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1 Introduction

In her 2012 Kettering Foundation working paper on academics’ civic agency, KerryAnn O’Meara poses the question:

[is there a] sea shift or movement of sorts to change higher education and its relationship with public work [and to] what degree are the individuals doing this work with such passion changing higher education so that there might be a “new normal”? (O’Meara 2012, p. 36)

O’Meara’s use of the “new normal ” also invokes the current economic crisis which has upended comfortable and stable notions of what is considered normal. In the midst of this economic crisis, what is the role of institutions of higher education in public problem solving and directing, as Ernest Boyer wrote,

the rich resources of the university to our most pressing social, civic and ethical problems, to our children, to our schools, to our teachers and to our cities. (Boyer 1996, p 32)

While individual faculty are indeed carrying out community or publicly engaged scholarly agendas (O’Meara 2012; Ward 2010), Ward underscores that the individual work of community-engaged faculty needs to be examined alongside the individuals’ institutional context to gain an understanding of how institutional culture supports or hinders the faculty member’s engaged scholarly work.

While there are multiple and varying influences on a faculty member’s motivation for engaged scholarship (Ward 2010; O’Meara, 2008; Colbeck and Wharton-Michael 2006), the institutional context within which these faculty members work are key to the choices they feel they have and the choices they need to make about the work they choose to do in the academy (Ward 2010). The individual faculty work of community, publicly, or civically engaged scholarship,Footnote 1 or the work of service learning as a teaching practice, cannot be separated from institutional change efforts to move the community engaged scholarly agenda forward (Saltmarsh et al. 2009a; Saltmarsh and Hartley 2011).

With the prospects of a “new normal ” pushing higher education toward deeper public purpose and the commitment of individual faculty members to carry out community-engaged scholarly work, to what degree are institutions of higher education changing their policies, practices, and priorities toward rebalance of higher education’s commitment to the public good?

More specifically in this chapter, we explore how the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching through its Community Engagement Elective Classification (a classification available only for US-accredited institutions of higher education) is promoting transformational and lasting change in the heart of academic culture . If transformational change is to take place in American higher education , the higher education system needs to make an honest self-assessment as to how institutional identity, mission, and purpose align with individual faculty work , and how these align with the culture of the institution in terms of reward policy and practice (how the actual work of individual faculty gets recognized and rewarded through promotion and tenure )—perhaps the clearest artifact of academic culture . It is through such institutional recognition of community-engaged scholarly work—through formal reward structures—that a clear message of culture change that values community engagement and community-engaged scholarship is conveyed.

This chapter explores how the Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement—at an institutional and national level—is contributing to/advancing the public mission of higher education through offering a counterbalance to the traditional frame of the American academy as nationally focused, basic research oriented and prestige chasing, to an emphasis on “the value of the local” (Rhoades 2009). Our contribution is based on the existing literature and 4 years of our research on the institutions that have been awarded the classification (all Carnegie classified institutions have a “basic” classification—from the 2006 and 2008 classification cycles, 196 campuses, in addition to their basic classification, have achieved the elective community engagement classification through a process of application and review by the Carnegie Foundation ).

The authors do four things. Firstly, place the classification within the US context and the civic mission of US higher education . Secondly, explore the classification as a tool for benchmarking institutional commitment to community engaged and public scholarly work. Thirdly, show how this movement is taking hold in some institutions by examining institutional change through the lens of institutional recognition and reward of community-engaged scholarship particularly through promotion and tenure policy and practice . Fourthly, offer some recommendations for further advancing the work of institutionalizing community engagement. This latter work is based on interviews with chief academic officers at institutions found to be doing an exemplary job at institutionalizing community engagement on their campuses.

2 Clarifying Language

We noted our own struggle with the loose nature of the language in the area of engagement, and we are certainly not alone in the realization of the challenge-differing terminology presents to both researcher and practitioners in the field. Within the United States, researchers have identified the challenge terminology presents in the field of the Scholarship of Engagement (Giles 2008; Sandmann 2008) particularly when different terms are used to describe the same or similar meaning or practice. This can become problematic as the terminology used can often shape the characteristics of the work. This challenge is amplified in international discussions of engagement and warrants attention in this chapter. Therefore, we offer some definitions of terms as an attempt to clarify language and terminology in a US context.

