reasoning in cases where the evidence is not dispositive, but I don’t think that is right. Indeed, as Derek Bok argues in Our Underachieving Colleges, teaching students to arrive at reasonable conclusions in ambiguous cases is one of the most important things for colleges to do, and one at which they often fail badly.

It is more controversial to suggest that “empathetic imagination” is a proper standard for appraising the quality of civic engagement.¹ Suppose someone votes in favor of a public project that will benefit him and his friends modestly at the price of great harm to others in the town whom he doesn’t know peronsally or care about. His knowledge of the facts is impeccable and his instrumental reasoning from them is accurate. He is entirely willing to acknowledge that these other people will be hurt severely, and he will say that he just doesn’t care. Is it justifiable to claim that his civic engagement is flawed? Some might worry that such a judgment is no more than a prejudice displayed by “bleeding heart liberals” against their “hard-headed” conservative counterparts.

I don’t think that’s the case. The argument sketched above, “this is good for me and I don’t care about you,” is not one that could be persuasive to those harmed by the proposed project if made in a democratic forum. When making arguments in the public forum or when acting as a citizen (as in voting), one should seek to argue or act in ways that are reasonable from everyone’s point of view (or as Thomas Scanlon has put it, to act or reason in a way that no one who was motivated to find agreement could reasonably reject). To believe that the public sphere is simply one more arena in which to pursue one’s private interest is a fundamental misunderstanding and displays a low quality of civic engagement. That this is the case is indicated by the fact that people almost never publicly make arguments of this kind (“vote for this because it is good for me” — they will at least gesture in the direction of claiming that the harm to others is less, or the gain to them is greater, than might appear. Now the capacity to grasp how a proposed policy or electoral outcome will affect others requires is the capacity to “put oneself in another’s shoes”, a capacity that requires not only sound reasoning, but “empathetic imagination”. Valuing this quality in appraising civic engagement is not, I think, simply a political prejudice but a proper standard that is in the relevant sense impartial. Indeed thoughtful conservatives generally argue that policies that seem to neglect the interests of the disadvantaged really are in their long run interest (or at least serve social interests that outweigh the individual costs, when viewed impartially).

If these sketchy remarks make it at least plausible that we can define quality in civic engagement, and in some measure sort out its dimensions, what are the prospects for measuring it? Here I think my main point is that measurement should be understood in a much broader way than is commonly done. We often think of measurement as inherently numerical and, even more ambitiously, as being consistent with an interval scale like temperature, in which it is meaningful to compare the difference between a change from 0 to 10 degrees and one from 80 to 90 degrees. It’s important not to be a prisoner of such a narrow understanding of measurement and to recognize that one can meaningfully speak of measurement whenever items can be ranked in terms of “better” and “worse”. It is better to aim for measures of things we really care about than to confine ourselves to those items that can be measured with (an often specious) precision. As Amartya Sen observed in the context of the somewhat analogous problem of measuring the standard of living, “it is better to be vaguely right than to be precisely wrong”.

That said, are there realistic prospects for gauging the quality of civic engagement generally and, more specifically, for relating measures of quality to the character of educational experiences? It’s easiest to see the possibility of measurement for the first of the three categories I reviewed, information. There are, for example, surveys of the kinds of information people access regularly about newspaper reading and radio listening, for example. There have also been studies of civic knowledge, seeing what samples of citizens know about the legal structure, governmental institutions and such².

Good measures of the quality of political reasoning and especially of empathetic understanding are considerably harder to envision. It would be hard to get them from pencil and paper surveys or multiple choice questions, which can be useful in learning what information citizens know. The most plausible way to gather evidence about these dimensions of civic activity would be through extended interviews or possibly through observation of people participating in civic and political discussions. It is conceivable that such inquiry could be conducted on a scale that would shed some light on the distribution of quality of political reasoning in a broad sample of the American population, but it doesn’t seem very likely. It is much more plausible that an individual college or universities, or a group of colleges, could engage with groups of current students or alumni to learn something about how their college experiences influenced the ways they came to political judgments and to decisions about action. My arguments earlier in this paper suggest that it is possible to bring qualitative judgments to bear in appraisal of these judgments and decisions. Although there are many difficulties in relating such evidence to particular features of the college experience, but such projects may be worth considering.

There are some very important pitfalls to be aware of in judging the quality of citizens’ political reasoning. As Meira Levinson observed in a recent essay on deliberative democracy, judgments of the reasonableness of citizens’ political views and arguments must be sensitive to the fact that basic background assumptions and factual beliefs differ widely across groups in a racially and economically divided society like that of the United States. African Americans, for example, for whom the history of the Tuskegee experiments is much more salient than it is for White Americans, are likely to be much more inclined to attribute bad motives or conspiratorial intent to American medical practices than are Whites. Widely differing experiences create quite different starting points for members of different groups. This reality certainly complicates but does not, I think, preclude responsible assessment of the quality of civic engagement across members of different social groups.

I have tried to argue here that judgments about the quality of civic engagement can in principle be made in defensible ways and to suggest that such judgments could and should play a role in the evaluation of college’s efforts to promote civic engagement. In saying this, I don’t mean to downplay the worth of quantitative measures of civic engagement. I feel sure that more is better. I only want to argue that better is better too. As Barbara Holland said in responding to my proposal for this paper, “The ultimate measure of success is rewarding lives for individuals, and healthy communities composed of “engaged” and interactive residents.” We cannot achieve success, measured in this way, without attending to the quality of the engagement we foster.

¹ My comments here are influenced by Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity. back

² The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) has sponsored such studies. See for example the studies reported in CIRCLE’s newsletter (June 2006). back

Last week — it is early July as I write? — I found myself in one of the textile mills that once formed the economic heart of Lewiston, Maine. The mills began closing in the 1970s, but now, after two decades of abandonment, the long brick buildings are being reclaimed by businesses and non-profits. I was visiting Museum L-A, a grass-roots initiative dedicated to creating a museum of labor and industry in Lewiston-Auburn — for the purposes of both cultural preservation and downtown renewal. At Bates College, where I direct the Harward Center For Community Partnerships, we have collaborated with Museum L-A for two years on a series of oral history and archival research projects. The partnership holds a special pleasure for me as a cultural historian and American Studies scholar. Over the past six months, I have worked with a team of students to research and script a traveling exhibit on the world of Lewiston millworkers from the Depression to deindustrialization. It will serve, I hope, as, a kind of “rough cut” for the larger story the permanent Museum will tell.

Today I am here to see Rachel Desgrosseilliers , Executive Director of Museum L-A; we meet amidst the photographs, union records, company newsletters, looms, and letters that she and others have carefully saved from the dumpster. The museum is open two mornings a week, but it is still more an attic than an exhibition-space, containing the raw material for a local museum with more than local meaning. Rachel has shown me the latest treasure, a manilla envelope of memorabilia given by Roland Gosselin, an elderly veteran of Bates Mill. There are family photos of parents and grandparents (all three generations worked in the mills) and of M. Gosselin in uniform during World War II; there are snapshots of the St. Jean-Baptiste Day parade floats he was famous in Lewiston for designing. Then I take a little breath with the kind of geeky thrill that only the adventures of research can bring. I have pulled out an invitation to a formal banquet from 1966. On the back is written, “Best wishes, Maurice Chevalier.”

When my academic career turned toward civic engagement in the late 1990s, Campus Compact had been leading the movement for more than a decade. Over those twenty years, I would argue, three of its accomplishments (by no means, its only ones) have been especially consequential for our movement. First, Compact mobilized a broad, visible, national coalition of academic leaders to renew the commitment of American higher education to the goals and skills of democratic citizenship. Second, Compact created an infrastructure of offices, staff, and programs that enabled colleges and universities to turn that commitment into practice?most of all, the practice of undergraduate service-learning. And finally Compact nurtured a stunning spread of service-learning pedagogy and course development among the faculty grass-roots. If this were a PowerPoint presentation, I’d distill these accomplishments in three numerical bullet-points: 975 (member presidents), 31 (state affiliates), and 22,000 (estimated faculty who currently integrate community work into their teaching).

Of course success has exposed new issues and catalyzed new debates about the next twenty years. Barbara Holland and Elizabeth Hollander rightly argue that the embedding of civic engagement more deeply across academic institutions remains one of our key unfinished tasks. We are well into a period of reflection and experimentation, it seems to me, about the values, programs, and practices that such embedding would entail. Recent Compact initiatives explore problem-based learning and departmental engagement as models that move beyond the atomized courses and student placements of early service-learning. John Saltmarsh and Harry Boyte, among others, seek to reframe academic engagement from a discourse of community service to one of civic learning and citizen action. Other voices (I count myself among them) have urged a parallel reframing of the core practices of the movement from course- and semester-based service-learning to longer-term, more sustained and integrative partnerships. Such multi-year “collaboratories,” as we call them at Bates, would be co-created by academic and community partners and grounded in the assumption that each collaborator brings resources, needs, plans, and critical reflection to the project. Their criteria of success would include not only public benefit “out there,” but also educational innovation “in here”: new courses (including those taught and team-taught by community practitioners), new curricular clusters and pathways, new interdisciplinary formations, new research questions, new scholarly projects informed by, and in turn informing, the public work.

It is this last issue that I want to underscore. If we are to embed engagement more deeply across academic institutions over the next twenty years, surely one core goal must be to take seriously, more seriously than we have, the intellectual and scholarly generativity of public work. Neither the mainstream professoriat nor even engaged faculty, I would argue, have truly committed ourselves to the academic (not only pedagogical) value of civic engagement. We have practiced community collaboration as a transformative medium of student learning much more intently than we have pursued it as a transformative medium of scholarly and artistic production. We dispatch our students to places like Museum L-A, where they do extraordinary work with and for our community partners. Yet too often we do not go ourselves, not with our own vocation of knowledge-making and meaning-making in mind. And so we do not bring to our public work our particular gifts as scholars and artists: intellectual curiosity, analytical subtlety, research craft, doggedness, passion, and playfulness.

This is one reason, it seems to me, that civic engagement remains marginal to faculty cultures (both institutional and disciplinary) and model pathways of academic careers. Until we trust (and demonstrate) the intellectual value of civic engagement, we will unwittingly collude in that marginalization; and we will hobble our efforts to embed the institutional changes that Holland and Hollander advocate. What’s more, we will shortchange our partners, depriving them of the full measure of our attention. And by missing the opportunity to include them in our community of inquiry, we deprive ourselves of the questions and discoveries that they catalyze — deprive ourselves of the encounter with Maurice Chevalier. It is because of Bates’ partnership with Museum L-A, after all, that I was able to open M. Gosselin’s envelope; it is because of my academic vocation that I can help make sense of what was inside.

How is it that Roland Gosselin came to have a card signed by the famed cabaret singer Maurice Chevalier? Even before pulling it out, I knew part of the answer; several interviewees had boasted about Chevalier’s appearance at the centennial banquet of Bates Mill. Yet the invitation itself, with its heavy stock, embossed script, and scrawled autograph, added layers of meaning to the fact of the visit; it made clear the cultural ambition of the Twin Cities’ Francophone community in its heyday and the pride with which its achievements are recalled today. As M. Gosselin knew in bringing it to the Museum, the card added gravitas, the aura of the real object, to our planned exhibition. George Washington slept here; Maurice Chevalier sang here.

Yet for me, the heft of the document involved more than just the authenticity with which it invested our story-telling. The card raised complex interpretive questions about the interaction between local community and mass culture, about the distinctively ethnic and regional ways in which people lived a supposedly homogenizing modernity. Was Chevalier’s appearance in Lewiston part of a Francophone geography that linked Quebec, Franco-America, France, and other places in a common cultural archipelago? Did it point to the penetration of mass culture into Maine milltowns, or conversely to the distinctive agency of “provincial” places within the landscape of celebrity and entertainment? (It was about just the same time that Muhammed Ali defended his world heavyweight title in Lewiston.) Were Franco-Mainers paying homage to Chevalier, to the influence of Hollywood, Paris, and Manhattan? Or was the singer paying his dues to the local worlds within which he had to seek a following?

These are an academic’s questions, far from the concerns of Roland Gosselin and Rachel Desgrosseilliers. They are provoked by my peculiar position on the borderlands, so to speak, between my community partners and my scholarly colleagues. The civic engagement movement needs to inhabit those borderlands not only for teaching and public problem-solving, but also (or rather consequently) for scholarly work. If the story of M. Gosselin’s card shows us anything, it is that community collaboration provokes academics to see new connections, ask new questions, hear critiques of old paradigms. In making our partners part of our community of inquiry, we can return the favor, giving back new contexts and understandings. The researcher’s lens can be diminishing and reductionist, we know. Yet if framed by an ethics of collaboration, it can also be illuminating, empowering, and bracing. In the particular case of M. Gosselin’s card, it seems to me, a cultural historian can challenge a received picture of Lewiston and the Franco-Maine experience as local, provincial, insular, and defensive — a picture shared by both its critics and its partisans. Chevalier’s autograph suggests a different reality: a complex weaving of local and global, ethnic and cosmopolitan. A Francophone mill community celebrated its resilience in the global economy with a long-lived French star, mobilizing his urbanity for its own local purposes.

