In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

xi Over the past twenty years there has developed within American higher education a rich conversation concerning how colleges and universities can better utilize their vast knowledge resources to support public progress. Beyond the production of graduates, what is the value-added that we bring to such public goals as strengthening economic competitiveness , improving P–12 education, enhancing health care, and a host of other challenges that confront our nation and its communities? What form should this public engagement take? Who should be involved? How can this involvement contribute to our mission to educate students and produce cutting-edge research? The contributors to this handbook represent some of the most thoughtful and influential leaders in this national conversation. Together, their work represents the most comprehensive set of perspectives yet assembled on behalf of higher education’s public engagement mission. American higher education has a long and rich tradition of involvement in advancing public priorities. Over the past 150 years, our colleges and universities have brought science to agriculture, produced the workforce for economic expansion, provided the most direct pathway for intergenerational mobility, contributed to national defense, and produced cutting-edge research that has improved nearly every dimension of our lives. Our faculty members as well as our institutions themselves have often served as voices of reason and conscience related to highly charged matters of public concern. In short, American higher education has been both a catalyst and a launching pad for much of America’s breathtaking economic and social progress. Twenty years ago, I was part of an effort at Michigan State University to develop a deeper understanding of the scholarship of engagement and to determine what role such scholarship should play in the life of the university. Many of the contributors to this handbook were Foreword James C. Votruba xii F O R E W O R D part of that effort, which helped launch similar efforts on campuses across the nation. Although often different in mission, size, focus, and funding, what these institutions shared in common was an interest in better defining the role of higher education in fostering citizenship and helping to address some of the difficult challenges confronting the public. In this sense, the focus was on higher education’s public role, which is also the focus of this handbook. We’ve come a long way in understanding the role of public engagement in the life of our colleges and universities. Still, we have a long way to go before the scholarship of engagement is fully embraced as a core campus mission. Several years ago, I chaired a national task force on public engagement sponsored by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. We surveyed more than four hundred universities to help us better understand the nature and extent of their public engagement involvement and how this work fits in the overall institutional mission. Two outcomes are particularly notable for our purposes here. First, we found that there was a vast array of public engagement activity being conducted by faculty across the full spectrum of the university , from arts and sciences to the professions. Second, we discovered that this work tends to be fragile and very person-dependent. That is, it tends to flourish when there is a president , provost, dean, or chair who champions the engagement mission and supports faculty involvement. However, when the leader departs, the engagement mission often flounders. Contrast this fragility with the institutionalization of research and scholarship in the major research-intensive universities. In these institutions, presidents and provosts, deans and chairs may come and go, but the importance of the research mission is so deeply embedded in the fabric of the institution that it continues uninterrupted. The next great challenge for advocates of the public engagement mission is to achieve this same level of institutionalization : to so deeply embed the scholarship of engagement in the fabric of the campus at every level that it becomes a thoroughly integrated part of the institution’s core academic mission. What would such an institution look like? Public engagement would be grounded in a strong intellectual foundation that relates it to the other mission dimensions. The voice of the public would be institutionalized at every level. Key institutional leaders would be selected and evaluated based, at least in part, on their capacity to lead the public engagement function. Faculty and unit-level incentives and rewards would encourage and support the scholarship of engagement. Faculty selection, orientation, and development would highlight the importance of...

Share