The variation in terminology was very apparent in our 2009 study of the institutions that received the community-engagement classification (the Classification) where we identified 14 terms used across the institutions to convey community-engaged work (Saltmarsh et al. 2009b). The terminology used with greater frequency included—service to the community or public, service-learning, community engagement, outreach, engagement, and to a lesser extent—engaged scholarship , civic engagement, scholarship of community engagement, scholarship related to public engagement mission, community-based research, scholarly civic engagement, service-related publications, scholarship which enhances public good, and civic engagement scholarship.

The Classification has made a key contribution to advancing this sea change toward engagement and normalizing community-engaged practice and scholarship within the academy, through its definition of the term community engagement which is framed as

the collaboration between higher education institutions and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity. (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching)

This definition captures the breath of diverse interactions between higher education and community, promotes inclusivity and “intentionally encourages important qualities such as mutuality and reciprocity ” (Driscoll 2008). The most important part of the definition is the word “reciprocity ” which is often missing from other articulations of engagement. Reciprocity, for the Foundation, defines “engagement.” Reciprocal relations between institutions of higher education and communities are two-way interchanges that involve collaboration and shared authority in shaping the relationship and its outcomes—campuses work with communities. It is not the equivalent of a more common understanding in higher education of “application,” which conveys a unidirectional relationship of the campus applying its knowledge, resources, expertise, and/or service to a community.

2.1 Civic Engagement

There are numerous definitions of civic engagement. The National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges’ (NASULGC) Kellogg Commission (2001) frames engagement as referring to institutions that have redesigned their functions to become more sympathetically and productively involved in their communities. For Plater (2004), civic engagement is social action for a public purpose in a local community (in Langseth and Plater 2004, p. 10). A leader in the field, Thomas Ehrlich defines civic engagement as

working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values, and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes. (Ehrlich 2000, p. vi)

Brint and Levy (1999) define civic engagement by building on primary and secondary meanings of civic, the activities of citizens, and engagement, active participation, until they conclude that civic engagement is when someone actively participates in, and has deep and broad concerns for the public needs of the community (in Skocpol and Fiorina 1999, p. 164). For the purpose of this chapter, civic engagement is understood as rooted in respect for community-based knowledge, grounded in experiential and reflective modes of teaching and learning, aimed at inclusion and participation in education and in public life, and aligned with institutional change efforts to advance collaborative knowledge generation and discovery and make the resources of the university a community asset. In this chapter, we use the term engagement to capture the full spectrum of scholarly, community, and civic elements of the work.

3 Recognizing the Need to Rebalance Commitment: The Civic Mission of US Higher Education

3.1 US Higher Education’s Public Purpose/Engagement

It began as what Saltmarsh (2011) terms a quiet revolution where four academic leaders—Ernest Boyer , Ernest Lynton, Eugene Rice, and Donald Schön—came together during the mid-1980s and contributed serious thinking to the nature and purpose of higher education. Together and through their connections to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, they considered the public purpose of higher education and thought through ways to bring about changes so that colleges and universities would be more responsive to meeting public needs.

They believed their concerns for the public purpose of higher education to be inseparable from their commitment to improving the undergraduate experience and their concerns for the nature of faculty work, roles, and responsibilities. They were particularly concerned with the core research and scholarship role of the faculty in the generation of new knowledge. These intersecting themes weave in and out of their individual work and have collective influence on reforming the academy.

Boyer is credited with the expanded conceptualization of scholarship beyond basic research to a quadrant of scholarly activity—that of the scholarships of discovery, application, teaching, and integration (Boyer 1990). A key indicator of a campus deepening its commitment to engagement is when they identify Boyer as influencing the framing or expansion of their categories of scholarship rewarded in the promotion and tenure process —identifying their guidelines as “Boyerized ” (Saltmarsh et al. 2009b).

It was not until after Boyer’s death that his expanded thinking beyond the scholarship of application to that of the “Scholarship of Engagement ” was published. Here, he expands application to the scholarship of engagement where

the scholarship of engagement means connecting the rich resources of the university to our most pressing social, civic, and ethical problems. (Boyer 1996, p. 32)

And while this concept of engagement is critiqued for its academic centricity by contemporary researchers (O’Meara and Rice 2005), it is still the work that moved us out of focus on the needs and wants of the academy to those of the community.

Ernest Lynton’s work (1995b; Lynton and Elman, 1987), most notably New Priorities for the University: Meeting Society’s Needs for Applied Knowledge and Competent Individuals (with Elman 1987), was also focused on the academy’s public purpose. He made the connection between institutional rewards and faculty engagement with social issues. He advocated a reform of reward structures to recognize and reward the service and engagement work of faculty.