As this story suggests, pursuing engaged scholarship does not mean focusing primarily on what Ernest Boyer called “the scholarship of engagement.” To be sure, rigorous research into the process, methods, and outcomes of community engagement is essential to our work, and venues like the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning have been invaluable in catalyzing and disseminating it. Over the next twenty years, we will need more such sites: other journals, regular convenings, forums for theory and debate. And yet I would argue that the full promise of public scholarship will come not with the maturing of a professional apparatus dedicated to community-based teaching and research (as useful as that will be). It will come when we have disseminated a commitment to the intellectual generativity of civic engagement across the whole domain of Boyer’s “scholarship of inquiry,” making knowledge about the world in new ways by making it for and with public collaborators.

I hope it is clear that what I am not advocating is the academicization of the civic engagement movement, a coup d’etat by the research professoriat. Nor am I calling for a model of the public dissemination or translation of scholarship, for the dispensing of academic wisdom or critique out (or down) to the lay public in bite-sized morsels. To the contrary: if we are to heed Holland and Hollander’s call to deeply embed engagement in faculty careers and scholarly practices, it will mean institutionalizing new kinds of careers and practices. We will want to evolve not only new and rigorous models of tenure and promotion, but also a host of smaller-scale practices that lie under the rock of the tenure question: new habits by which research projects are intuited, conceptualized, undertaken, and ended, new opportunities to fund community-based research and train students to take part in it. We will want to create times and spaces for reflective conversation with community interlocutors about the intellectual implications of our partnerships. We will want to experiment with new genres of writing and new practices of assessment and critique. We will want to revisit the ethics of research, amending policies — for instance, those on intellectual property and human subjects — that presume the autonomy of the research scholar and the passivity of the research subject. (“Roland Gosselin” and “Rachel Desgrosseilliers” are not pseudonyms but the names of actual partners and peers, whose story I tell with their permission.)

Indeed the risk of embracing the intellectual importance of civic engagement is not that it will challenge academic practice too little, but it may seem too much. It asks faculty to reconceive the social compact that governs our labor and our access to resources, making public engagement not a goal of every scholar’s work but a legitimizing commitment of our institutions. And so it is important to remember, as we undertake the long march that Holland and Hollander advocate, that engaged scholarship will be a joy as well as a responsibility, calling on us to be playful, exploratory, curious, and rigorous. Anyone who has taught a service-learning class knows the exhilaration that our students express when “get out of the bubble,” as the saying goes, activating their liberal learning in the practice of public life. We too will be energized by closing the circuit between our intellectual vocation and our civic life.

A few days after my meeting at Museum L-A, I drive to Canton, Maine, a town some twenty miles north of Lewiston, at the invitation of Sue Gammon, the leader of a local citizens’ committee. Canton has suffered from job losses and repeated floods in the past decade. It received federal and state funding to relocate dozens of families from the flood plain of Whitney Brook to the town’s upland hills; at the same time, it seeks ways of reversing the area’s economic decline by redeveloping the flood plain as an environmental and educational resource. Sue wants to know how Bates College might help. “Maybe we can create a recreational corridor or an environmental education center,” she tells me on a drive through town. “What do you think?” I do not know and tell her so, but I start making a list of colleagues — an environmental economist, an archaeologist, a hydrologist — to contact.

Educating students about the ideas and methods of public engagement has largely focused on undergraduates. With progress on that front well underway, we propose that the ambitions of the public engagement movement should be extended to graduate students. This is a challenging prospect, because most graduate students — with the strong encouragement of their faculty advisors — concentrate on their disciplinary studies and research. However, there are many reasons to turn in this direction. Graduate students have said that the want to know more about the public aspects of their disciplines. In some fields, and along some lines of inquiry, research requires collaboration with community partners. Experience with community partnerships can widen the range of employment options outside academia or in non-Research 1 universities. Finally, public support for research universities may be enhanced when faculty and students attend to the public implications of their scholarship.

In select disciplines and interdisciplinary programs, attention to the ideas and methods of public engagement may become integrated into the curriculum. In order to incorporate public engagement training into the broader fabric of graduate education — without unduly adding to the time requirements for progress toward a degree — we propose that public engagement become part of the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) or research ethics training that our institutions routinely provide to graduate students. Most RCR training presumes disengagement from research subjects, leaving a void for those seeking to define standards of ethical conduct between university-based researchers and community partners. A focus on the practice of engaged research, particularly its ethical aspects, would substantially enrich RCR training, making it less legalistic and more connected to broader societal concerns. Ethical aspects of publicly engaged research include IRB issues; formulating, reviewing, and publishing research in ways meaningful to community partners; addressing the imbalances of power that usually attend university-community partnerships; compensating partners for their time and effort; and attending to the potential uses and consequences of new knowledge.

In order to encourage the integration of public engagement issues into research ethics, it will be important to develop and disseminate suitable pedagogical material throughout graduate education, a project in its own right. This requires sensitivity to the diverse intellectual and professional settings in which engaged research is practiced, developing case studies responsive to specific disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts, and formulating institutional strategies for connecting offices of research, graduate education, and community engagement with graduate programs in the interest of preparing students to employ best practices in engaged research and the scholarship that stems from it.

Because science and technology (and the mathematics that undergird them) so permeate modern society, it is not hard to generate STEM examples worthy of discussion. There are some obvious examples of how science and society have interacted in very public ways, such as the Manhattan Project that led to the atomic bomb, and the Asilomar Conference that led to a self-imposed moratorium on recombinant DNA research until the dangers could be better assessed. From earlier days one has the attempts to reliably determine longitude (engagingly recounted in Dava Sobel’s book of that name) so as to make the oceans safe for trading voyages, and Michael Faraday’s work on electricity and magnetism. (There are two versions of what occurred when Prime Minister Gladstone visited Faraday’s lab and asked what use his research might be. In one version, Faraday is reported to have replied “What use is a baby?” In the other version, “Someday you’ll be able to tax it.”)

These are major developments that have had profound influences on society. They provide rich material for discussion, but that we should probably focus more of our attention on examples of more immediate local significance, in which STEM graduate students might participate directly. These could include:

• Discussing patents and technology licensing by universities
• Developing internships and volunteering in science museums
• Arranging K-12 school visits to talk about science and engineering
• Mentoring younger college students from underrepresented groups
• Making contact with local industries through departmental seminars
• Developing engineering designs for people in need (e.g., water purification)
• Studying toxicology and environmental justice issues
• Developing nutritional awareness programs in poor communities
• Discussing legal and ethical issues in the biological and health sciences
• Discussing the economic and political ramifications of renewable energy sources

It’s important to consider these and similar examples in the light of the definition of engagement adopted by the CIC Committee on Engagement and the parallel NASULGC/CECEPS:

Engagement is the partnership of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good.

CIC Committee on Engagement and the parallel NASULGC/CECEPS

Most science and engineering projects are motivated at least in part by public and private concerns (e.g., when research is sponsored by NIH or private industry), and there is usually little question that they hold the potential to enrich research, enhance curriculum, and address critical societal issues. It’s less clear — though a strong case can be made if we take the trouble to articulate the connections — that scientific research could contribute to the preparation of educated, engaged citizens; and that it strengthens democratic values and civic responsibility through its very practice (see Jacob Bronowski’s Science and Human Values). And, of course, definitions of “the public good” are often contentious these days. But such contentions provide rich opportunities to discuss public engagement in the context of the STEM disciplines with our graduate students.

This list of potential engagement topics needs to be followed up with some reflections about the ethical issues that should be touched upon in teaching grad students about engaged research in the STEM disciplines. Especially important are issues that might arise in working with publics in some kind of partnership.

In the health sciences, ethical concerns about the protection of human subjects are paramount. Not only do regular Institutional Review Board (IRB) concerns have to be satisfied for university researchers, but if work is done in collaboration with a community organization, then those community members who are involved in the research should also have proper training in human subjects protection and data privacy issues. In addition, there’s active debate whether special IRBs, with more than the (usually token) complement of community members, should be appointed to oversee community-based work.

If graduate students take internships with companies, intellectual property (IP) rights are a particular concern. Presumably the IP developed during an internship belongs to the company, but care needs to be taken not to inadvertently transfer IP developed at the university. As debates over the use of indigenous ethno-botanical knowledge for the development of pharmaceutical products reminds us, the ethics of intellectual property are complex and nuanced. Graduate education should be more than an overview of intellectual property law; it must embrace deeper questions such as: Who owns knowledge? Who has the right to disseminate it? Benefit from it? And what are the ethical obligations of researchers who seek to acquire knowledge that fundamentally resides within communities, particularly communities that are disadvantaged in relationship to the universities or corporations that seek to capitalize upon it.

The most frequent ethical concerns in scientific research, in addition to human or animal subjects and intellectual property, are fraud, plagiarism, and authorial conflicts. These could become manifest in public partnerships, particularly with non-academic community partners who may not know all of the canons of data integrity, who may not appreciate the complexities of citing the work of others, and who may not realize the responsibilities accruing to authorship. (On the other hand, academic researchers may be dismissive of the valid claim of community partners to be coauthors.) Taking the trouble to teach about these concerns could be useful not only for the community partner but also for the academic partner who can learn a lot from the process of teaching.

Professor Naomi Scheman, of University of Minnesota?s Philosophy Department, has emphasized the question of community trust in research results: Why should university researchers be trusted when they’re researching things of particular importance and sensitivity to a community, and the community is not given the opportunity to learn about, question, and shape the research. These situations could easily arise in environmental toxicology projects, for example, where studies of local accumulations of toxins could raise concerns about viability of scarce housing stock, accusations of irresponsible parenting, etc. One can argue that in such situations, academic researchers have an ethical as well as a practical responsibility to involve community partners deeply in the conceptualization, execution, and analysis of the research. Tools for resolving conflicts that arise in the process of widespread consultation need to become an explicit part of the graduate curriculum.

Programs that use the professional expertise of students to help communities, such as civil engineering students working on a water purification project in a needy rural community, of course need to exercise all the responsibility and ethical standards of practicing professionals. Yet deeper issues remain largely unexamined in most project-based community work stemming from universities, particularly with regard to the long-term obligations of university-community partnerships and effective strategies for mitigating inequitable power relations between partners.

These concerns about the ethics of engaged research are not limited to scientific, technical, and professional fields. In recent years, oral historians have led the charge against subjecting their research to review by Institutional Research Boards, distinguishing its purposes from standard protocols in the biomedical and behavioral sciences. This campaign led to the exemption of oral history from official IRB oversight, yet significant ethical issues remain for those who collect life histories, including issues of copyright, potential harm to interviewees stemming from the dissemination of research findings, access to information, and other matters. Professional societies, such as the Oral History Association, have formulated ethical guidelines for the practice of oral history research but these remain outside the curriculum of most graduate programs in history, unless they explicitly focus on its public dimensions. Training in the ethics of engaged research is needed to ensure that graduate students and future faculty cultivate the professional judgment needed to successfully navigate these issues.

No major research university in the 21st century can continue to ignore engagement as a major component of the academy’s work. Doing so would prevent the institution from fully meeting its mission, goals or aspirations. Just take a look at the mission statements of major research universities, and you will see what I mean.

Depending on the institution and its local context, “engagement” can take many forms. Most simply, at research universities, engagement has meant establishing an office or center for service learning, sometimes as on offshoot of teaching and learning centers, other times as an outgrowth of community service initiatives. However, engagement in today’s higher education environment requires a more transformative approach, one that maximizes opportunities for faculty and student to engage with the community not only through service activities, but also through research and teaching. This type of engagement cuts across all departments, disciplines, and endeavors to become a defining characteristic of the institution and its faculty and students. In this kind of model institution, students seek relevance and want to learn in contexts that are personally satisfying and rewarding because they impact the real world; faculty engage in research that involves the public and/or has public impact (and is therefore well funded by outside sources); staff and administrators facilitate the endeavors of faculty and students and their collaborative enterprises with multiple and heterogeneous community (local, regional and global) partners.

How does one go about embedding engagement like this at a major research university? What follows is a guide to the rough-and-tumble (ongoing) journey undertaken by Tulane University.

One: Use change or crises as opportunities to enhance engagement.

Universities are confronted with many adverse situations — budget crises, new university leadership, natural disasters, enrollment and retention shifts, deteriorating town-gown relationships, redefinition of educational priorities, just to name a few — that require change of some kind. These situations, and the uncertainties that come along with them, often cause great strife among campus community members. As situations go from bad to worse, morale decreases, faith in the institution’s strength is weakened, and people’s overall commitment to the institution is placed in jeopardy.

But, sometimes good things can come out of the most adverse situations. Hurricane Katrina and the flooding caused by the breached levee system in New Orleans shut down Tulane Univesity for a semester, scattering its students, faculty and staff all over the nation. As the university struggled to get back on its feet after sustaining property losses of more than $250 million, it also recognized the need to redefine itself — quickly and assertively — in order to address the realities of a post-Katrina world. We were (literally) the only institution of any kind in New Orleans that was functioning and we recognized our responsibility to serve the community with our physical, creative, and intellectual resources. We also recognized that because of Katrina we had to become a different institution — not a lesser one, but a different kind of institution. The keystone of Tulane’s “Renewal Plan” — our road map to recovery — became a conscious and deliberate commitment to engagement at all levels. (2005b). Although the commitment was there before Katrina, only a great upheaval made its implementation possible for us in this bold a fashion./p>

Two: Focus on what you do well and on what you need to do (i.e., the mission/vision thing and the money thing).

