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181 Engaged Scholarship at Historically Black Colleges and Universities Stephen L. Rozman Michael Lomax, president and CEO of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), observes: From their founding 150 years ago, historically black colleges and universities have been an exercise in engagement. For almost a century, they functioned not only as institutions dedicated to the education and betterment of their students, but very deliberately as engines for the improvement of a community and population toward whose well-being and social integrity society at large was at best indifferent, at worst hostile. (2006, p. 12) Zlotkowski et al., in One with the Community: Indicators of Engagement at MinorityServing Institutions (2005), compare historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) with non-HBCUs by saying, “It is important to appreciate the degree to which interest in campus-based community engagement, a recent phenomenon for many institutions, has always been part of the core mission of HBCUs” (p. 39). The traditionally strong identification of African Americans with their communities is apparent in African American students at both HBCUs and predominantly white institutions (PWIs). A sample of 276 African American students who attended either an HBCU or a PWI—two HBCUs and two PWIs—revealed that the strongest predictor for perceptions of community outreach was black racial identity, with racial identity playing a significant role in this bonding. The data help provide a framework for understanding the factors that build strong connections between African American students and African American community members, and support the hypothesis that racial identity “contributes a substantial variance to community outreach perceptions” (Lott, 2008, p. 11). S T E P H E N L . R O Z M A N 182 The importance of race as a variable is attested to by data from the 2005 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which showed that students at HBCUs “are far more likely to participate in a community project linked to a course (28 percent) than students at predominantly white institutions (16 percent)” (Indiana University, 2004, p. 1). This result is bolstered by survey data from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE), which show that graduates of HBCUs “volunteer more and are more likely to attend political meetings than are graduates of other types of institutions” (Campus Compact, 2006, p. 2). The commitment to community outreach at HBCUs is reflected in the priorities set by faculty development directors. Beach, Dawkins, Rozman, and Grant (2008) compare the perceptions of faculty development directors at HBCUs with those of faculty development directors affiliated with the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD) with regard to issues of importance to faculty developers, and observe the following: Of particular interest is the very significant difference between the HBCU sample and the POD sample regarding the importance of “Community service learning.” Given the unique historical circumstances of African Americans in their encounters with racism and racial injustice, they may have developed a greater sense of community than whites. Consequently, HBCUs have tended to have stronger identifications with their (African American) communities. (p. 166) Faculty developers were also asked to respond to a number of new challenges and pressures on institutions that affect faculty work, both in terms of how important they think it is to address those issues through faculty development and the extent to which their institutions were already responding. HBCU faculty developers, by a significantly higher percentage than the POD developers, regarded “outreach/service activities” and “commitment to civic life/the public good” as important and claimed that their institutions were responding to these issues. The HBCU developers also placed a higher premium on “community-based research,” and, according to the results of the survey, their institutions were collectively more involved in this type of research than those of the POD developers (p. 164). The struggle for civil rights during the 1960s was a time of particular struggle for HBCUs, as the leaders of these institutions were confronted by this dilemma: encourage the engagement of their students and faculty in the civil rights movement and risk a white backlash; or suppress civil rights activity and risk alienation from their own campus and external communities . Public HBCUs were especially vulnerable because they were under the authority of governing boards controlled by whites who tended to be committed to the racial status quo. Strong ties were in place between HBCUs and the faith-based community because of the strong religious identification of African Americans. These ties were reinforced during the civil rights period...

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