Eugene Rice worked closely with Boyer and can be credited with having a strong influence on the formulation of the arguments in the Carnegie publication Scholarship Reconsidered (1990), particularly around the expanded frame for faculty scholarly work. Yet it is 15 years after Scholarship Reconsidered, where Rice’s impact is truly noted. It was at this point that he, along with KerryAnn O’Meara , further expanded these notions of engagement. They call into question the university-centric, highly rationalized expert knowledge of the academy being applied to the external community. Instead, they offer an alternative notion of engagement as a move beyond this expert model toward collaboration between researcher and practitioner and recognition of the knowledge and resources the practitioner brings to the partnership of mutual exchange (2005).

Donald Schön challenged the dominant epistemological norms and values of the academy and highlighted the need for change in the organizational culture of the academy toward a reconceptualization of what “counts as legitimate knowledge” (Schön 1995, p. 27). In his 1995, Change magazine article, “The New Scholarship Requires a New Epistemology” he contends that if faculty is to engage in the new forms of scholarship Boyer , Lynton, and Rice identify then

we cannot avoid questions of epistemology, since the new forms of scholarship…challenge the epistemology build into the modern university…[I]f the new scholarship is to mean anything, it must imply a kind of action research with norms of its own, which will conflict with the norms of technical rationality—the prevailing epistemology built into the research universities. (Schön 1995, p. 27)

According to Saltmarsh,

perhaps more than Lynton, Schön recognized that legitimizing a different epistemology would lead to wrenching battles in the academy because the change it required went to the core of the dominant paradigm that had dominated American higher education since the late 19th century. (Saltmarsh 2011, p. 346)

These early leaders paved the way for the engagement movement we recognize within the US academy today.

3.2 Civic Engagement Today

There is a rich contemporary civic and community engagement landscape at the national level in American higher education (see Appendix A).There are also a number of key events and subsequent publications that furthered engagement in US higher education.

For instance, in 1998, the Wingspread Conference was held. This was a collaboration between the University of Michigan, Association of American Universities, American Association for Higher Education, American Council on Education, Association of American Colleges and Universities, Campus Compact, New England Resource Center for Higher Education, University of Pennsylvania, and the Johnson and W.K. Kellogg Foundations . The focus of the Wingspread conference was on renewing the civic mission of the American research university. The participants issued a declaration in 1999—the Wingspread Declaration—calling on higher education to renew its commitment to civic purpose and mission as an agent of democracy .

Also in 1999, Campus Compact convened 51 presidents in an effort to advance civic engagement on their respective campuses. The resulting Presidents’ Declaration on the Civic Responsibility of Higher Education challenged higher education to reexamine its public purpose and commitment to democracy, and engage with its communities. Presidents of other institutions were asked to join:

in seeking recognition of civic responsibility in accreditation procedures, Carnegie classification, and national rankings…to catalyze and lead a national movement to reinvigorate the public purposes and civic mission of higher education. (Ehrlich and Holland 1999)

The benefits of these declarations can be seen in new streams of funding for the institutionalization of civic and community engagement. In 2002, Campus Compact received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to document best practices of engaged institutions with the goal to increase institutionalization of civic engagement practices. Research supported by the funding focused on the assessment of engagement within institutions of higher education leading to what was considered indicators of engagement (Hollander et al. 2002). What follows is a brief history of the early assessment measures that led to the development of the Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement.

3.3 Assessment of Engagement

In 2001, Barbara Holland identified five foundational components that needs to work together to

build and sustain an institutional culture in which community-engaged research, teaching, and public service are valued to the extent that they become fully infused within the academic fabric of a higher education institution. (Holland 2001, cited in Furco 2009, p. 47)

These five foundational components include:

  1. 1.

    A philosophy and mission that emphasizes engagement;

  2. 2.

    Genuine faculty involvement and support for engaged research or teaching, or both;

  3. 3.

    A broad range of opportunities for students to access and involve themselves in high-quality engagement experiences;

  4. 4.

    An institutional infrastructure that supports engagement practice; and

  5. 5.

    Mutually beneficial, sustained partnership with community partners.

Andrew Furco in his chapter, “Issues in Benchmarking and Assessing Institutional Engagement”, states that

[t]o help ensure that the components take shape in ways that best facilitate the advancement of community engagement, the employment of an assessment process that can measure and benchmark each component’s development is essential. (Furco 2009, p. 48)

He further states that assessment structures:

help collect and review information so that informed decisions can be made about an institution’s engagement strengths and weaknesses. (Furco 2009, p. 48)

So, what constitutes an assessment structure or framework? These vary according to Burack and Saltmarsh (2006) because of the different motivations for the assessment. The assessment methods will be just as varied as the motivations for conducting them. In their review of engagement institutionalization, they highlight as many as eleven different assessment instruments. They organized these into five categories including, checklists, indicators, benchmarks, rubrics, and matrices.