Before Katrina, Tulane, like many research universities, had a long tradition of supporting and nurturing undergraduate experiential and service learning initiatives. For its future, however, it has placed a broadly-defined concept of engagement and civic responsibility at the very center of its institutional mission: “The Tulane University undergraduate education serves to create engaged, ethical and thoughtful citizens whose actions and endeavors make a difference in society.” (2005a) The keystones of the commitment are a new undergraduate graduation requirement in public service and a greater commitment towards engaged faculty scholarship and research that address important local and global issues.

This shift marks a profound institutional change, spearheaded by our charismatic president, Scott Cowen (who is also a major community advocate, particularly on K-12 educational issues), the board of trustees and top administrators. Far beyond an opportunistic move to capitalize on the community’s needs at this time, the shift revisions the entire university around engagement:

As appropriate, Tulane’s programs will be shaped by the university’s direct experience with the unprecedented natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina. This experience will provide faculty, staff and students with equally unprecedented research, learning and community service opportunities that will have a lasting and profound impact on them, the city of New Orleans, the Gulf Coast region, and other communities around the world. (2005a)
Tulane University Mission

Alongside this philosophical statement, the university also recognized that, even as it had to contract in some areas (cutting programs and eliminating some endeavors) it also had to invest real dollars in its new central commitments. Without capital investments visions are rarely materialized. These investments help make the vision a reality.

Three: Establish a consultative process that identifies key players and gets buy-in (we could not)

This was a major challenge; I don’t recommend our course of action for most institutions. With our faculty and students far from campus, it was impossible to establish a community-wide discussion about this strategic change to the culture and nature of the university.¹ There was much concern that this would be perceived as an imposition and would be stone-walled. However, we had some early positive signs that we could find support to build on:

1. Our students returned with a personal commitment to the university and the New Orleans community that exceeded our expectations: they created relief not-for-profits and fund-raised tirelessly; they volunteered for community service in unexpected numbers. The students that returned (and many more did so than we expected, close to 93%) did so because they wanted to make a difference and we were assured that Tulane’s renewed commitment to engagement would echo positively with them and future students.
2. Even before the Renewal Plan was released, the faculty proposed new Service Learning courses and approached the Office of Service Learning in unprecedented numbers. Spontaneously, they too had begun to engage with the community in different ways; several who had done “pure” research began to develop community-based projects.

We knew then that we would have at least a sizable group of faculty and students to count on as the planning process proceeded throughout the spring 2006 semester. Above all we had our champions in the upper levels of the administration, which was a blessing (though, for some faculty stalwarts, a curse, since to them anything the administration supports is by definition suspect). However, as the engagement focus gained momentum and prominence, it became evident that Tulane could not fully realize its potential as an engaged campus without the full support of the broader campus community. The need to move quickly and operationalize large scale engagement activities within a short time frame, all while academic programs were being restructured or eliminated, created much resistance, especially from faculty and deans. It was not until we began to implement more collaborative processes for dialogue and debate that we began to garner broader support for making engagement a more central feature of Tulane’s work.

Four: Keep the focus and address challenges clearly and decisively.

Given the broad range and impact of Tulane’s engagement initiative, the campus’s Renewal Plan identified two new entities to serve as the hubs of university engagement: the Partnership for the Transformation of Urban Communities (PTUC)² and the Center for Public Service (CPS). I will focus my discussion on CPS, which is at the heart of student engagement at the new Tulane University.³

CPS was envisioned as independent of any school and charged with strengthening and expanding the connections between academic study and public service (it would subsume the Office of Service Learning), creating new innovative initiatives, providing better integration and collaboration among existing programs, and seeking service opportunities that contribute directly to the reconstruction of New Orleans. Above all, it was charged with the creation and maintenance of the new undergraduate graduation requirement in public service. Again, making this happen, quickly, presented several challenges, especially establishing an inclusive organizational structure and negotiating the needs of others with ongoing investments in engagement (namely, the Office of Community Service in the Student Affairs division).

With the support of the Provost’s Office and other administrators, CPS is now organized as Tulane University’s principal gateway to the community, encompassing service learning, community-based research, community-based internships and research projects, and community service. This has allowed CPS to begin to forge deeper relationships with its community partners that will create better learning environments for Tulane students as well as enabling us to contribute more effectively to building community capacity. Building a central unit that connects and coordinates engagement efforts allows Tulane to optimize engagement activities by reducing program overlaps and addressing gaps in engagement work.

Five: Integrate engagement into teaching, learning and research.

Mandated by the new undergraduate core curriculum, all incoming Tulane undergraduates must satisfy a public service requirement that includes one service learning course at the 100-, 200-, or 300-level before they earn 70 credit hours and, after completion of 70 credit hours or four semesters of coursework, participation in one of the following CPS approved programs (at the 300-level or above): service learning course, academic service learning internship, faculty-sponsored public service research project, public service honors thesis project, public service-based international study abroad program, or capstone experience with public service component.

Working from the assumption that it had to be meaningful, process-based, and with the potential to be transformative, the requirement was developed by the CPS Executive Committee and vetted by the Undergraduate Core Curriculum committee. Throughout the spring 2006, CPS held information sessions and course development seminars for faculty, recognizing that one of our biggest challenge will be to have enough public service offerings for our students and that we need the broad buy-in of faculty and deans to achieve this. Simultaneously, CPS has also established funds for seeding faculty community-based research projects, recognizing that engaged scholarship will be a crucial component of our success. We have encountered resistance from some faculty and deans, who worry about faculty workloads and the impact on promotion and tenure. These are the challenges we face in the upcoming year: we will continue to “educate” our constituency via seminars and workshops and we will strive to establish procedures for formal and informal recognition. At a major research university, research will always trump service when it comes to faculty rewards (and tenure), but where we can make a huge difference is educating faculty on how useful to their research engagement can be (especially in terms of getting funding from major federal agencies). Still to be addressed is whether more or what kind of “green carrots” will be necessary to sustain this initiative at the levels envisioned.

Interestingly, we opted to focus on our new commitment to engagement as a major theme of our recruitment efforts this past spring. The new public service requirement, experiential and engaged learning, and making a difference in the real world were the leitmotifs of our recruiting. After speaking at innumerable recruitment events, I sense that this message impacted students (and their parents) positively: this is something they yearned for. We will soon know whether in fact the students we recruited are in some measurable way different from our pre-Katrina student-body (after scanning the facebook to learn something about them, I begin to fear not?). Above all, our challenge will be to deliver the possibility of undergoing a transformative experience while at Tulane University.

Six: Develop an accountability structure.

In addition to reporting directly to the Office of Academic Affairs, CPS is accountable to its Executive Committee, an Advisory Board of faculty, community partners and students, and a separate Student Advisory Committee. In addition, its curricular responsibilities — the public service graduation requirement — will be regularly measured and assessed: beginning with the fall 2006 freshman class, we will regularly track student progress and faculty, student and community partner satisfaction through several new instruments that we are in the process of developing. This assessment will, in turn, generate new research initiatives for our faculty.

We are also developing an eportfolio system that will allow students to record and track their engagement from the time they enter to the university to graduation. We hope that in the majority of cases, the eportfolios will track their civic education and their growth as they meet the challenges of democratic and committed citizenship. Ultimately, an institution that sees itself as engaged campus will need to show that engagement indeed has positive impacts on student learning, faculty productivity, and community development.

Seven: Don’t even think about breathing easily

Every time we achieve a significant milestone (securing the proper administrative space, holding another well-attended developmental seminar, hiring qualified and enthusiastic staff, successfully establishing a new initiative like “Semester in NOLA”⁴), new challenges emerge. One that caught us by surprise has been the difficulties of meeting the demands of the Office of Insurance and Risk Management. Now that service has become more than a volunteer activity, but a requirement for obtaining a degree at Tulane University, Risk Management has established a much higher threshold of due diligence in our dealings with community partners and student placements. Issues we never considered before (insurance and proof of it, transportation, training, “hazardous” placements, etc.) now have to be addressed and vetted. To address this, we have set up a new unexpected committee charged with establishing criteria and assessing the “business risks” to the university of certain potential and/or otherwise desirable community placements for our students. The lesson here is that while the continued advancement of Tulane as an engaged institution is exciting and worthwhile, it is a process that brings with it a set of new challenges and issues to be addressed. This large initiative is still in its infancy, and there are undoubtedly many other obstacles in its future that we have not even imagined. Yet Tulane University is committed to embedding engagement as deeply as possible throughout the entire institution and particularly, within the undergraduate experience; we will meet the challenges head on. The fortitude that helped Tulane make it through one the nation’s worst natural disasters will help us in the difficult task of transforming a major research university into a fully engaged campus. Having this mindset throughout our work is what will allow us to address and overcome whatever obstacles confront us.

Conclusion

Our goals are multiple, but we seek to help produce engaged, ethical and thoughtful citizens whose actions and endeavors make a difference in society. While we have only begun our journey, we know that the strong commitment, will, and sense of purpose for engagement at Tulane will help us realize our vision. We hope that our experience to transform our institution into a more fully engaged campus can serve as a model for major research universities that want to sustain cutting edge research and learning while simultaneously being grounded in a unique interactive relationship with the local community, the region, and beyond.

¹The Renewal Plan was generated over a frantic two month period in late 2005 via extended conversations, debates, and analyses held by Tulane University President Scott Cowen, top administrators, the board of trustees, a small number of faculty and a panel of outside experts (primarily former university presidents) that provided counsel on all of its parts. back

²PTUC emerged as a result of Tulane’s partnership with Dillard and Xavier universities, and neighboring Loyola University, to provide classroom and administrative space in spring 2006 while the heavily damaged campuses of the two Historically Black Colleges/Universities (HBCUs) were being repaired. Taking that partnership further, PTUC is focused on building healthy and sustainable communities locally, regionally and throughout the world and will sponsor educational programs, generate research initiatives and produce activities of national and international relevance, many of which will emanate from the Hurricane Katrina experience. It is also the home of a new Institute for the Study of Race and Poverty, charged with an agenda that spans research, education, policy and advocacy, and a new Institute for the Transformation of Pre-K-12 Education, which will combine research on educational practices and policy with grassroots advocacy at the community level to foster positive change in urban public school systems. As it develops, PTUC will collaborate with the Center for Public Service on new partnerships and initiatives. back

³The CPS website, though still under construction, defines pubic service at Tulane University and outlines its mission, goals, and principles. back

⁴“Semester in NOLA” is a 6-credit summer academic internship experience for students from both Tulane and other colleges which allows students the opportunity to participate in a 5-week internship with local organizations focused on assisting with New Orleans rebuilding and renewal. back

Bibliography

Tulane University (2005a). “Renewal Plan:” http://renewal.tulane.edu/renewalplan.pdf. Retrieved August 6, 2006.

Tulane University (2005b). “Survival to Renewal:” http://renewal.tulane.edu/ Retrieved August 6, 2006.

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz prefaces his 2005 book The Rise of American Democracy with a timely and chilling reminder:

“Democracy is never a gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers who seek to reinforce their own legitimacy. It must always be fought for by political coalitions that cut across distinctions of wealth, power, and interest. It succeeds and survives only when it is rooted in the lives and expectations of its citizens and is continually reinvigorated in each generation. Democratic successes are never irreversible”

The Rise of American Democracy (xix)

Wilentz’s reminder is no less cogent when applied to the purposes and practices of higher education. As educators, we can contribute to democratic successes. We can help to ameliorate the violent potential of democratic reversals. We cannot, however, aid the reinvigoration of democratic institutions, principles, and practices unless we move beyond simple notions of community service and volunteerism. Contributing to democratic survival is more complicated than being willing to serve.

Yet student service in the guise of volunteerism has taken on a life of its own in education. The talismanic view of service as independently capable of generating and sustaining democratic capacity is at best a fond hope. At worst, like the facile ideology of “a thousand points of light,” it is a distraction that reduces education’s ability to contribute to sustainable democratic sovereignty. Service and scholarship are too often either divorced from one another or seen as one and the same. Separating service from scholarship prevents higher education from fulfilling its obligation to help build democratic capacity by preparing student-citizens for the habits and practices of public sovereignty. Conflating service with scholarship has equally negative consequences by fostering faculty who neither understand nor practice the inherent and inevitable connections between their research and teaching and their ongoing political responsibilities in a democracy.

We the People — along with civil institutions such as higher education, the information professions, and the agencies of government — form political alliances and coalitions that at their best span distinctions of wealth, power and interest. The three branches of government together constitute one crucial element in maintaining democratic public sovereignty. However, in democracies in which the people retain sovereignty, ordinary citizens of all stripes — including faculty, students, and both together — play an equally crucial role. The people, the rule of law embedded in their constitution, and the tripartite governance established by the people’s charter are each necessary in order to sustain a democracy’s structure of checks and balances and to sustain civil liberties.¹ With liberties come responsibilities.

