If you want to know how an institution encourages faculty to think of scholarship, you need ask only two questions: How do faculty get promoted? and, How do faculty get tenured? Faculty roles are usually divided between teaching, research, and service. At Michigan State University, promotion and tenure have been restructured to include a fourth element: outreach.

Outreach at Michigan State virtually identical to community engagement as it has been discussed here is defined as a form of scholarship that cuts across teaching, research, and service. It involves generating, transmitting, applying, and preserving knowledge for the direct benefit of external audiences in ways that are consistent with university and unit missions.

Faculty are rewarded, as they have always been, for teaching that responds to the needs of their students on campus. But faculty are also rewarded for teaching that responds to the needs of members of the external community for instance, by teaching outside the university, or through service-learning.

As always, faculty are rewarded for research that builds knowledge in their profession. But they are rewarded still more when that research engages and serves the outside community.

Faculty are rewarded for service to their profession or the university. However, they are also rewarded for service to outside organizations and communities in need that benefit from the skills of their discipline.

The university s Office of the Vice Provost for University Outreach provides top level support and leadership for this new approach to scholarship. The Office has developed a guidebook distributed and presented in workshops to deans, faculty, and academic chairs that provides in-depth explanations, planning tools, and resource materials on the outreach component of scholarly activity. The office provides a file of model faculty portfolios and case studies to help faculty envision how they can document their outreach activities. As another form of support, experienced faculty members serve as coaches and peer reviewers for faculty who are preparing documentation for promotion and tenure. Ask how faculty get tenure on most campuses and you ll hear many of the same answers: publish articles; teach courses; serve on university committees. At Michigan State, the answers will be somewhat different: publish articles about research you have done to address real community problems; teach courses that provide direct benefit to community members; and don t only serve on university committees, serve society.

From Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

Contact: outreach {at} msu(.)edu or visit http://ntweb4.ais.msu.edu/