Checklists provide opportunity for a quick and easy assessment to count if components deemed necessary for advancing engagement are present. Indicators are a little more robust providing data on the strengths and weaknesses of the engagement efforts. Benchmarking requires a higher presence of empirical data and introduces “the notion of performance expectations that can be established through internal and external comparisons” (Furco 2009, p. 49).

Rubrics bring in dimension and are usually two-dimensional and capture statements about the characteristics regarding levels of engagement. And finally, matrices being similar to rubrics are two-dimensional incorporating both engagement components as well as description for determining the level of institutionalization. The descriptions are not prescribed as in the rubric, but provide opportunity for variance in the description depending on the context and concerns.

While the instruments are utilized to assess a wide variety of engagement efforts, for example service-learning, the Carnegie classification framework is exclusively used for the assessment of the institutionalization of engagement on a given campus. This framework builds on a long tradition within the Foundation for reforming higher education, firstly in terms of teaching and research and now in relation to engagement. (See the CFAT website for a full list of their publications on higher education reform http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/publications_archive.)

4 The Counterbalance: The Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement in Teaching (the Foundation) has been a key influence in the direction of US higher education for more than a century. Since 1905, the Foundation has been an independent national policy and research center to encourage, uphold and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education in the United States. In particular, since the 1970s, the Carnegie Foundation has been the developer and custodian of the most prominent higher education classification system in American higher education .

Originally conceived as a system to describe, characterize, and categorize colleges and universities to meet the analytic needs of those engaged in research on higher education, it has evolved into a “sort of general-purpose classification employed by a wide range of users for a variety of application” (McCormick and Zhao 2005, p. 54). It is used by institutional personnel from trustees to faculty; politicians, and regional and state authorities; accreditors, philanthropic foundations, and other funders, as well as by local and national media and magazines. In contrast to its original purpose of highlighting the institutional diversity in US higher education, it has had a

homogenizing influence…as many institutions have sought to ‘move up’ the classification system for inclusion among ‘research-type’ universities. (McCormick and Zhao 2005, p. 52)

The Foundation worked to counter the tendency of institutions to view the classification as a ranking system particularly in 2005 when it planned to develop a set of “elective” classifications to move from a single system to multiple classifications that reflect what is taught, to whom, and in what setting . The goal was to foster institutional movement and innovation in a variety of directions over encouraging a strictly hierarchical model of higher education (Rhoades 2009).

The elective classification would allow institutions to voluntarily participate and document aspects of their work that are not reflected in the national data. The first such elective classification featured community engagement. Rhoades (2009) reminds us of the significance of this being the first elective classification as a shift away from the traditional focus on the national to an emphasis on the value of the local. Where previous work of the Foundation helped shape the focus of higher education toward a strengthening of undergraduate education, here the Foundation emphasizes the importance of connecting the activities of the academic profession

more to the public good and to public service than to the academic prestige market and revenue generation. That model emphasized not only teaching but also the application of scholarship in local contexts. (Rhoades 2009, p. 4)

Based on consultation with national experts and national associations, and honed through multiple drafts and a year-long pilot, a documentation framework was developed for benchmarking community engagement across diverse institutions and approaches to the work of engagement. The framework assesses institutionalization of community engagement through identifying indicators in the following key areas:

  1. 1.

    Vision and leadership,

  2. 2.

    Curricular engagement,

  3. 3.

    Infrastructure to support community engagement and faculty professional development (which includes developing the capacity for establishing reciprocal community partnerships),

  4. 4.

    Multiple means of assessment, and

  5. 5.

    Policies that define the incentives that shape faculty scholarly work.

The framework reflects an understanding of institutionalization that implies that when engagement occurs in an educational institution, it is required that this engagement is embedded in core academic work—that is reflected in the curriculum, in all the faculty roles (teaching, research, and service), and in student learning outcomes. There are two main sections to the application: (1) foundational indicators and (2) categories of community engagement (Table 15.1; see Table 15.4 in Appendix A for the full application template).

Table 15.1 Application template summary
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Given that the elective classification is self-reported data, the classification does not represent a comprehensive national assessment. It is also a benchmark of outputs not outcomes (it does not provide an assessment of impacts of community engagement). However, we learn a lot from the data presented in the first wave of applications that reveal much about the general state of engagement across different institutional types and functions in the United States. The classification also identified challenges faced by institutions in the institutionalization of community engagement as well as identified some emerging best practices.