We the People are constituted as responsible for our democratic sovereignty in the Constitution’s Preamble; the First Amendment and other Amendments act instrumentally to create explicit obligations.² The Constitution provides for the tripartite branches of government in Articles I, II, and III. The civil liberties find voice in the Bill of Rights. Continually reinvigorating democratic sovereignty requires education, whether through the formality of school and university scholarship or the library and laboratory of experience and self-disciplined engagement beyond the academy.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer draws the education-democracy connection succinctly in his 2005 tract Active Liberty. “The people, and their representatives,” Breyer wrote, “must have the capacity to exercise their democratic responsibilities. They should possess the tools, such as information and education, necessary to participate and to govern effectively” (16).

Breyer did not suggest that only those with an advanced education deserve or are capable of safeguarding the liberties associated with democracy. Still, policy and political decisions facing the American people are complex. Solutions may be non-intuitive and call for uncommon sensibilities. Surely, democratic successes require an active knowledge of our unvarnished history, of our democratic structure, and of conditions beyond our direct observation if we are to self-govern with more than raw emotion. Service — when practiced without scholarship — places democratic capacity at risk.

Institutional Foundations of Democratic Legitimation

Wilentz’s reminder that democracy is always at risk and Breyer’s insistence on the role of education in collective self-governance resonate deeply with Supreme Court decisions addressing the legitimacy of our democratic institutions. These decisions require our collective vigilance and our understanding of the issues that spawn them. Awareness of the conduct of government, and our active participation based on that knowledge, are the obligation of citizens collectively responsible for sustaining the legitimacy of their democracy.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens emphasized the legitimacy not only of the Constitution but also of the Supreme Court itself in a June 2006 decision that reinvigorated two fundamental principles of democratic governance: the separation of powers, in which the judicial, legislative, and executive branches each must play an affirmative role, and the rule of law, under which legal precedent and principle rather than brute force or the alleged benevolence of officials who place their own legitimacy above the law of the land, are central tenets of democratic governance.

“The executive is bound to comply with the rule of law that prevails,” Justice
Stevens wrote at the conclusion of his 73-page opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006, p. 72). The Court’s majority found that the executive branch’s creation of military tribunals violated the safeguards of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions and exceeded the president’s authority. Under the rule of law, the executive cannot act independently outside of an explicit realm of granted authority. The Court ruled that the President and his administration must cease their extra-Constitutional actions.

The Court’s willingness to reinvigorate the principle which holds individuals and institutions to constitutional practice is nearly as old as the nation itself. This principle finds its judicial origins in Justice John Marshall’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, which itself re-legitimated Article III of the Constitution. In more recent reinvigorations of the separation of powers and the rule of law, the Court overruled Democratic President Harry S. Truman in 1952 when he exceeded his constitutional authority by attempting to seize the steel mills during the Korean War, and Republican President Richard M. Nixon in 1971 when he claimed a non-existent privilege to withhold incriminating Watergate tape recordings from federal prosecutors. Each of these was a political case: While the Supreme Court at its best is non-partisan, the Court is, nonetheless, always political — political in the sense that justices recognize not only the Constitution’s political compact among the tripartite branches of government but also the People’s liberty and responsibility to engage actively in democratic self-governance. The Supreme Court is obligated under the Constitution’s political structure to rule on the separation of powers and to enforce the rule of law. These obligations are elements of a political system that requires more than passive engagement not only from the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government but also from the People, who must not only comply with government when they see it as legitimate but also act as governors.³ Volunteer service is an inadequate model of practice for sustaining democratic sovereignty.

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld is reassuring. The democratic keystones of rule of law and separation of powers, even during times of great national stress, emerged again as fundamental tenets worth fighting for, capable of standing against powerful anti-democratic challenges. Battles like this require citizens educated in the democratic principles, including those that legitimize both the citizen’s obligations and the tripartite duties of the equal branches of government.

Higher Education’s Role in Reinvigorating Democracy

Public attention to, and understanding of, the judiciary’s insistence that the executive and legislative branches of government adhere to the rule of law is a necessary vaccine against the loss of democratic sovereignty. Yet are we prepared as faculty, administrators and staff to hold higher education similarly responsible for contributing to and reinvigorating democratic capacity?

The habits of citizenship and comprehension of the political system to which we subscribe — like the curricula of language, fine arts, math, science, and the professions — can be learned and practiced in the academy. Effective education is no less important to the health of a democracy than are ethical officials and equitable laws. Higher education is too often failing, however, to root democracy into the lives and expectations of citizens. Thus is higher education too often failing to reinvigorate each generation’s sense of democratic capacity and public sovereignty. Decreasing democratic capacity is revealed not only through young adults’ recurring failure to vote. A lack of capacity is also exposed in an emerging sense among the young that politics is, if not shameful, then clearly futile. Youths and young adults have learned to engage with their communities, if at all, through occasional individual acts of volunteerism rather than through informed and sustained engagement with understanding the principles and reinvigorating the practices of democracy itself.

Acts of charity and selfless giving are marks of ethical commitment; they are to be applauded. They are — like the contributions of civic groups, congregations, and fraternal organizations — appropriate actions of student and other community members. Yet philanthropic and sweat-equity participation without deep knowledge and active engagement is not sufficient to fulfill the compact between higher education and democratic sovereignty. At a university fulfilling its democratic obligations, knowledge must, in addition to springing from experience and observation, include scholarship: the learned ability to bring the university’s full capacity — student and faculty, administration and staff — to bear on democratic sovereignty. While the call of service should be heard by all citizens and all institutions, education has a unique role to play.

Ashley came to the university with a record of community service and volunteerism. It was natural for her to enlist in THON, an annual, entirely student-run, volunteer effort culminating in a marathon of dancing through which several million dollars are raised each year for children’s cancer research. Students dance from Friday night through Sunday night. Faculty generally offer an informal moratorium on tests, quizzes, and even class attendance on the following Monday for those exhausted volunteers who participated. Fraternities, clubs, and others engage together with at least as much energy as they expend in the university’s pronounced commitment to athletic success. The university president has called THON the best thing we do as a university. Town support for Gown is high during THON. It is by any measure a source of university pride and a worthwhile and successful community-building experience for a particularly valuable cause. Although national service organizations such a Rotary and Elks are experiencing declining memberships, the THON service effort is growing. The local high school now holds its own scaled down version. Students are attracted to the service effort and are pleased to have contributed their time and energy to something valuable and tangible.

Ashley’s senior year with THON was in some respects her most rewarding — and most troubling. She had advanced through the ranks into a THON leadership position. The experience had, at least in part, motivated her active engagement with NGO programs. She volunteered in urban and rural, national and international arenas. As the year drew to a close Ashley’s questions were poignant: Why are we dancing for cancer and adding a drop in the bucket? Why do a bunch of students have to dance to get their country to see that health care and research to save children must be a priority, a shared responsibility? Why do so many of the corporate sponsors of THON manufacture products that emit carcinogens? Why didn’t the university help us learn how to change the system so that the government pays for needed research? What I did made me feel good, but what have we accomplished in the long term? I’m not sure my university time was well spent, she concluded.

The university met Ashley’s personal development needs, but missed the chance for purposeful teaching and collaborative learning about public sovereignty in a way that integrates democratic understanding, scholarship, and practice. Ashley found that while direct service is valuable, charitable service is an individual, privatizing effort: one individual aiding one or many individuals but rarely affecting root causes, service offered not as an element of political process and choice but from a sense of ethical or moral imperative. A good deal of university volunteerism teaches students the rewards of selfless giving. However, service too rarely addresses the brick and mortar of democratic sovereignty that create democratic keystones. Community-spirited volunteerism is not adequate to habituate democratic learning or teach public sovereignty. Those interested in effecting democracy itself — in building democratic capacity — must address public issues in addition to individual need. Those in higher education who want to help reinvigorate democratic institutions and practices must at the very least come to understand explicitly — through academic scholarship as well as their own experience — the relations between individual need and democratic obligation. Doing so requires more than social development. Universities and colleges are to be applauded for attending to the personal development that springs from direct service. Service does not in and of itself, however, replace higher education’s lynchpin democratic obligations.

Democratic Capacity: Reinvigoration through Transformation

The need for increased democratic capacity increases as the legitimacy of democratic institutions recedes from public memory or otherwise comes into crisis. Among the contributions of higher education to democratic capacity and sustainability is an interdisciplinary understanding of politics not as something shameful or dirty but as a set of practices — discursive and material — necessary to self-governance.

The function of our scholarship — that is, of our teaching and research broadly and coherently conceived — is not to enlist partisans. An instrumental function of democracy education must be to instill in youth an understanding of, and an ability to contribute to, the political compact inherent in the public’s constitutionally structured democratic sovereignty. As with the Supreme Court’s consideration of executive privilege and the separation of powers that reaches from Marbury v. Madison to Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, education is always political — political in that educators must recognize and teach the Constitution’s political compact among the tripartite branches and the people if we are to have any hope of reinvigorating active democratic engagement. Justices come to understand the need for a continually active citizenry not by some moment of divine inspiration but by studying the cases and controversies that have arisen from the Constitution. Students learn to become active citizens and to develop the skills needed to contribute to the democracy not from divine inspiration or charitable public service alone but from formative educational programs of scholarship and practice. The question is not whether or not we will continue traditions of public service at the university. We are confronted instead with a challenge to re-imagine our current practices or risk contributing to the decline of democracy into empire, where students, faculty, staff and even administrators’ roles are limited to spectators and consumers rather than to citizen critics building democratic agency.⁴

Our democratic and educational successes are inseparably coupled. James Madison’s Enlightenment recognition of the direct link between education and the ability of individuals to grapple with and understand the complexities of self-governance is instructive. “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives,” he wrote (Vol. III, p. 276). Madison, an architect of the Constitution, recognized too the inherent danger in governments that are unaccountable to the scrutiny of an enlightened public. An educated citizenry, he said, provides the foundation of accountability. “Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people,” Madison said. “They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty” (Vol. III, p. 277).

Public Scholarship: A Curriculum of Consequence

We ask service to accomplish a lot. We want the experiential learning implicit in service to sensitize students to other cultures, to introduce them to unfamiliar social and economic strata, to enable them to transfer knowledge across classroom/community boundaries, and to initiate them into full citizenship. When service is strategically combined with a larger curriculum of democratic education, there is reason to believe that some of these transformations are nurtured in a manner that may assist in the complex process of generating democratic capacity and contribution.

Unfortunately, equations and generalizations which suggest that — or academic programs that act as if — service unaccompanied by an explicit curriculum of public sovereignty corresponds implicitly with democratic, academic, or other predictable learning outcomes or behavior changes mirror the out-of-favor belief that lectures alone or classroom seat time in and of itself produce learning. In a Scientific American column entitled The Political Brain, journalist Michael Shermer focused recently on a phenomenon social scientists and brain researchers call confirmation bias. People are more emotional than intellectual. Confronted by evidence, individuals rarely alter their opinions or behaviors. People interpret the world about them in ways that confirm what they already believe to be true. The war in Iraq is good or it is bad, justified or reckless, dependent not on news, the weight of evidence, or open-minded observation and investigation but on an individual’s very stable system of long-held beliefs. Rarely is news coverage alone, nor service alone, powerful enough to alter preexisting attitudes and opinions, let alone generate new habits of principled democratic practice.

This does not mean that education does not work. It does mean that it is necessary to be realistic about how to achieve desired learning outcomes. Toward that end, the challenge is to begin by adding an explicit curriculum of democratic capacity-building to already active pursuits of public service. The immediate hurdle is to be absolutely clear about what we want.

Higher education must provide an explicit curriculum in which democratic capacity-building is valued and rewarded as a core element of scholarship and professionalism — and as a core element of higher education’s democratic mission.

Three corollaries capture the public nature of higher education’s democratic mission:

• Students must receive effective instruction in the theory and practice of democratic citizenship that includes appropriately focused scholarship as well as field practice. Challenge: Identifying and developing curricula necessary to build democratic capacity through the production and diffusion of knowledge and the explicit transmittal of democracy’s theory and practice to each generation; institutional recognition of higher education’s core obligation to generate democratic capacity among students.
• The public has a right to benefit not only from the infusion into the polity of citizens with democratic capacity nurtured by scholarship and instruction in democratic principle and practice, but also from the university’s discovery and diffusion of new knowledge and practice applied to public needs and issues of local and national concern. This includes the scholarship and artistic contributions of faculty as well as students. Challenge: Creating institutional recognition of the value of public scholarship, providing faculty reward for excellence in its practice, and developing protocols by which it may be assessed.
• The public’s institutions of higher education must serve as conservators of the experiences, discoveries, understandings, and skills that are the essence of human enterprise and knowledge and that provide the enlightenment necessary for wise governance. Challenge: Protecting the autonomy of scholarship while recognizing scholarship as a public resource.

