The Challenges of Rewarding New Forms of Scholarship: Creating Academic Cultures that Support Community-Engaged Scholarship, A report on a Bringing Theory to Practice seminar held May 15, 2014

The need for and value of civic engagement is widely acknowledged and frequently advocated by students and faculty at American universities. Over the last several decades, recognizing the variety of forms of scholarly research and academic achievement has become commonplace on many campuses. The Carnegie Foundation now assesses and validates community engagement as one critical measure of a university’s identity and success. Many faculty stress community involvement, internships, and various forms of experiential learning in their courses and view them as critical components of a university education. Numerous faculty engage in communityengaged research, working with local organizations, local businesses, and city and town governments, solving problems and helping to collect data and information. There exists a considerable literature—by and for faculty—documenting the scholarship and pedagogical impact of civic engagement strategies and the promotion of communityengaged research. Frequently, however, such activities are not rewarded or supported in the recognition and promotion process of faculty in higher education. Faculty and universities are still judged primarily by the research profile of their individual and combined achievements. This profile exclusively rewards models which assume that all valid knowledge of the physical and social world is obtained by faculty pursuing their research agendas and getting validation for that work in the form of peer-reviewed publications, successful grant applications, and recognition in national and international discipline-based associations. While some universities are recognizing emerging forms of scholarship in ways that challenge this traditional model, there are powerful counterforces that undermine higher education’s commitment to community engagement. The decline in funding for state universities and the competition over fewer and fewer funding opportunities have pushed many institutions to return to a narrow model of excellence built on traditional ideas about academia’s function and role. Increasingly, universities are engaged in a prestige race in which the winners are defined by the presence of star faculty (i.e., those who publish widely, obtain large grant-funded research projects, and who receive wide public acclaim for their research) and by their success at recruiting top students and placing them in high paying, high skill careers. Administrators focus on encouraging these traditional activities as they seek funds from wealthy sponsors, alumni, foundations, and grant funding institutions to replace dwindling state support. The recognition of faculty committed to community engagement is often counterbalanced by institutional striving for higher prestige through narrow and restrictive measures of excellence. Our concern for finding better ways to recognize the work of University of Massachusetts (UMass) faculty who pursue emerging forms of scholarship, including community engagement—and who encourage their students in community engagement—prompted a one-day seminar on the assessment and reward structure for university faculty’s community engagement activities. As a result of a vibrant and active discussion that showcased what has been happening on the five campuses of the UMass system, we have formulated the following statement of concerns and actions needed to better recognize the value of community engagement for students, faculty, our campuses, and the University as a whole

Democratic Engagement White Paper

Participants at a recent Wingspread conference on civic engagement in higher education concluded that while the movement has created some change, it has also plateaued and requires a more comprehensive effort to ensure lasting commitment and institutional capacity. For the participants at Wingspread, and for others involved in civic engagement in higher education, the time has come for “calling the question” of whether engagement will be viewed as a core value of the university of the 21st century – as centrally important to the civic mission of higher education and to generating and transmitting new knowledge. The concern is that “engagement has not become the defining characteristic of higher education\u27s mission nor has it been embraced across disciplines, departments and institutions” and “that the momentum needed for engagement to become fully identified with the mission of higher education” is waning. As the participants concluded, despite widespread evidence of innovative engagement activities across higher education, “few institutions have made the significant, sustainable, structural reforms that will result in an academic culture that values community engagement as a core function of the institution. Will higher education live up to its democratic purpose and undertake the kind of deep change in institutional culture needed to create the conditions for sustained civic engagement

A NERCHE Annual Report: Profiles of Public Engagement: Findings from the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement for Early Career Faculty