4.1 Challenges

In assessing the application from the 2006 classification, Amy Driscoll, the Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation administering the classification found three areas of “challenges”. One was community involvement: This was described by Driscoll as a weakness around

assessing the community’s need for and perceptions of the institution’s engagement and developing substantive roles for the community in creating the institution’s plans for that engagement.

A related weakness was that

most institutions could only describe in vague generalities how they had achieved genuine reciprocity with their communities…Another challenge for institutions was the assessment of community engagement in general and of the specific categories of engagement in particular.

Finally, a third area of challenge was support for faculty engagement, or what Driscoll described as “lack of significant support for faculty who are engaged in this work”, including faculty-development support and faculty recruitment and hiring practices, as well as “changes in the recognition and reward system for promotion and tenure .” (Driscoll 2008, p. 41)

4.2 Best Practices

Sandmann et al. (2008) identify five (though we have separated them out into six) best institutional practices that lead to the institutionalization of community engagement. Firstly, executive leadership and leadership by key faculty members matters. Secondly, successful institutions are those with some infrastructure (positional or structural) to support engagement activities. Thirdly, purposeful advancement strategies are critical to providing the necessary resources for engagement activities to be sustained as well as develop.

Fourthly, evaluation is important and needs campuses moving toward more comprehensive, longitudinal assessment plans including authentic forms of evidence such as student products that capture student learning in a community-engaged course. Fifthly, constructing policies that reward community engagement across the faculty roles and including and valuing community partners in the peer-review process are both important. Sixthly, community–campus partnerships include those that have a clear focus and direction that coincides with the culture and mission of the community partner and campus.

5 Normalizing Community Engagement—The Tensions Becoming Clearer

In our study of the 2006 recipients of the classification, using Eckel et al.’s (1998) model for assessing transformational change in higher education, we explored how the Carnegie classified institutions may be transforming higher education through the normalization of community engagement as a central institutional practice . In doing this we used the “Foundational Indicators” for their focus on institutional identity, culture , and commitment. These indicators also reflect an understanding that community engagement is an element of transformative institutional change and that institutional transformation is characterized by changes in institutional culture . The supposition is that institutions that receive the Carnegie Community Engagement classification demonstrate that they have implemented changes in the core work of the institution.

In their 1998 study of transformational change in higher education, Eckel et al. defined transformational change as that which

(1) alters the culture of the institution by changing select underlying assumptions and institutional behaviours, processes, and products; (2) is deep and pervasive, affecting the whole institution; (3) is intentional; and (4) occurs over time.

Changes that “alter the culture of the institution” require “major shifts in an institution’s culture—the common set of beliefs and values that creates a shared interpretation and understanding of events and actions.” Attention to deep and pervasive change focuses on “institution-wide patterns of perceiving, thinking, and feeling; shared understandings; collective assumptions; and common interpretive frameworks”—the “ingredients of this ‘invisible glue’ called institutional culture” (Eckel et al. 1998, p. 3). It is precisely these elements of institutional culture that constitute the “Foundational Indicators” of the community engagement framework .

Transformational change occurs when shifts in the institution’s culture have developed to the point where they are both pervasive across the institution and deeply embedded in practices throughout the institution (see Fig. 15.1). Change in an institution can be understood along two dimensions, the depth or substance of the change, and its breadth or pervasiveness, and this allows for a 2 × 2 matrix to be composed and particular institutions to be mapped onto the space for analysis of the depth and breadth of their change.

Fig. 15.1
figure 1

Two dimensions of transformational change. (Source: Eckel et al. 1998)

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Eckel et al. (1998) describe adjustment (Quadrant 1) as “a change or series of changes that are modifications to an area. One might call this ‘tinkering’ … changes of this nature are revising or revitalizing, and they occur when current designs or procedures are improved or extended. An adjustment may improve the process or quality of the service, or it might be something new; nevertheless, it does not drastically alter much.” The change has little depth and is not pervasive across the institution.

Isolated change (quadrant 2) is “deep but limited to one unit or a particular area: it is not pervasive.” Campuses in the third quadrant achieved far-reaching change that “is pervasive but does not affect the organization very deeply.” Quadrant 4 represents deep and pervasive change that transforms the institutional culture . Eckel et al. call this change in “the innermost core of a culture … our underlying assumptions; these deeply ingrained beliefs” that “are rarely questioned and are usually taken for granted.” Transformational change, they write, “involves altering the underlying assumptions so that they are congruent with the desired changes” (1998, pp. 3–5).