The challenge to adopt these corollaries is not an easy one. Many people believe that in performing public service they are sufficiently engaged in a democratic curriculum and that in offering public service universities already are meeting their democratic capacity and contribution obligations. Some assume that public service and the preparation of students for engaged citizenship are add-ons, rather than elements of a core educational mission. Universities and colleges generally require teaching, research and service and demand a high level of engagement in each for purposes of faculty reward and recognition, but do not set an equally high bar for the university’s often explicitly stated mission of producing good citizens. Few universities develop a professional environment in which there is incentive to alter faculty pedagogy, curricula, or research protocols explicitly to address democratic capacity-building and contribution as obligations inherent in our Constitution. As a result, the service community often unintentionally excludes faculty.

An educational enterprise called public scholarship is emerging in the United States and internationally that addresses some of these challenges.⁵ It places the focus on the educational and scholarship elements of democratic capacity-building and contribution rather than on the service component, which students encounter elsewhere. “Public scholarship is the conduct of scholarly and creative work, including teaching, research, artistic performance, and service, in ways that contribute to informed engagement in the democratic process” (Cohen, 2005, pp. 506-507). Rather than a prescriptive methodology, public scholarship is an educational philosophy in which the mission or desired university outcome is democratic capacity-building among students and contribution to democratic sovereignty by faculty, students and staff. Public scholarship carries an explicit appreciation of education’s special obligations and the value of fully integrating scholarship with democratic practice. And public scholarship recognizes that, as with all learning, it is rarely appropriate to rely on a single method or to assume that all individuals will progress in the same manner. A challenge for the Campus Compact is to help identify and encourage the means to implement democratic capacity-building in higher education, means which recognize the complexities of democracy, scholarship, and individual practice and thus move beyond stand-alone service to fully engage the unique potential of university-based discovery and diffusion of knowledge, innovation, and transformation.

¹ For a discussion of the people’s ownership of the Constitution and the rights it bestows, see J. M. Burns, A people’s compact. back

² For a discussion of the instrumental view that the Constitution, particularly the First Amendment, creates an explicit obligation, see J. Cohen, “Shouting fire in a crowded classroom: From Holmes to homeroom.” back

³ For a discussion of the people as governors, see A. Meiklejohn, Political freedom: The constitutional powers of the people. back

⁴ For more on the history and potential of citizen critics, see New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (p. 282), R. Eberly Citizen Critics, and E. P. J. Corbett and R. Eberly, “Becoming a Citizen Critic.” back

⁵ See, for example, R. Eberly and J. Cohen (eds.), A laboratory for public scholarship and democracy. back

Works Cited

Breyer, S. (2005) Active liberty, Interpreting our democratic constitution. New York: Knopf.

Burns, J. M. (1994). A people’s charter. New York: Random House.

Cohen, J. (2005). “Public Scholarship.” In L. Sherrod, C. Flanagan, R. Kassimir, and A. Bertelsen (eds.), Youth Activism: An International Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood.

Cohen, J. (2001). “Shouting fire in a crowded classroom: From Holmes to homeroom.” Campus Compact Reader, 1:3, 11-17.

The Constitution of the United States of America. Accessed July 20, 2006.

Corbett, E. P. J., and Eberly, R. (2000). “Becoming a Citizen Critic.” Elements of Reasoning, 2d. ed. New York: Allyn and Bacon.

Dewey, J. (1927). The public and its problems. Miami, OH: Swallow Press, rpt. 1980.

Eberly, R. (2000.) Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres. History of Communication Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Eberly, R., and Cohen, J. (eds.) (2006). A laboratory for public scholarship and democracy. New directions for teaching and learning, No. 105 . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Gusfeld, J. (1984). The culture of public problems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. (2006). Accessed July 19, 2006.

Madison, J. (1865). Letters and other writings of James Madison. Published by order of congress. 4 vols. Ed. Philip R. Fendall. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Marbury v. Madison. (1803.) Accessed July 20, 2006.

Meiklejohn, A. (1948). Political freedom: The constitutional powers of the people. New York: Oxford University Press.

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. (1964). Accessed July 20, 2006.

Price, V. (1992). Public opinion. Communication concepts 4. Newbury Park, N. J.: Sage Publications.

Schermer, M. (2006, July.) “The political brain.” Scientific American, p. 36.

Wilentz, S. (2005). The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Dr. Jeremy Cohen is Associate Vice President and Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, Professor of Communication, and Faculty Chair of the Bachelor of Philosophy Program at Penn State University.

Dr. Rosa Eberly is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of English at Penn State University and a Fellow in the Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy.

Boyer (1997) stated “the most fundamental challenge confronting American higher learning is to move from fragmentation to coherence. He spoke of the need for connection, “connections between teaching and research, connections between students, faculty, and staff, connections across the disciplines, and connections from the campus to the larger world.” Like the pause between symphonic movements, higher education appears to be signaling a critical turning point. The Information Age has forever altered our work, and changing the tempo of this new knowledge network requires our institutions to think, organize, and act differently. 21st century higher education has been transposed into business?big business?and this shift in reality demands the full attention of our leadership. New and compelling research on the learning process illuminates the need for changes in the way higher education performs its mission. A successful response to this powerful rhythm of change confronting academe necessitates commitment, courage, and creative collaboration. Composing organizational cultures committed to civic engagement requires a concerted shift in organizational practice and requires transformational change working in what Ramaley (2002) describes as “a complex three-dimensional mental space: learn about culture of organization and work in ways that respect it, embody qualities that are associated with a true democratically guided learning community, and have a clear and compelling model for change that guides actions.” This essay describes the philosophical and practical impetus for organizational change and the critical role community colleges play in educating students as participatory citizens.

Surprising to many in the general public, more than half of the undergraduate students in public colleges and universities in the United States are now enrolled in community colleges Further, community colleges serve the majority of all of the minority undergraduates in the United States (American Association of Community Colleges, 2006). Forecasters project community college enrollment to increase by 13 percent over 2000 levels by 2015 and to approach an increase of up to 46 percent if community colleges model enrollment strategies of the highest-performing states (Martinez, 2004). Why is community college enrollment relevant? Because an individual’s educational attainment level is powerfully correlated with gainful employment, ability to provide for education and health of children, propensity to pay taxes, participation in civic life and democratic processes, and voting behavior (Carnevale & Desrochers, 2004). Therefore, the opportunity to attain a college education has major implications for the quality, strength, and spirit of our democracy. Given these significant statistics and the projected continuation in enrollment growth, community colleges represent a gateway of diversity in America?a symphonic tapestry of thoughts, actions, cultures, experiences, and values, each unique and each enriching the whole of the higher education experience. This richness in the learning process serves to strengthen citizens, communities and nations and provides an ideal setting for educating students about the importance and value of civic engagement.

Organizing for Harmony

A best practice demonstrated by institutions of higher education committed to the work of civic engagement is the presence of a visible and accessible center or office responsible for coordinating civic engagement opportunities. This is an important first step in creating a culture of civic engagement. At Collin College, we established the Center for Scholarly & Civic Engagement, a common administrative structure that orchestrates the management and accountability of several existing programs and activities directed towards scholarship, leadership, and engagement and serves as a catalyst for innovative compositions of organizational engagement. We moved forward bolstered in part by a joint report entitled, “Powerful Partnerships: A Shared Responsibility for Learning” by the American Association for Higher Education, American College Personnel Association, and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, which claimed that “most colleges do not use collective wisdom as well as they should?It is only by acting cooperatively in the context of common goals, as the most innovative institutions have done, that our accumulated understanding about learning is best put to use”(1998).

The impetus for organizing for collaboration is grounded in both the practical and philosophical. Practical reasons include the development of a harmonious system that results in reduced duplication of resources and programming, decreased competition among programs and departments, increased effective communication, and alignment of common goals for enriched learning. The philosophical rationale embraces the move from a culture of solos to a symphony of collaboration, creating a culture of common goals while giving credence to the mission and values of individual institutions.

Colleagues as Collaborative Composers

Engagement must be an organizational priority and collective effort. The often deep chasms between Academic Affairs and Student Affairs administrators must be bridged with student learning and engagement at the center. “Top administrators at many institutions have recognized that treating student academic work and general student development as largely discrete areas is neither economical nor effective” (Zlotkowski, Longo, & Williams, 2006). Strategic plans and programming efforts should involve collaboration and ongoing communication between titular faculty members, both Student Affairs and Academic Affairs program administrators, active student leaders, and community partners. Successful implementation includes adhering to a set of guidelines:

1. holistic, systems thinking;
2. creation of enabling mechanisms supported by administrative leadership;
3. shared leadership with an emphasis on cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-department collaborations and context-centered learning;
4. persistence, perspective, patience;
5. building on small successes;
6. effective communication;
7. keen awareness of the environment and developing a base of common knowledge;
8. flexibility, creativity, and a healthy appreciation for chaos theory.

The collaborative efforts catalyzed through multi-stakeholder planning emphasize deep learning that works to develop lasting competencies for college graduates: intellectual inquiry through active, critical thinking, principled ethical reasoning and real world problem-solving, along with creativity, adaptability, acceptance of human difference, and effective teamwork skills. Since establishing the Center for Scholarly & Civic Engagement, a culture of collaboration has emerged at Collin with notable increases in attendance, participation, and innovative partnerships college-wide./p>

Opportunities for Creative Compositions

The future of civic engagement in higher education presents many thought-provoking opportunities: an increase in the number of organizations focusing their energies on facilitating and organizing for effective dialogue offer great promise for community coalition-building; the recognition of the leadership potential of our students and creating an infrastructure intended to cultivate these student leaders; and consideration of how our undervalued colleagues in Institutional Research can be our allies.

Wind, Strings, Percussion, Keyboards, et al: Celebrating Our Differences, Honoring Our Voices

In honoring the values and mission of higher education in the United States, the depth and breadth of a holistic educational experience not only includes developing students cognitively and normatively for the world in which we live, but must also include references to our transnational identities and responsibilities. We can enhance our civic engagement work and infuse intentional, scholarly, and cross-disciplinary perspectives through democratic dialogue as illustrated through models such as the World Café, Study Circles, and National Issues Forums, to name a few. Frank and scholarly dialogue on subjects often characterized as “sensitive,” “difficult,” or “off-limits” are infrequent, and social and educational programs are often implemented that appear to run counter to their intended outcomes. Many lessons on how to approach difficult dialogues with sensitivity are drawn from diverse voices of the past, from the ancient African concept of Ubuntu, meaning “I am what I am because of who we all are” to the words of Albert Einstein: “Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.” In order to arrive at dialogue, an environment of trust and safety is critical — a place where participants feel free to express ideas without fear of retribution. Further, the diversity of participants involved serves to enrich the dialogue. Many institutions of higher education represent this richness of diversity, particularly community colleges.

Outcomes that can be expected from such dialogue include: depth and breadth of knowledge of challenging issues impacting our society and thus, public policy; greater understanding and respect for multiple viewpoints; the acquisition of dialogue skills, and the development of students as global/transnational citizens. Institutions should strive to create an environment of free and thoughtful expression where challenges are illuminated as opportunities for growth and to learn and appreciate the value of perspective where freedom of expression converges with intellectual inquiry.

The Student as Composer

Dr. Ed Zlotkowski, a respected scholar of civic engagement practices is currently leading the way in highlighting an oft-missed, yet exciting opportunity inherent in civic engagement work, that of developing students as leaders, students as colleagues. As noted in the recently published, “Students as Colleagues: Expanding the Circle of Service-Learning Leadership”, well trained undergraduates can play a decisive role in making academic-community collaborations powerful, successful experiences for all involved. (Zlotkowski, Longo, & Williams, 2006). Students are often more familiar with pressing community issues and local organizations than many faculty and these students bring their own set of experiences and understanding to service-learning projects. Leadership opportunities are abundant: site supervisors, peer mentors, program facilitators, and faculty assistants all lend themselves to powerful leadership learning experiences. And further emphasizing the importance of organizing for collaboration, Zlotkowski and his colleagues suggest that “the willingness and ability of undergraduates to assume substantive service-learning responsibilities both in the classroom and in the community represents an excellent opportunity to bring student affairs and faculty affairs into better alignment.” (Zlotkowski, et al. 2006). Recognizing and honoring students as knowledge producers while integrating student voice into our work serves to enrich the learning experience for all of us.

Institutional Research Chimes In

Assessment and evaluation are keys to improving our collective work. Offices of Institutional Research represent a relatively untapped resource for assessing and evaluating the levels of learning currently taking place in the context of civic engagement. Recently, the Carnegie Foundation brought together a focus group of community college institutional research administrators to explore the role of institutional research in the improvement of teaching and learning. “Traditionally, institutional research has been treated as a kind of company audit, sitting outside the organization’s inner workings but keeping track of important trends and facts-about enrollment patterns, student credit hours, graduation rates, peer institutions, and so forth-requested by both internal and external constituencies.”(Hutchings & Schulman, 2006). In the future, questions that get to the heart of student learning may explore, “What do our students know, and what can they do? What do they understand deeply? What kinds of human beings are they becoming-intellectually, morally, in terms of civic responsibility? How does our teaching shape their experience as learners, and how might it do so more effectively?”