Community-campus engagement has evolved significantly over the past quarter century, shaped by a number of factors. One has been the effort to reclaim the civic mission of American higher education. Frank Newman, while at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in the early 1980s, asserted that the most critical demand is to restore to higher education its original purpose of preparing graduates for a life of involved and committed citizenship,” and concluded that “the advancement of civic learning, therefore, must become higher education\u27s most central goal (1985, xiv). Another factor has been the increased understanding that colleges and universities serve as “anchor institutions” (Axelrod & Dubb, 2010) and thus have responsibilities to their neighbors to act as “stewards of place” (American Association of State Colleges and Universities, 2002). There is also the influence of research in the cognitive sciences and developmental psychology that has provided a deep understanding of how students learn, highlighting the importance of validating prior experiences and gaining higher-order thinking skills through inquiry-based, problem-posing teaching and learning strategies that involve students in addressing important, trans-disciplinary issues in communities (National Research Council, 2000). Finally, there is an emerging awareness that generating knowledge increasingly requires new epistemological frameworks and research methods that honor and emphasize the “ecological” or interconnected nature of knowledge generation that includes but go well beyond the academy (Bjarnason & Coldstream, 2003; Gibbons et al., 1994; Saltmarsh, 2011). This last factor, in turn, is being driven especially by a new generation of scholars who are fundamentally oriented to networked knowledge generation and are creating integrated academic identities as engaged scholars (Sturm, Eatman, Saltmarsh, & Bush, 2011). In many ways, the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement is a product of this set of influences, particularly the evolution of perspectives on knowledge generation and the scholarly work of faculty. NERCHE created the annual Ernest A. Lynton Award in 1996 to recognize excellence in what was then called “Faculty Professional Service and Academic Outreach.” In 2007, it was renamed the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement to reflect shifts during the intervening decade toward a fundamentally more collaborative, integrative conceptualization of faculty work. What has not changed is the recognition of Ernest Lynton’s key contributions to engaged knowledge generation and its implications for faculty work and institutional change

Full Participation: Building the Architecture for Diversity and Public Engagement in Higher Education

This catalyst paper offers a conceptual framework for connecting a set of conversations about change in higher education that often proceed separately but need to be brought together to gain traction within both the institutional and national policy arenas. By offering a framework to integrate projects and people working under the umbrella of equity, diversity, and inclusion with those working under the umbrella of community, public, and civic engagement, we aim to integrate both of these change agendas with efforts on campus to address the access and success of traditionally underserved students. We also hope to connect efforts targeting students, faculty, and broader communities in each of these arenas. We offer an approach that situates the integration of these change agendas squarely within the core values and mission of higher education. This paper grew out of a realization by each of the authors (and the organizations they represent) that the long-term success of diversity, public engagement, and student success initiatives requires that these efforts become more fully integrated and that their larger institutional settings undergo transformation. The Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia University Law School; Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life ( IA ) and its Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) program; the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE); and Syracuse University‘s Scholarship in Action have come together to build knowledge and momentum for integrating these initiatives. This catalyst paper is intended to stimulate conversations and movement in this direction

Advancing Community Engaged Scholarship and Community Engagement at the University of Massachusetts Boston: A Report of the Working Group for an Urban Research-Based Action Initiative

The University of Massachusetts Boston has a rich history of mission-driven commitments that engage the campus with local, state, regional, national, and global communities. In the context of a public urban research university, a mission of community engagement is most clearly expressed through community-engaged scholarship. The University is positioned to build upon its strengths in community engagement and strengthen its community-engaged scholarship to become an international model for community engagement

Capitalism and Earth System Governance: An Ecological Marxist Approach

Growing recognition of the Anthropocene era has led to a chorus of calls for Earth System Governance (ESG). Advocates argue that humanity's newfound sociotechnical powers require institutional transformations at all scales of governance to wield these powers with wisdom and foresight. Critics, on the other hand, fear that these initiatives embody a technocratic impulse that aims to subject the planet to expert management without addressing the political-economic roots of the earth system crisis. This article proposes a more affirmative engagement with existing approaches to ESG while also building on these critiques. While advocates of ESG typically ignore the capitalistic roots of the earth system crisis and propose tepid reforms that risk authoritarian expressions, their critics also have yet to systematically consider the potential for more democratic and postcapitalist forms of ESG. In response, I propose an ecological Marxist approach based on a structural analysis of capitalism as the primary driver of the earth system crisis and an "ecosocialist" vision of ESG that subordinates the market to democratic planning at multiple scales. I argue that an ecological Marxist perspective is needed to foreground the structural political-economic constraints on earth system stability, though existing approaches to ESG can in turn inform ecosocialist strategies for global institutional design and democratization

Best Practices in Institutional Support for Engaged Scholarship

John Saltmarsh, Co-Director, New England Resource Center for Higher Education, UMass Boston John Saltmarsh is the Co-Director of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) (www.nerche.org) at the University of Massachusetts, Boston as well as a faculty member in the Higher Education Administration Doctoral Program in the Department of Leadership in Education in the College of Education and Human Development. He leads the project in which NERCHE serves as the administrative partner with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for Carnegie’s elective Community Engagement Classification. He is the author, most recently, of an edited volume “To Serve a Larger Purpose:” Engagement for Democracy and the Transformation of Higher Education (2011)and a book with Edward Zlotkowski, Higher Education and Democracy: Essays on Service-Learning and Civic Engagement (2011). He is an associate editor for the Michigan Journal of Community Service- Learning, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement. www.umb.edu/academics/cehd/faculty/john_saltmars