Examining the Carnegie Foundation’s Framework for the community engagement classification in light of Eckel et al.’s work suggests that campuses that achieve the classification have undergone shifts in institutional culture that have led to change such that community engagement is both deep and pervasive. Is this actually the case?

For us, a proposition emerges from this conceptual framework and from the literature on both community engagement in higher education and institutional change. The proposition is that campuses that received the Elective Carnegie Classification for community engagement provided sufficient evidence to be located in the fourth quadrant, demonstrating transformational change reflected in institutional reward policies that are artifacts of an academic culture that values community engagement. It is this proposition that we tested in our research and ultimately needed to reconsider in light of our findings.

5.1 Engagement Taking Hold: Whether, Where and How?

In our study of the 76 campuses that were awarded the elective Community Engagement Classification in 2006, 5 received the classification for curricular engagement, only, 9 received the classification for outreach and partnership only, and 62 received the classification for both curricular engagement and outreach and partnership. We focused on these 62 institutions as they emerged as the most engaged meeting criteria in both areas.

Within this 62 campuses, we were unable to gain permission to use the applications for 5 institutions, so we were left with 57 campuses in our study. Of the 57, 33 elected to answer the question on institutional reward policies and provided documentation to support their answer. None of the campuses answered no. Twenty-four campuses chose not to answer the question. Our assumption was if a campus that chose not to answer the question on promotion and tenure did not have such policies in place, nor were in the process of revising them.

Using a qualitative approach (Denzin and Lincoln 2000), our analyses consisted of analysis of the applications followed by an analysis of the official promotion and tenure guidelines form the applicants’ campuses . Using both the application documentation and the official policy documents, we used a process of concept mapping to code the documents and identify emergent concepts, themes, and patterns (Creswell 2007).

Finally, after coding the applications using the four themes that emerged, we used a modified axial coding process (Creswell 20007) that mined each campus’s data for evidence supporting the themes we had identified in the application. This allowed us to contextualize the occurrence of the themes and to more readily identify incongruities between application narratives and available promotion and tenure guidelines .

Tenure and promotion is considered a core function of the institution and reflective of the embedded culture of the academy. In examining tenure and promotion, we examine the cultural norms, practices, and experiences of the institution. Evidence of institutional transformation from the Carnegie classified institutions is most clearly revealed through the promotion and tenure guidelines that outwardly recognize and reward community-engaged scholarship. We unfortunately needed to revise this proposition as the findings clearly revealed that not all institutions classified fell into the fourth quadrant, showing both deep and pervasive change.

Of the 33 institutions that elected to answer the then optional question on reward policies and provided evidence in the form of a written narrative to support their answer, we found variation in the degree to which these campuses provided legitimacy for community-engaged scholarship. Sixteen of the 33 campuses responded that they had community-engaged scholarship either (1) had revised their policies to incorporate community-engaged scholarship, (2) had revised their guidelines to incorporate broader notions of scholarship using Boyer’s categories, opening the possibility of rewarding community-engaged scholarship , or (3) were in the process of revising their policies in ways that made room for community-engaged scholarship.

There were almost three times as many campuses in the process of revising promotion and tenure guidelines that specifically incorporated community engagement as a form of research than campuses that had reached the point in the revision process of implementing new policies for community-engaged scholarship. Of the 17 campuses that did not indicate involvement in revision, those applications either did not address community-engaged scholarship or research as part of their application or specifically identified community engagement as part of the service role of faculty (see Table 15.2).

Table 15.2 Applications and institutional reward policies
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Of the 16 campuses involved with policy revisions, 9 had addressed revision of guidelines through a process of broadening notions of scholarship by adopting Boyer’s categories (1990). Only 7 of the 16 campuses, which included four of the campuses with “Boyerized ” guidelines, had explicit criteria articulating the legitimacy of engaged scholarship —that is, community engagement defined a legitimate form of research.

Four of the sixteen campuses that expressed involvement in a process of revising faculty rewards issued responses similar to the following:

All departments have been asked to review tenure and promotion guidelines to ensure that engagement of students with community is part of the expectation for faculty … we are currently moving to revise the Faculty Handbook tenure and promotion guidelines to reflect the importance of community engagement as scholarly activity.

What is not known from this statement is how long the process has been going on or if it will result in revised policies. In the case of one of the four campuses in the process of revising their guidelines, the application identified revisions proposed by an advisory committee (the “publication of research…connected with…public service should be considered creative work insofar as they present new ideas or incorporate the candidate’s scholarly research”) but the adopted guidelines that appear in the faculty handbook do not reflect the suggested changes.