Our Collective Opus

Orchestrating dramatic change with the ultimate goal of enriched student learning proves to be both exciting and challenging; while the work may seem familiar, the players, instruments, and music requires a new set of guidelines and a whole lot of practice. Further, community colleges are in a unique position for establishing a seamless culture of civic engagement from K-12 to university experiences and beyond. Workforce development and life-long learning are tenets of the community college mission and offer opportunities for revitalizing the civic-consciousness in students of all ages, positions, ethnicities, religions, and stations in life.

The lessons intrinsic to dramatic change are numerous:

1. a compelling case for transformational change must be made as collaboration of this magnitude requires the conductor to trust the players and vice versa;
2. understand and be sensitive to the stages of team development?be prepared for significant resistance;
3. stay focused and intentional on student learning goals;
4. propose and share resources to reinforce buy-in and stewardship;
5. be aware of curricular calendar to allow for mega-level strategic planning;
6. sustain ongoing, effective campus and community communication; 7) maintain continuous environmental scanning and evaluation;
7. engender trust by empowering individuals, disagree with respect, and capitalize on vast array of internal talents and scholarly expertise;
8. realize that in the end, it is about the collective; and 10) understand that even with the guidelines in practice, one can never fully reach “it” — interpretation of success is fluid.

Organizational change created through collective wisdom as proposed herein may resemble a symphonic work that begins as a few notes, struggles with discord, finds and looses its melody (more than once); then, after countless rewrites and rehearsals — finds its melody, audience, and benefactors. The beat goes on; performances run daily.

References

American Association of Community Colleges (2006). Fast Facts Sheet.

American Association for Higher Education, American College Personnel Association, National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (1998). Powerful partnerships: A shared responsibility for learning. Washington, DC: Author.

Carnevale, A.P., & Desrochers, D.M. (2004). Why Learning? The Value of Higher Education to Society and the Individual. Keeping America’s Promise. A joint publication of Education Commission of the States and League for Innovation in the Community College. Denver: Education Commission of the States.

Hutchings, P., & Shulman, L. S. (March, 2006). Carnegie Foundation Perspectives: Learning About Student Learning From Community Colleges. Stanford, CA: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Martinez, M. (2004). High and Rising: How Much Higher Will College Enrollments Go? Keeping America’s Promise. A joint publication of Education Commission of the States and League for Innovation in the Community College. Denver: Education Commission of the States.

Ramaley, J. A. (2002). Field Guide to Academic Leadership. Moving Mountains: Institutional Culture and Transformational Change. — A Publication of the National Academy for Academic Leadership; Robert M. Diamond, Editor. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Zlotkowski, E., Longo, N.V., & Williams, J.R. (Eds.) (2006). Students as Colleagues: Expanding the Circle of Service-Learning Leadership. Providence, RI: Campus Compact.

In recent years, practitioners, faculty, administrators and students have called for institutions of higher education to undergo change in order to more fully embrace their civic roles. However, little research on this topic has examined how universities might undertake institutional change efforts for these purposes. In particular, scant attention has been given to understanding the rationale for developing university centers for community partnerships and how they might begin to stimulate public research universities to embed engagement into the institution. Therefore, the focus of this paper is the presentation of findings from a case study at one public research university. In particular, the early operation of a new center for community partnerships is explored to understand how perceptions of campus discourse and practice around community engagement were influenced in order to embed institutional engagement.

Given this focus, the findings from this case study offer some valuable insights for practice around embedding engagement within research universities: in particular three stages of early change are explored to improve our understanding of how a centralized center for community partnerships can serve this purpose.

Engaging in more substantive thinking about how to embed engagement within higher education institutions necessitates the consideration of how change occurs within large loosely coupled organizations. The organizational concept of boundary spanning (or bridging the gap between sub-units within a larger organization) can play a critical role in fostering horizontal integration that can cut across the many departmental and administrative units on a campus; and can propel a strong institutional vision of how engagement can be embedded within the organization.

Based upon the findings from my case study, in this paper I draw some conclusions as to how a center for community partnerships can uniquely affect early change processes in order to further embed institutional engagement. Three phases of change are offered; reflected in these phases are the influence of learning and cultural lenses as well as what has been learned in this particular study about sense-making. Three stages of change are proposed: conceptualizing, positioning, and implementing. These stages are described in the section that follows.

Conceptualizing. At the time that the idea of a new university initiative arose at the university in this study, the institution was clearly responding to external versus internal pressures for more substantive community involvement. Thus, as the campus was tasked with producing a response that would satisfy the community, it also had to consider how to make the internal change culturally viable. Executive leadership rationalized that internal change to promote community engagement would actually serve to strengthen the quality of scholarly work undertaken on campus. This strategic framing of community engagement positioned it in a culturally relevant context. Subsequent consultation explored faculty perceptions of the institution’s espoused theories and how community engagement was theoretically supported by the service aspect of the mission, but in practice received little tangible affirmation from the institution. During this initial stage of change the planners of the initiative worked to conceptualize an internal strategy that would resonate with faculty and benefit the institution’s academic work. Faculty offered insight as to how the University’s new efforts could support and influence individuals’ behavior by affecting their theories-of-action (or the internal cognitive frameworks guiding their actions). This initial stage is marked by the gathering of information from key constituencies to conceptualize the initiative in such a way as to further a new vision and influence individuals’ theories-in-use, within the broader academic context. Such actions emphasized institutional efforts to propel a vision of engagement that could influence how individuals’ made sense of the relevancy of engagement within the institution.

Positioning. The center’s subsequent creation as a centralized campus entity was indeed reflective of an identified need for change in the institution’s community engagement efforts and a desire to influence theories-in-use about engagement. The center was also intended to coordinate the tracking and facilitation of campus-wide engagement. Such a large and diverse institution required that the center utilize its position to cast a wide net in order to connect with individuals from various constituent groups. These connections were critical mechanisms to help the center initially take in information and also promoted more intentional systems thinking about University engagement. From this platform greater community engagement was affirmed and made more visible.

In this stage, the center continued to reflect the need to establish its cultural relevance within the academic environment. Its initial programs served to help the center navigate the culture and thus bring greater academic legitimacy to its efforts. They also reached out to existing “believers” in and “doers” of community engagement. Establishing relationships with these individuals assisted in developing a foundation of knowledge of engagement in the community, especially among faculty. The fact that the center director was a faculty member helped communicate the academic focus of the center — thus working to promote the academic nature of the new office. Finally, much of the center’s work during this period could be described as “affirming” existing engagement versus “stimulating” new engagement. However, the center’s programs provided new university support for community-based work and thus produced clearer illustrations of the type of engagement the center sought to foster. Such effects illustrate how the center incorporated notions of institutional excellence, academic relevancy, and evidence of institutional prioritization to effect change in individuals’ sense-making. Affecting the sense-making process helped spur greater systems thinking about engagement as a scholarly endeavor. Thus at the positioning stage, the center worked to implement programs that navigated the academic culture in order to legitimate its academic identity and promote systems thinking.

Implementing. Once the center was established, and had its initial programs underway, it entered what can be termed an implementation phase. In this phase, network development was a continuing area of focus. The center had started to position itself in the second phase in such a way as to develop programs with an academic focus. It also developed relations with engaged faculty and relied upon its growing knowledge of community partnership projects to inform its work. Changes in its programs reflected this learning.

In the implementation phase, which the center was theorized to be in at the conclusion of this study, affirming existing campus engagement is coupled with the development of greater institutional incentives for new participation. This encompasses the development of formal mechanisms to further spread knowledge of the center’s work. Systems thinking requires the greater dissemination of knowledge and networks to build upon and learn from existing practices. Efforts such as the center’s future plans to provide more faculty development and training are examples of ways in which they are working to strengthen the institution’s vision of engagement.

Programs and formal mechanisms for internal communication (such as an advisory committee) also served as conduits for internal feedback, although a lack of focus on these mechanisms reveal that a dearth of such horizontal functions likely hindered information from coming in and going out of the center. At this point in the Center’s evolution there was still a strong effort to articulate its academic identity.
This model for change in the University attempts to draw upon the distinctive cultural characteristics that were evident in this case as well as learning processes that appeared to be at play in affecting individuals’ sense-making to stimulate change. Through this synthesis of how change processes have unfolded at UCLA, a model of how early stages of change processes aimed at embedding civic engagement are stimulated by a center within the research university is offered. While these stages are presented for clarity in a fairly linear manner, it should be noted that the stages can be overlapping and are not meant to be exclusive. Rather each stage characterizes defining actions and processes, especially the important role that sense-making plays in spurring early change processes.

This case study suggests that initially, centralized centers for community partnerships may focus efforts on shaping and propelling a new campus vision of engagement. In so doing greater attention is given to connecting with faculty who are already engaged. Providing new institutional affirmation for those who often were previously engaged, but who received little or no campus support can be a powerful contribution of a centralized center. During these early periods of change greater investment thus appears to be made in reshaping the vision that institutional members have of engagement. In part, this is accomplished by influencing their sense-making processes: providing institutional resources to support and recognize faculty who are already engaged in the community illustrates the academic value of the work undertaken and the campus’ increasing affirmation of this work — both of which can help foster a new vision of engagement by affecting individuals’ sense-making. As a centralized center moves forward in its work a key challenge will be to leverage this groundwork to stimulate new involvement of previously unengaged faculty. Thus, developing new relationships with previously engaged faculty, although not without its challenges (such as some faculty concerns about a center “taking credit” for their independent work); the greater challenge will likely be crossing new boundaries with those who were not “doers” or “believers” in community engagement efforts.

However, one tool that campuses may need to better utilize for these purposes is influencing individuals’ sense-making processes. A potential strength of a centralized center for community partnerships is the opportunity to craft and propel a new institutional vision of engagement. In fact, the powerful role that sense-making plays in promoting change is also evidenced in other disciplinary literature. Gilliam and Bales (2004) note that strategic frame analysis is a means to understanding, anticipating, and responding to individuals’ reactions to changes in public policy.

Benford and Snow (2000) explain that in recent years there has been a proliferation of literature on the role of framing processes in social movements. They explain that the influence of meaning-making is powerful because, “…it involves the generation of interpretive frames that not only differ from existing ones but that may also challenge them” (p. 614). Thus, the idea that sense-making or reframing is a powerful mechanism for change is not a new concept. However, within the field of higher education, a greater focus on sense-making in early change processes could, therefore, hold great promise for stimulating change not only in individual meaning-making, but change that will further embed engagement within these institutions.

Benford, R. & Snow, D. (2000). Framing Processes and social movements: An overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611-639.

Gilliam, F. & Bales, S. (2004). Framing early childhood development: Strategic communications and public preferences. In N. Halfon, T. Rice, & M. Inkelas (Eds.), Building state early childhood comprehensive systems series: No. 7. Washington, DC: National Center for Infant and Early Childhood Health Policy.

The occasion of the Campus Compact 20th anniversary celebration, and the challenge of being included in the group of authors invited to share a personal vision of “embedded engagement” offers the opportunity to look forward — to speak in the language of possibility — and to do so to a large, diverse audience. This paper is written from a community partner perspective and will reflect my convictions, gained over fourteen years of working with service-learning students at the Pike Market Senior Center in Seattle.

The theme suggested for this essay, that of “Embedding engagement more deeply,” is an attractive one, especially if it applies to all institutions. From the community perspective, when speaking of all institutions, the vision goes beyond the campus. If the full potential of communities and campuses, mutually engaged, with the goal of benefiting society and stopping the erosion of natural resources is to be realized, community institutions must also aspire to embedding engagement. It is my view that the next phase of growth toward embedding engagement can receive a boost from strong community campus partnerships. Community voices inviting the academy to join them in finding solutions to global problems can magnify the value of engaged practices. Active community partners can help to fix the concept of engagement firmly in the mind of campus partners. Best practices and proven success can erode resistance to embedded engagement.

This paper, then, speaks of a vision for the future of our cities and communities, where issues of social inequity and environmental degradation are met with informed, lasting solutions. This future can be made possible by infusing communities with the capital of the accumulated wealth of our higher education institutions — a wealth that encompasses the resources of knowledge, ideas, research, technology and labor. This paper speaks of a vision for the future of higher education — a future where leadership and faculty believe in the high purpose of education: to educate students to be members of an informed, active citizenry. It speaks to a future where all our institutions of higher education commit themselves again to teaching democratic values and engagement in civic society.

In saying that our campuses will re-commit to the public purpose of education is to say that they have, somehow, left this enlightened purpose behind. Many within the field of higher education have been influenced by the same materialistic and commercial values as have influenced our media and our politics. It wasn’t always so.

“With the American Revolution arose the need for enlightened public servants for our democratic society. The Founding Fathers determined that colleges were institutions for training those leaders to their civic duties. Indeed, the president of Bowdoin College, in 1802, asserted that colleges were for the common good and not the private advantage of those who attended, and students had a peculiar obligation to exert their talents for the public good.”

