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235 Integrating Outreach and Engagement into Faculty Work Ann E. Austin and John P . Beck The history of higher education includes commitments to teaching the next generation, preparing thoughtful citizens, discovering new knowledge, and addressing and improving issues and problems confronting society. Higher education institutions stand solidly as pillars of society, without which the quality, meaning, and opportunities in the human experience would be much diminished. Part of the history of American higher education includes a trend in the past six decades toward heavy emphasis on the research productivity mission. As important as this contribution is, over the past decade and a half, many higher education leaders, faculty members, and observers have highlighted the full array of missions of higher education institutions, including the responsibility to engage deeply with the problems and issues of society (Boyer, 1990, 1996; Diamond & Adam, 1995; Glassick, Huber, & Maeroff, 1997). Building on Boyer’s (1990) call for an expanded understanding of scholarship to include application, discovery, teaching, and integration, and his later call for a scholarship of engagement (Boyer, 1996), many higher education leaders and faculty members, across institutional types, are thinking more deeply about the roles and responsibilities of universities and colleges in the broader society. This volume is simultaneously an outcome of and a tribute to the growing interest in the importance of outreach and engagement in academic work, while also being a call for an even greater effort to embed such commitment into the daily fabric of work in higher education . Because faculty are critically important to the fulfillment of the missions of universities and colleges, efforts to strengthen the scholarship of engagement and outreach must be linked to attention to how individual faculty members understand and carry out their work. This chapter takes up that question: How can outreach and engagement be integrated more fully into faculty work? A N N E . A U S T I N A N D J O H N P . B E C K 236 Faculty members are socialized from the start of their careers in graduate school to a set of values and assumptions that gained strength in post–World War II academe (Rice, 1986, 1996). These assumptions include the valuing of research productivity expressed through publication in scholarly journals, the dominance of disciplinary culture and identity in shaping an academic’s life, the importance of the autonomy of the individual faculty member, and the recognition that career advancement and quality assurance are related to peer review. These assumptions have been instrumental in propelling forward and ensuring excellence in research activity and have had an impact on teaching-oriented as well as research-oriented higher education institutions. They have shaped the preparation process for graduate education and the reward structure for academic careers. Although for more than half a century these assumptions have formed the core of the American higher education system, recognized for its excellence and quality across the world, they also can be barriers to efforts to increase the attention of faculty members to scholarly work that involves explicit engagement with their communities and the broader world. Efforts to integrate engagement and outreach more fully into the work of faculty members must recognize and build on this assumptive world while also opening the way for expanded understandings of strategies to create responsible, effective, respected faculty careers. Theoretical work and research findings concerning institutional change and faculty work satisfaction and motivation inform the analysis and ideas offered in this chapter. Research on organizational change highlights the importance of aligning multiple levers for change (Austin, 1998;Votruba, 2005). Specifically, changes in higher education are encouraged when there is attention to and alignment between such elements of the organization as leadership actions (including communication strategies and attention to cultural symbols), institutional infrastructure (including financing procedures and the organization of units), professional development, and incentive and reward structures. Focusing on only one of these elements—or levers—for change is often not sufficient to encourage substantive change within complex higher education systems; engaging a set of levers for change is likely to have a greater impact. In addition to the work on organizational change, key findings concerning work satisfaction and motivation (Gappa, Austin, & Trice, 2007) are useful in regard to understanding strategies that may influence faculty members (although detailed discussion of this work is beyond the scope of this chapter). Specifically, employees’ satisfaction is enhanced with the presence of these factors: challenging work, including opportunities for creativity and personal growth; meaningful relationships; a sense of responsibility; and opportunities...

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