Nine of the 16 campuses have made changes to faculty roles and rewards through Boyer’s broadened notion of scholarship, with six campuses noting that “community engagement scholarship fits logically as scholarship of integration, application or teaching.” Yet this broadening of the definition of scholarship did not, for the most part, specifically recognize and reward community engagement as faculty scholarship. The six of the nine campuses employing Boyer’s categories do so in ways that include a broader view of scholarly activity inclusive of community engagement but maintain a traditional evaluation process through academic peer-reviewed publications, as in the following example:

Scholarship of Application: This involves applying disciplinary expertise to the exploration or solution of individual, social, or institutional problems; it involves activities that are tied directly to one’s special field of knowledge and it demands the same level of rigor and accountability as is traditionally associated with research activities.

This conception of research not only fails to make a distinction between application and engagement, but also it does not broaden notions of what counts as publication and who is considered a peer in the peer-review process. Further, while a campus application claims that community engagement can be rewarded under the “Scholarship of Application,” it was not unusual to find policy statements that did not specifically articulate community engagement as an element of “application.” For instance, one “Boyerized ” set of guidelines states,

Application involves asking how state-of-the-art knowledge can be responsibly applied to significant problems. Application primarily concerns assessing the efficacy of knowledge or creative activities within a particular context, refining its implications, assessing its generalizability, and using it to implement changes.

Of the nine campuses that adopted Boyer’s categories, three of them specifically articulated a shift in terminology from application to engagement. As one Boyerized policy document articulated, scholarship of engagement entails “community-based research, technical assistance, demonstration projects, impact assessment, and policy analysis,” as well as “scholarly work relating to the study or promotion of public engagement.”

So, we can see how the reward of community-engaged scholarship is a change that is taking place over time; thus there is a transitional quality to what is happening on campuses as they engage in a process of defining, implementing, and adjusting to the implications of change. These are campuses where institutional reward policies are in a process of transition to rewarding community-engaged scholarship . Many more campuses are involved in the difficult task of revising their promotion and tenure guidelines . For those that have revised their guidelines to reward community-engaged scholarship, the policies exhibit a quality of establishing conceptual clarity around community engagement, address engagement across the faculty roles , and are grounded in the values of reciprocity .

Most prominent in the revision process is the adoption of guidelines that broaden scholarly activity in Boyer’s four domains: the scholarship of discovery, the scholarship of integration, the scholarship of teaching, and the scholarship of application. As this adoption represents a transitional movement toward rewarding community-engaged scholarship, community engagement is less specifically written into policies than it is implied in their interpretation . For example, one campus explained its use of Boyer’s categories of scholarship in this way:

The scholarship category is broadly defined as “Scholarship and Related Professional Activities” and Boyer’s four types of scholarship are made explicit. Given these broad definitions, faculty scholarship related to community engagement is rewarded in promotion and tenure decisions. The point is that our scholarship criteria are broadly defined and community engagement activities are regular key components of scholarship in successful P&T applications. Community-engaged scholarship fits logically as scholarship in integration, application, or teaching.

As this example indicates, community-engaged scholarship “logically,” but without explanation, could be evaluated under integration, application, or teaching. In other cases, the campus application noted that “we don’t fit the community engagement scholarship into one of Boyer’s other categories, we recognize that engagement can cross-cut them all.” Yet, more common was to have community-engaged scholarship specifically subsumed under the scholarship of application.

The Faculty Handbook uses the term “scholarship of application” in its standards for promotion and tenure. Summarizing Boyer, the handbook states, “This involves applying disciplinary expertise to the exploration or solution of individual, social, or institutional problems; it involves activities that are tied directly to one’s special field of knowledge and it demands the same level of rigor and accountability as is traditionally associated with research activities.”

Occasionally “application” referred specifically to community-related interactions, as in “scholarship encompasses … the application of knowledge in responsible ways to address problems of contemporary society, the larger community, so that one’s scholarly specialty informs and is informed by interactions with that community.” More often “application” was used as a broad category into which community engagement activity most logically fit. “Application involves asking how state-of-the-art knowledge can be responsibly applied to significant problems. Application primarily concerns assessing the efficacy of knowledge or creative activities within a particular context, refining its implications, assessing its generalizability, and using it to implement changes.”