(Dr. Toni Murdoch, President Antioch University in Seattle, commencement speech, June 8, 2006. Dr. Murdoch is now chancellor of Antioch University’s six campuses nationwide)

A large number of educators are finding their way back to the public purpose of education through teaching models that offer students the opportunity to take their newly gained knowledge on the road, so to speak. Teaching practices that combine classroom work and research with learning and serving in community have existed for several decades, since the 1960s. The advent of the coalition of university and college presidents, uniting to promote these teaching models, and the birth of Campus Compact, brought an insurgence of interest in connecting the classroom experience to real needs in cities and communities. Community based co-curricular activities and service-learning have become more visible on campuses. But, while there has been great success in developing civically engaged campuses, there is much yet to be done in raising the awareness of some educators and administrators to the duty of instilling a knowledge base that is connected to the real world experience — and to carry this awareness to a level that connects the student to his/her community responsibilities.

How, then, do leaders and educators who have a utilitarian view of higher education find their way to teaching civic responsibility? Or, how do educators who pride themselves on rigorous classroom experience make the leap to infusing their courses with the concepts and practice of community engagement? The former must see the practicality of sending students outside campus walls; the latter must see that community engagement will not mitigate the student’s learning experience.

Promoting the advancement of engaged practices within institutions of higher education cannot be the primary goal when planning and developing service-learning or other partnership projects. The goal must always be to address and solve the identified issues. But the topic of “embedding engagement” allows for a focus on a secondary benefit to promoting partnerships – that of catching the eye of those who are not yet engaged in teaching for the benefit of the larger society. It is my view that this is where the community voice can make the difference.

This voice, if it is to be heard by those who resist the service-learning movement, must be passionate and knowledgeable. These qualities show forth if campus partners take seriously their commitment to creating infrastructure that supports preparation of community groups to take their place in the partnership. Well-deepened community partners will understand the connection between the student’s experience in the classroom and his/her experience of civic engagement. If the work done through community campus partnerships is to be noticed by those who are still questioning the value of teaching civic engagement, these partnerships must carry the identifying marks of effectiveness and sustainability. Partnerships must be founded and continued on such solid principles as the Community Campus Partnerships for Health’s nine principles of partnership, developed in 1998.

Once an institution has defined its role in a partnership, it can take the next critical step of engaging the community. In this process an institution of higher education can view the entire society that surrounds it as a potential learning ground where students will engage in practices of civic responsibility. In this discussion of “Embedding engagement more deeply across all institutions”, I will discuss factors which I believe will lead to more active and stronger commitments from communities.

When campus advocates for community and civic engagement take their convictions to the community, marketing the benefits of getting campuses and communities together to solve problems, these groups will then push back on the academy with interest and enthusiasm, making engagement all the more possible. Certainly, strong and effective community campus partnerships already exist. What is being discussed here is taking these partnerships to new levels. What is suggested is going to professional coalitions, associations and councils. The community leaders who comprise the membership of these groups, if well informed of how community campus partnerships can get things done, will then encourage their member organizations and constituents to get involved.

Awakening to the public purpose of mission is not just the responsibility of higher education. Community organizations, also, have an obligation in this dynamic that is most often not acknowledged. When mission statements are written they focus on an identified population or issue and how the needs of this population or issue will be served, or addressed, through the work of the organization. I believe firmly that these mission statements should also include the role the organization has in educating the next generation to continue the work. I believe it is the obligation of community organizations to share their work with the greater community — to invite fresh ideas and insight into their work if it is not to become stale. The training of the young is not just the role of the academy. Community organizations employ experts in their fields. These organizations contain a body of knowledge already in practice — a body of knowledge that should be demonstrated to the public. Community campus partnerships offer the perfect opportunity for community organizations to fulfill their obligations to the public purpose of their mission.

If a community organization is to participate in embedding engagement there must be a buy-in to the partnership by the entire organization. It is no longer enough for just one or two individuals within an organization to act as partners. Executives and boards of directors need to embrace partnerships with campus programs that will help them achieve their institutional goals. The only reason for an organization to welcome and work with student learners is the clear connection between the presence, and service of the student, and the accomplishment of the organization’s mission. This evidence will lead to institutionalizing service-learning within community organizations.

As with the campus partner, the community partner wants to engage in projects that will be effective and sustainable. People working for an agency or organization do so with limited resources and time. Evidence of progress in accomplishing a goal has to be measured and reported to governmental and private funding partners on an ongoing basis. If a community group can see that partnering with a campus will be productive, the partnership will be welcomed.

The availability of campus resources to cities and communities is still a relative secret. There are fine examples of service-learning everywhere. When one thinks, though, of the possibilities that await, possibilities of growth in numbers and types of partnership projects, it is clear we are only just beginning to make a difference. Greater creativity is needed when envisioning partnerships. Increase of public information about the mechanisms of service-learning will engage more community groups.

“Embedding engagement more deeply across all institutions” is a joint effort between campus and community leaders. The discourse promoting embedded engagement has until now taken place on the campus. Now and in the future, the discourse must welcome the voice of cities and communities. If students in higher education are to be educated for their role in an engaged, intelligent citizenry, campuses should be seen as having doors open to the influx of knowledge and experience that surrounds them. If cities and communities are to meet the ever-changing challenges to which they awaken every day, they need the infusion of resources available to them through the channel of community campus partnerships.

Motivated by the imminence of our centennial anniversary, when DePaul Universityⁱ launched its community-based service-learning program in 1998, it was a result of a two-year institutional strategic planning process. This milestone prompted us to turn to our mission and history in an effort to answer the question of what kind of institution we wanted to be in the future. This institutional self-reflection yielded Vision 2006, a plan that called for an investment in a few bold strategies that could position DePaul as a leader in higher education, especially among institutions that are urban, private, and highly tuition dependent. While not the only Vision 2006 strategy, establishing the community-based service-learning program was an important one — one that ultimately bridged all three of the plan’s strategic goalsⁱⁱ, knit together the institution’s Vincentian and academic missionsⁱⁱⁱ, and in 2001 yielded one of the largest individual gifts that DePaul has received. Eight years later the Steans Center for Community-based Service-Learning has garnered for DePaul U.S. News and World Report’s recognition as one of the most outstanding service-learning programs in the country and inclusion in the publication, Colleges with a Conscience.^iv

In fairness, DePaul’s “new strategy” was more of a heightening of a long-standing practice. DePaul had already earned a local reputation for community involvement. For decades, individual faculty members have placed students at community organizations throughout the city, conducted research for communities, and held classes in community settings. Until Vision 2006, however, much of DePaul’s community involvement tended to be individually motivated and episodic. With the introduction of centers such as the Msgr. John J. Egan Urban Center, the Latino Research Center, and the Steans Center for Community-based Service-Learning, DePaul began to develop a more systematic and consistent commitment to community involvement. The funding and launching of these centers represented the institution’s calculated risk to implement Ernest Boyer’s vision of the New American College at a comprehensive urban university — a vision that views American higher education as integral to the social fabric of local, national, and global society.

It is Boyer’s vision and St. Vincent DePaul’s legacy of service to those at the margins of society that form the context for our programming. For us, a university’s authentic commitment to community engagement emerges from a continual and institutional examination of mission and a desire to develop in students a commitment to contribute to society. The relationships that comprise the partnerships that lead to institutionalized community engagement become one important mechanism for fulfilling higher education’s mission and educating our students about the fundamentals of civic engagement. DePaul’s experience also indicates that community engagement develops incrementally — brick upon brick laid upon a strong foundation.

Back to Our Roots, Creating Our Future

The conversation that Vision 2006 started is continued in our new strategic plan, Vision Twenty12. As at many institutions, the process of designing civic engagement and service-learning programming, offers our institutions the opportunity to align institutional practices with our intellectual and social mission. Similar to artists who ground their artwork on a foundational model, DePaul has found it helpful to model its civic engagement initiatives with a consistent eye on our mission statement. The development and nurturing of community partnerships provides a concrete mechanism for fulfilling and integrating the fundamental aspects of our mission.

As with most universities, DePaul’s mission focuses on teaching, scholarship, and public service. Most often these three aspects of our missions manifest themselves in the individual work of our faculty members. Successful faculty applications for tenure and promotion at all of our institutions ride primarily on the quality of teaching and scholarship. Secondarily (if at all), faculty may be reviewed on their public service, but such a review is rarely based upon how a faculty member’s expertise has been applied to resolve a community problem. Only recently have accreditation and professional organizations begun to include in their assessments of our institutions and academic units the extent to which they engage and apply knowledge to external local, national, and global problems. Certainly it is rare for administrators’ performance to be measured by the extent to which they help to integrate the three defining features of our institutional missions. Yet it is administrators’ support and the attending allocation of resources that signals the authenticity of an institution’s commitment to engage its local community. The beauty of an honest institutional commitment to community engagement is that it provides a mechanism for the integration of teaching, scholarship, and service.

The extent to which mission statements are fulfilled depends upon an institution’s willingness to juxtapose the meaning of the words against actual practice. This is not easy work. A collective examination of a mission statement will surface diametrically opposing interpretations of language as well as practice. The process, however, can bring a diverse and even dispersed institution to an experience of community internally and connection to community externally that could never occur without the struggle to understand and assess how mission is practiced. A re-examination of our missions with an eye toward how we meet our obligations to our society can bring a renewed sense of purpose. And our institutions do have obligations to the larger society. After all, the foundation of our tax exempt status comes with the quid pro quo to strengthen the social fabric of our increasingly global society. Throughout our history this has always meant more than merely graduating students who are prepared to work. Our graduates should understand the complexities of creating and maintaining a multi-cultural, pluralistic society from their own experiences not only from the extrapolation of experience that is neatly edited into a bound volume. Mission-driven community partnerships help expand our understanding of what education and scholarship are and how educated citizens should behave.

Honoring the public service aspect to our missions is hard and messy work. For faculty, it means sacrificing some of the organized control of a rational learning environment to venture out into the chaos of the world and test whether what we teach and research can be applied in a manner that benefits real people living in deplorable circumstances. Yet there is also real benefit. A strong community partnership provides a locus for involving students, staff, administrators, and alumni, as well as individual faculty members, in rewarding and meaningful work. Some of the most powerful teaching and learning experiences for both faculty and students that the DePaul’s Steans Center has supported have occurred through research methods and project development courses that have focused on answering a research question or project challenge that a community partner organization has posed. These courses provide a mechanism for faculty to apply their expertise in defining problems, for students to learn how to answer real questions that will address real problems, and for community organizations to obtain information and products that are often out of their reach financially. Along the way new knowledge is produced, students experience a level of academic mentoring that is often absent in traditional lecture courses, and faculty can build upon their academic reputations. The fact that many students discover the challenges and rewards of working in community organizations on issues that matter deeply to them is the reward that should motivate our institutions toward greater community engagement, not less.

Authentic community partnerships emerge from a sense of purpose that is grounded in an understanding of mission on both sides that ultimately results in mutual benefit. On-going community partnerships also provide ideal opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching, learning, and problem-solving. For higher education, practical opportunities that intentionally integrate all aspects of our missions and simultaneously support interdisciplinary teaching and learning ultimately have a positive impact on the reputation of the university in the local community — and regardless of national stature, we all have reputations in our local communities. In DePaul’s case, Steans Center community partners view the institution as one that is attentive to community concerns, willing to hear and respond to criticism as well as praise, and woven into the social fabric of the city. This is a result of hard work, consistent attention to relationships, creatively connecting the expertise of specific disciplines to community problem-solving, a willingness to acknowledge responsibility when things go wrong, and a desire to correct what is wrong and replicate what is right. In a city where higher education has an historical reputation that many communities characterize as duplicitous, hostile, or distant, DePaul is beginning to be seen as an institution that stands behind its mission, listens before it responds, and does what it says it is going to do.

Our Students, Our Future

Perhaps higher education’s most important stakeholders are the students who arrive in our classroom seeking an education. Our students come to us with preconceived notions about what they need to learn and what that learning will do for them after they graduate. In many ways we have responded to our students by giving them what they want within the context of the narrowly defined disciplines in which our faculty members ground their expertise. However, our students often arrive on our campuses with narrowly defined notions of educational credentialing as a means toward private gain. For those who come to us as adolescents, few believe that our institutions have any obligation to attend to their maturation process; yet in fact, our institutions are most often the last organization that gathers adults, young and old, for the express purpose of learning to think, question, and discover. Community partnerships provide the opportunity to ask students — and faculty and staff — to engage in learning that they might not initially acknowledge as important or necessary, especially if it makes them feel uncomfortable. Students learn that education is ultimately for the larger community as they actively go through the motions of contributing to society with their newfound knowledge. This symbolic and substantive action becomes not only educative but formative. In the process, they learn more about the society in which they are citizens, understanding the breadth and depth of experiences of living in our culture — the challenges and inequities as well as the opportunities and rewards.

The majority of DePaul service-learners say that they value their community-based service-learning courses for the opportunity that they provide to apply theoretical learning to practical situations. However, these students often approach their community experiences with trepidation if not downright fear. But fear of what? Most often it is fear of what they think they know about “inner city neighborhoods” and the people who live in them. This fear comes from media images that convey highly negative images people of color, urban dwellers, immigrants, and people living in poverty. Engaging in community partnerships enables higher education to provide more than theoretical opportunities to encounter people who confront very different life challenges than many of our students. For those of us in majority white institutions, community partners that we have cultivated as educational partners offer us the opportunity to help our majority students confront enduring societal problems, such as inadequate access to quality education, healthcare, and economic opportunities, that are produced by historical and contemporary racism and structural inequalities produced by our economic system.

