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  • Faculty Service Roles and the Scholarship of Engagement: ASHE Higher Education Report Vol. 29, No. 5
  • Kristen A. Renn and Angela D. Allen
Faculty Service Roles and the Scholarship of Engagement: ASHE Higher Education Report Vol. 29, No. 5 Kelly Ward San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003, 192 pages, $26.00 (softcover)

In Faculty Service Roles and the Scholarship of Engagement, higher education scholar Kelly Ward sets out "to address some of the questions that remain unanswered with regard to the service role of faculty and the institutions where they work and to provide a complete overview of the service categories associated with faculty work and how they are linked to engagement" (p. 3). She succeeds remarkably well, providing a readable text that is well-written, inclusive, and current. Locating her subject within the well-known teaching-research-service triad of faculty work, she unpacks the meaning and functions of faculty service across institutional types and [End Page 240] disciplinary contexts.

Ward begins her monograph by discussing the context of higher education's current national conversations on engagement, and goes from this context into a thorough historical presentation of what has taken place in higher education related to institutional commitments to service. Ward traces higher education history in the U.S. from 1636 (the founding of Harvard) to the present to provide the reader an understanding of how the concept of faculty service evolved. She makes a well-documented case that this evolution followed largely from early combinations of federal government and specific institutional policies to the incorporation of service into institutional missions. However, unlike previous authors on the topic of faculty service, she uses this historical foundation to tie the evolution of the concept of service in higher education to the traditional triumvirate roles of both institutions and their faculty. Further, Ward makes a clear case that through the "scholarship of engagement" (p. 4), faculty work and institutional missions can advance higher education's response to community needs by applying disciplinary expertise to the integration of teaching, research, and service. Chapters dedicated to internal service, external service, and linking service to scholarship complete the main portions of the volume, which concludes with Ward's insightful accounting of how engagement might help answer critical policy questions related to higher education. Her recommendations for research and practice provide an excellent blueprint for the field at a time when the scholarship of faculty engagement is more critical than ever.

This monograph has many strengths. First, building from student-centered outcomes that the Kellogg Commission (as cited in Ward, pp. 14-15) called "the three goals of the engaged campus," Ward illustrates comprehensively and concisely how internal and external faculty service roles impact the entirety of the institution, including its students and the communities it serves. Second, the tone of the book is direct and clear, including much of the foundational and current literature of engagement and faculty service. This monograph is thus a well-written and timely piece for anyone who has become more curious recently about the scholarship of engagement. Third, student affairs professionals and those who work in the service-learning and/or experiential education areas of higher education will be especially impressed by Ward's discussion in chapter 3 of how faculty internal service in outreach and engagement to the institution as "institutional and disciplinary citizens" serves both the campus and the student community. Finally, Ward takes a purposeful approach to addressing issues of diversity in relation to faculty engagement, including under this topic issues related to faculty diversity (e.g., race, gender, academic discipline, full-time or part-time status, etc.), institutional diversity (e.g., institutional sector and mission), and community diversity (e.g., urban and rural, wealthy and poor, etc.) The inclusion of specific attention to diversity, broadly construed, marks this text as a particularly strong contribution to the field.

Readers seeking a comprehensive, well-written, and compelling case for understanding faculty service as an essential feature of higher education in the United States will find what they are looking for in this monograph. Readers who are unfamiliar with—or even skeptical of—the role of faculty service and engagement will receive a broad introduction to...

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