6 Getting to the New Normal—The Institutionalization of Community Engagement

The above examples show clearly where the tensions and indeed subtleties are when assessing authentic community engagement and identifying that apart from the spectrum of variations of applied scholarship . And while we set out in our study presupposing that institutions that received the Classification would be able to provide clear evidence, placing them confidently in quadrant four—having shown transformation and cultural change, the reality was found not to be the case. We identified some movement among the classified institutions toward a change in the traditional institutional culture .

But the movement toward change was not as deep or pervasive as receipt of the Classification might indicate. So what is the significance of the Classification in light of these findings? How do external forces such as the Classification promote transformational and lasting change in the heart of the academic culture? Is the Elective Classification for Community Engagement continuing the long reform tradition of the Foundation and helping to create a “new normal” in American higher education ?

Evidence from our interviews with chief academic officers shows that, rather than being a catalyst for change, the Classification is more seen as a way of documenting, measuring, and validating work already being done on campuses (Ward et al. 2011). Here the Classification was seen to bring greater awareness to and reenergize campus efforts to institutionalize engagement. Evidence from our research also indicates that the Classification through revisions of the Documentation Framework is in many ways forcing validation of this “new normal”.

The Classification accomplishes this by no longer allowing institutions to avoid the question of recognition and reward of engaged scholarship by making the question on promotion and tenure a mandatory rather an optional question. This move alone sends a clear message to institutions that if you are going to say you take engagement seriously then you must demonstrate that at deep as well as surface levels of institutional culture and practice.

Relatedly, the Classification process provides an opportunity for a campus to increase transparency, openness and clarity around the promotion and tenure process , where areas of engaged scholarship were more clearly defined and articulated. The Classification also provides an opportunity for campus leadership to more clearly tie engagement efforts with institutional mission and identity and create institutional infrastructure—faculty support offices or higher administrative post such as Vice President for Engagement—to sustain and grow engagement efforts on a campus.

This assessment process, both voluntary to the institution and externally assessed, provides an opportunity for institutions to begin to take a look at where they stand in relation to their commitment to and work on engagement. What we have learned is that one cannot presume that with the Classification comes acknowledgement of a deep and pervasive level of cultural change and therefore institutionalization of engagement. What the Classification does is it identifies areas that need attention if institutionalization of engagement is to be achieved (Table 15.3).

Table 15.3 Shifting norms from marginalization to institutionalization of community engagement
Full size table

7 Concluding Thoughts

The Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement is a vehicle through which institutions that are committed to engagement can map their campus engagement efforts and have the impact of these efforts externally assessed. Yet, receipt of the Classification alone does not mean that a campus has reached the epitome of work needed in this area—it is merely an indicator that successful work is being carried out in this area. There is always room for improvement. For authentic and institutional transformation, real change in terms of how faculty work is recognized and rewarded is needed. As it stands, the Classification shows us that when we dig deeper than the self-reported data the evidence of transformational change , especially around core cultural issues, rewarding engaged faculty work weakens (Giles et al. 2008).

Along with the issues of faculty roles and rewards, if the third mission of higher education is to happen in any serious way across institutions, then the following challenges need to be addressed. Firstly, a paradigm shift is needed toward engaged knowledge generation that is applied, problem-centered, transdisciplinary, heterogeneous, hybrid, demand-driven, entrepreneurial, and network embedded. And, this is a move away from a more university-centric, hierarchical, academically expert-led, supply-driven, rational, positivistic knowledge paradigm.

Secondly, there needs to be clear use of language articulating clear understanding of the characteristics and values of community-engaged scholarship incorporating multiple stakeholder views.

Thirdly, the compartmentalized and fragmented faculty role needs to be abandoned and replaced with an integrated faculty role where one’s teaching, research, service, and professional or creative practice come together in an integrated scholarly body of work.

Fourthly, an acceptance is necessary that valid knowledge is not only generated through positivist, laboratory, scientific, and technocratic ways, but that knowledge generation has multiple sources and methods including thorough, rationalized, localized, and contextual methods.

Fifthly, a recognition is needed that prestige culture and striving currently marginalize the work of engagement as a bit part of the mission whereas a conceptualization of the institution as a steward of place can imbed engagement efforts in the institutional mission and identity in ways that create a more seamless alignment between institutional identity, mission, place, faculty work, and institutional reward policy and practice . This level of integration leads to an authentic engagement that is strongly institutionalized.

Going forward, a longitudinal assessment of the Classification is needed to fully understand the impact it has on institutional change related to the normalization of engagement. Likewise, study of institutions currently identified as exemplary community-engaged institutions is needed to provide tried and tested benchmarks for successful engagement for others to follow.