Global Crisis

I have a new piece up at the Chronicle on public engagement in higher education. I've written about public engagement both here and on various sites before, but now I am starting a series of columns for the advice/careers section of the Chronicle. I will be writing about how both individuals and institutions could be engaging and are engaging, and some of the lessons we might draw from this. Next month, for example, I will discuss Catholic universities and undocumented students.

This piece, however, has been in the making for months, especially with my response to Nicholas Kristof.

Here are the points I make today:

1. First, academics of all sorts are already deeply engaged with the public in many different ways.
2. Second, many universities explicitly recognize public engagement as a category that may count toward hiring, tenure, or promotion.
3. Third, in the United States and in academe itself, the widespread perception is that most faculty members do not engage with the public—either because they don’t want to or because they know they won’t be rewarded for it.

1. Be smarter than me. What does your institution count?
2. Start disciplinary conversations. I think this might be a great function for the MLA, AHA, AAR, CAA, etc. They have no power over institutions, but that's not the step here. The step is to persuade other faculty that we could do more to count and measure public engagement.

• Patricia Limerick, president of the Organization of American Historians, recently put out a call to locate scholars who do public work.
• In response, Matthew G. Schoenbachler, professor of History at the University of North Alabama, wrote that all such efforts are just “pro bono - the entire academic system of incentives and rewards militates against such activities.”
• My university includes “scholarship of engagement” as one of the types of scholarship that count for tenure or promotion, a phrase that emerged from the expansive taxonomy of scholarship pioneered by Ernest Boyer of the Carnegie Foundation. 
• Syracuse employs the phrase “publicly engaged scholarship” in their tenure and promotion documents.
• The University of Illinois uses “public engagement” and “public service,” recognizing the problem of categorizing diverse acts of engagement in our standard tenure and promotion framework.
• Other universities categorize such activity solely as service. Portland State, for example, uses the phrase “community outreach.” 
• Community colleges routinely link service to tenure and promotion, with the potential for that service to be outside the university. At the Central Oregon Community Colleges, for example, full professors will “regularly serve the community as an expert resource.”
• Also, I link to this (now slightly outdated) study on shifting workloads.