Many Steans Center community partners have become educational partners. As well as benefiting from faculty expertise and students time and talents, they see themselves as providing the physical space for DePaul students to experience substantive interactions with those who are different from them — different socio-economically, racially, ethnically, and culturally. Slowly these experiences have begun to have an impact on faculty, as well, as they visit community organizations, invite community partners to their classes, and engage in project development with people who are from very different life circumstances. Many report that they come to view their own disciplines in a different, more expansive way. Recent research on community perceptions of higher education indicates that our society as a whole yearns for our institutions to teach the public relevance of disciplines, model interdisciplinary learning and problem-solving, and encourage students and faculty to take some risks (Thomas, 2000). Educational experiences built around civic engagement and service-learning provide all of this and more.

Ultimately, sustained university-community partnerships that have cultivated trust and respect on both sides provide the opportunity for higher education to develop new, interesting, and meaningful learning opportunities for students and faculty. Through these partnerships, our institutions are asked to rethink the education process as one from disciplinary to broadly interdisciplinary. Educating our students from the context of applied learning and problem-solving prepares them to face the complex challenges and opportunities that our world faces today. Applied interdisciplinary learning within the context of mutually beneficial university-community partnerships exposes our students — in fact the university community — to the messiness and hard work of problem identification and solution seeking and the reward of a learning process that yields tangible results. Both sides of successful partnerships must learn listening skills, diplomacy, humility, ethical behavior, and the art of compromise. These are all qualities that community members, whether they are non-profit civic organizations or for-profit business, articulate as valuable and desirable in our graduates (Liederman, 2003; Thomas, 2000).

Conclusion

Higher education institutions have an ethical obligation to continually examine the extent to which they honestly fulfill their mission statements. Our mission statements signal our public purpose, and serve as the foundational reasons for public and philanthropic investment. The extent to which we deserve our status as “charitable organizations” is grounded in the extent to which we honestly strive to meet our missions. In the past higher education has relied upon the education and graduation of its students into the larger society as the fulfillment of its public purpose. Presently, public and many private donors look for more.

Our institutions are accused of isolating ourselves from societal concerns, and graduating too many students who are under prepared for the local, national, and global contexts in which they will work. Educational experiences rooted in civic engagement and service-learning offer a powerful and effective method by which to address these concerns. What might our school systems look like in five years if each discipline and institution committed to focusing our significant intellectual resources and human capital to finding solutions to problems that exist? How might our disinvested urban neighborhoods look if our schools of business committed to teaching entrepreneurship strategies and practices designed to give residents the opportunity to strengthen their neighborhood economies? Might we find a solution other than gentrifying real estate practices to revive local economies? What would our students learn from their involvement with the practical learning opportunities these community partnerships would provide? American higher education is in a unique position to influence the future health and well-being of our world. It is also at a critical juncture. We can rise to the intellectual and practical challenges that our society poses, or we can wait for others to define our solutions for us. Weaving an ethos of community engagement into the fabric of our institutions is one way we can more confidently and proudly prepare a new generation to assume leadership and responsibility for our human society.

ⁱ DePaul University is located in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1898, it is now the nation’s largest Catholic institution of higher education and is the tenth largest private, not-for-profit university in the nation. Of the 10 largest private universities, all except DePaul are classified as “research extensive” universities, making DePaul the nation’s largest university with a primary mission of teaching and service. back

ⁱⁱ Three goals of Vision 2006 were: 1) Provide all full time students a holistic education…, 2) Provide the highest quality professional education for adult, part-time learners…, and 3) Research, develop, deliver, and transfer innovative, educationally-related programs and services that have a significant social impact and give concrete expression to the university’s Vincentian mission. back

ⁱⁱⁱ The central purposes DePaul’s mission statement include the following: “Research is supported both for its intrinsic merit and for the practical benefits it offers to faculty, students, and society. Broadly conceived, research at the university entails not only the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge but also the … application of expertise to enduring societal issues…In meeting its public service responsibility, the university encourages faculty, staff and students to apply specialized expertise in ways that contribute to the societal, economic, cultural and ethical quality of life in the metropolitan area and beyond. When appropriate, DePaul develops service partnerships with other institutions and agencies…” back

^iv In 2005-06 the Center developed and supported 169 community-based service-learning courses that placed over 2551 DePaul undergraduate, graduate, and non-traditional students in over 125 community-based organizations. Service-learning experience included work on technical and research projects, as well as in traditional community service activities. The Center employs approximately 100 DePaul students through its community-based Federal Work Study program and direct employment as part-time employees of the Center. back

References

Leiderman, S., Furco, A., Zapf, J., & Goss, M. (2003). Building Partnerships with College Campuses: Community Perspectives, a Monograph. Washington, DC: Council of Independent Colleges/Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education.

Thomas, N. L. (2000). Community Perceptions: What Higher Education Can Learn by Listening to Communities. Washington, DC: American Council on Education.

As Campus Compact celebrates its 20th birthday this year, I find similar patterns of growth when comparing its history with my own twenty-something years. During the late 1980s my civic life and the life of Campus Compact began our development in close timing. By the early 1990s, Campus Compact and I were learning the importance of combining service in the classroom and we had not even been introduced yet. Upon entering college, I was properly introduced to the inspiring world of Campus Compact through the Raise Your Voice student campaign. Today as I advance my education and refine my professional scope in graduate school, Campus Compact is evaluating its past to advance the best path for the future.

I feel honored to have the opportunity to share my experiences and ideas on how Campus Compact, higher education, and all those “20 somethings” out there like me can grow. The experiences and ideas I will share will address my thoughts on how my cohorts feel about civic engagement, how student voices, student leadership, and service-learning can play a more integral and powerful part in the secondary educational system.

How students view civic engagement

In the late 1980s, Campus Compact was formed to encourage students to get involved in their community. Barely a new student, I also felt the push to volunteer in the community, but from my “civically-minded” grandparents, as Robert Putman would call them, rather than my school (Putman, 1995). While mom and dad were at work, my grandparents and I would often sort cans at the local food pantry and distribute birthday cupcakes at the retirement home. These tasks were the little things my grandparents and I did that fostered a stronger relationship with each other and the community. By the early 1990s, Campus Compact focused on combining service projects with academics to increase student awareness about how life is connected to the community. At this time, I was learning how to write in cursive and used my new skill to write letters to soldiers in Desert Storm. Even though I did not fully understand what was going on in the world at that time, writing a letter to a soldier made me feel connected to the war. The late 1990s saw Campus Compact’s initial attempts to motivate all members of the universities and colleges, not just the students and faculty/staff, to better their neighborhoods. While in high school, I too encouraged my classmates to better their community by adopting grandparents at the retirement home. I also persuaded them to help me organize a canned food drive for the local food pantry, which really seemed to make them feel more connected as a class and valuable to the community.

These civic-minded experiences in my life shaped me in a way to understand and appreciate the need for community service that was characteristic of my grandparents’ generation. Also, from my parents who say they “got the sixties,” I learned the importance of questioning authority. Through their many debates with friends on current events, I witnessed and later participated in the process of critically analyzing an event or policy to find the fairest option for all. Serving your community and fighting injustice is the challenging task for my generation whose societal norm is expecting things instantaneously while expending little effort. People today, especially those from my generation, a generation of ipods, instant messenger, and myspace, have lost the art of developing strong and genuine relationships with themselves and others. It gets easier and easier to lose ourselves in numerous deadlines, societal trends, and the “culturally individualistic” urgencies that shape our lives. Whether it is a professional or personal relationship, we lack the energy and strength to connect and work with one another. One of the messages I received from the Gamaliel Foundation’s weeklong training in July 2006, was to gain the energy needed to connect with others, a person needs to specifically define their self-interest. If we do not reflect on how our experiences affect our lives, it is hard to develop a strong sense of who we are and who we want to become, or in Gamaliel terms: self-interest. This includes civic engagement. We need to slow down and take the time to get to know ourselves again and discover what moves us, so that we will have the energy and interest to invest the time to help others.

Student Voice and Student Leadership

As the century turned, Campus Compact launched the Raise Your Voice Campaign to educate students on how to develop their civic life and to support and recognize what involved students were accomplishing. As I entered college, I knew I wanted to continue all the volunteer work that I loved to do as a kid in the community. When I became familiar with Campus Compact through college volunteering, I realized how connected government policies were to my everyday life and how the little civic-minded tasks in my everyday life could also influence government policies.

Through the Raise Your Voice student campaign I learned how to be a student leader and how to develop and strengthen my student voice. Throughout campus I began to see a distinct difference among those who were involved, who were strong leaders, who were strong voices on campus, and those who were not. The peers that were always involved seemed to have a better sense of self and were more comfortable in becoming involved in the community. To me they seemed to have reflected a lot on who they were and how they fit in the world. They knew their self-interest and where they wanted to take their life. By knowing their self-interest they were confident in their ability and had the energy to do seemingly difficult tasks to some students.

For example one student who I have worked with, primarily started volunteering through the Student Leadership Development Program on campus in a heavily populated Latino community. As a Mexican-American herself she related to the needs and issues and felt drawn to join in with the fight for a better community. With her self-interest in place this young student had the energy to mingle with students, faculty, staff, administration, and community leaders around the topic of Latino needs in the Metro-East area. Seeing her in other roles other than a student at public meetings and volunteer projects, these students, faculty, staff, administration, and community leaders were able to recognize her as more than a student and were more willing to invest their time into working along side her toward a common goal. This student is now the leader of the Latino Round Table, which consists of local representatives of higher education, area school districts, health and mental health agencies, social service agencies, religious groups, as well as various business leaders, media outlets, and area lawyers.

Those peers, who felt civic engagement was unnecessary or unappealing, often seemed to have less of an understanding of the need for community service and less of an understanding of their own self-interest. However for some of these peers, self-reflection occurred through a service-learning class. They were required to do volunteer work for a number of hours and then write an integrative piece combining the knowledge learned in class with their community experience. These experiences challenged my fellow classmates to consider another perspective. In the end they often sought out more opportunities to volunteer or joined a lobbying group headed toward Springfield. This teaching method of combining service with learning appeals to those students who are kinesthetic learners (learn through actively doing), and it also makes students own what they are learning. I think of systems theory when I think of this type of learning. The more invested students are in their role of being a student/volunteer within the system of education and the community, the more they feel a part of the issues that affect the system and ultimately themselves. By showing students that they are a valued part of their systems they will be more willing to take ownership and work toward improving each system.

More Engaged and More Committed to Service-Learning and Civic Engagement

Now in the 20th year of Campus Compact, and my first year of graduate school, I have begun to realize the full potential of the inspiring and empowering network created by the nexus of civic engagement, service learning and higher education. I feel that everyone should have the opportunity to realize and experience this network, but they should begin the process earlier in their education. Combining civic development with cognitive development would ensure everyone has the opportunity to realize the power of this network, and the power they gain from knowing where they came from and where they plan on going.

Just as students have different styles of learning, individuals have different approaches to citizenship, and we need to provide a variety of experiences to give students the opportunity to find their path to becoming a good citizen. According to Misa and Anderson (2005) there are three different concepts of a “good citizen” that individuals work towards. These concepts consist of individuals that “feel personally responsible for the community, those that are participatory in the civic and social life of the community, and those who are justice oriented who find the cause of social injustices in order to address them within the community” (Misa & Anderson, 2005). In finding out what motivates them and what they consider is their citizenship style, students can develop the skills they need to continue their education, to be competitive in the job market and developing a strong civic life.

I urge Campus Compact, students, faculty, staff, and administrators to trust what we have learned about the benefits of service-learning and civic engagement, and build from these strengths. We need to take the risk of committing to the integration of service-learning and civic engagement in every aspect of higher education. Currently, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville is proposing a general education program that requires students to complete a service-learning component which will ignite students’ sense of power and identity. I also challenge administration, faculty, and staff everywhere to self-reflect on if it is in their agenda to encourage students, faculty, and staff to foster a civic life? If civic involvement is not on agenda of institutional leaders, we need to understand what is on their agenda, and show how engagement fits with their self-interest. This refers to another message I learned at the Gamaliel Foundation training, one that encourages leaders to invest time into understanding the self-interest of others so that they may develop a convergence of self-interests. When this happens each person feels connected to the other and is motivated to work toward a goal that they both share, which ultimately increases their power to get things done in the classroom, in the community, and beyond.

The Little Things

These are large tasks, but if we start small and commit to investing and replenishing ourselves, we will have the energy to invest in others. Jane Roberts, the co-founder of 34 Million Friends of the Women of the World, offered me this advice when I felt overwhelmed by all the issues I wanted to address in the world: “You do what you can do, in harmony with who you are.” I felt that my efforts were not enough, but she reassured me that the little things I was already doing as a student represented what I could do right now; later, I can do more. These little civic tasks that we all can participate in make the difficult and large civic duties a manageable task for many rather than a large struggle for one.