Going Public: Civic and Community Engagement

Introduction

3 Introduction Hiram E. Fitzgerald and Judy Primavera The founding of Campus Compact in 1985 was intended to connect students to the “civic purposes of higher education.” Whether Campus Compact sparked higher education’s efforts to reconnect with society will be debated by historians, but it seems that Campus Compact stoked more than kindling when it encouraged higher education to develop students ’ citizenships skills by providing them with opportunities to work as volunteers in community contexts. Shortly after Campus Compact was founded, Ernest Boyer (1990) was challenging higher education to extend“scholarship” beyond its discovery mission to include teaching and application as well. The notion of the civic was being extended to involve faculty and administrators as well as students in discussion about the public purposes of education. Scholarship of Engagement By 1996 Boyer was calling for higher education to embrace the scholarship of engagement, the New England Resource Center had established the first national award for community engagement, the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land Grant Universities had completed the first of many meetings encouraging higher education to return to the principles upon which the democratization of public higher education was based (Kellogg Commission, 1999), and Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff (1997) had offered a clear prescription for assessing faculty work that penetrated to the core of scholarly life rather than deferring to the ease of counting scholarly products produced for personal or disciplinary consumption , not for the public good. Moreover, they argued that scholarship should be characterized by clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, effective H I R A M E . F I T Z G E R A L D A N D J U D Y P R I M A V E R A 4 presentation, and reflective critique regardless of whether such work reflected the scholarships of discovery, integration, application, or teaching. The Kellogg Commission reports focused on reinvigorating the student experience; improving student access; enhancing partnerships with the public; addressing the role of public universities in a learning society; attending to the culture of the campus; and renewing the partnership of the public university with the society it serves. Public support of higher education was being bound to public expectations that the “public’s universities” would become more directly engaged in the transformation of society across the broad disciplinary domains that define higher education. The final report of the commission called on public universities to “renew their covenant” with society by refocusing their scholarship agenda to place students first and to elevate the status of teaching and service within institutional mission and faculty rewards. This call to a covenant relationship moved the conversation beyond student experiences to include faculty life and work as well as institutional mission. Community Engagement Few can question the impact that prophets of change such as Boyer, Lynton, and the Kellogg Commission have had on higher education during the past 25 years. When Boyer published his treatise, there were no public psychologists, public sociologists, or public anthropologists . There are today! Few universities recognized faculty for their public scholarship or community partnerships. Nearly all do so today! There was no call from the National Institutes of Health to translate science findings to practice, and the National Science Foundation did not require grant writers to address the potential societal impact of their proposed research. Both are explicit aspects of grant requirements today. Handbooks have been published (Fitzgerald, Burack, & Seifer, 2010) and how-to primers have been published (Beere, Vootruba, &Wells, 2011). Indeed, Boyer most likely did not anticipate the worldwide response to his call for higher education to reconsider the breath of its mission. But if we judge from the list of organizations in table 1, the question whether higher education was ready to commit to community engagement (Burkardt, Holland, Percy, & Zimpher, 2004) seems to have been answered with a resounding “yes.” The Kellogg Commission challenged higher education to engage with communities. From the commission’s perspective, engagement embraces two-way or systemic relationships between higher education and community. Institutions were asked to challenge their faculty and students to move beyond “outreach” and “service” and to become engaged with their communities (Kellogg Commission, 2000, p. 22), regardless of whether community was defined from a sociological perspective (a group that is united by at least one common characteristic, geography, shared interests or values, etc.) or a systems perspective (a group sharing distinct characteristics or interrelationships, such as gender, kinship, tribal, schools, transportation, faith, etc.) (Center for Disease Control, 2012...