Engaging Campus and Community

The Practice of Public Scholarship in the State and Land-Grant University System

Scott J. Peters, Nicholas R. Jordan, Margaret Adamek

• Publisher: Kettering Foundation
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781945577345
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Grundschulbildung

Colleges and universities are increasingly being called on to deepen their engagement in the public work of addressing economic, social, and environmental challenges. How should they respond?

Engaging Campus and Community examines the practice of public scholarship as a promising means for academic professionals and students to join with external partners in addressing our most pressing public problems. Based on four years of collaborative research by a team of scholars from six different institutions in the national state and land-grant university system, the book provides the first in-depth qualitative study of the civic dimensions of public scholarship in American higher education.

The book presents and analyzes eight case studies of public scholarship involving close community-university engagement in public work initiatives that address the economic, social, and environmental challenges of pursuing agricultural and food systems sustainability. The authors draw lessons from these cases that have broad relevance for the larger movement to renew higher education's civic mission and work. Chapters in this volume include:

"Preface, " David Mathews

"Introduction and Overview, " Scott Peters

"Community Food Systems and the Work of Public Scholarship, " David Campbell and Gail Feenstra

"Organizing for Public Scholarship in Southeast Minnesota, " Scott Peters and Karen Lehman

"The North Country Community Food and Economic Security Network: A Profile of David Pelletier, " Margo Hittleman, Scott Peters, and David Pelletier

"Bringing Scholarship to the Orchard: Integrated Pest Management in Massachusetts, " Dan Cooley and Bill Coli

"Building a Knowledge Network for Sustainable Weed Management: An Experiment in Public Scholarship, " Nicholas Jordan et al.

"Teaching as Public Scholarship: Tribal Perspectives and Democracy in the Classroom, " Frank Clancy and Margaret Adamek

"Engaging Campus and Community to Improve Science Education: A Down-to-Earth Approach, " Robert Williamson and Ellen Smoak

"An Exploration of Participatory Methods in a Youth Outreach Program Linked to University Research, " Marianne Krasny

"Public Scholarship: An Administrator's View, " Victor Bloomfield

"Findings, " Scott Peters

"Achieving the Promise of Public Scholarship, " Theodore R. Alter

Chapter One:

Introduction and Overview

by Scott Peters

The clichéd image of scholars as detached ivory-tower intellectuals who are unwilling or unable to contribute in direct ways to the so-called “real” world beyond the campus is widely recognized. While this cliché is in some ways a relic of the past, it also captures a continuing reality about the minimal extent to which scholars, especially but not only in research universities, participate in what are sometimes referred to as “public service” activities. As James Fairweather (1996, pp. xii-xiii) found in his examination of survey data of thousands of faculty from hundreds of colleges and universities, “for most faculty public service, including direct involvement in economic development, continues to represent such a small percentage of their job that it hardly registers.”

While the image of ivory-tower detachment represents a familiar, and, if Fairweather’s study is to be trusted, dominant reality about the contemporary scholar, there is a less familiar counter image that represents another reality. The counter image is one of engagement, of scholars as active, contributing participants in economic, social, cultural, and political affairs. Far from being new, this counter image is at least a century old. It emerged as an ideal during the academic revolution that took place in American higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Flexner 1930; Conference of Universities 1933; Coffman 1934; Butts 1939; Hofstadter 1963; Veysey 1965; Jencks and Riesman 1968; Bender 1993; Fink 1997).

During the past three decades, the ideal of engagement has re-emerged as a key theme in two different but related literatures. First, it is a central theme in the new literature about the nature and meaning of higher education’s public-service mission—what it is and who performs it, its actual and potential value for the academy and the public, and its current status. In this literature, new ways of conceptualizing and naming the service mission have been proposed, including “civic mission,” “professional service,” “service learning,” and “outreach” (Martin 1977; Crosson 1983; Elman and Smock 1985; Boyer 1990, 1996; Lynton 1995; Lerner and Simon 1998; Kellogg Commission 1999; Campus Compact 1999; Ehrlich 2000; Checkoway 2001; Braxton, Luckey, and Helland 2002; Jacoby and Associates 1996, 2003; Ward 2003; Kezar et al. 2005).

Second, the engagement ideal is a central theme in a new literature about the problems with and limits of prevailing academic research methodologies, and with the assumptions, aims, politics, and practices of professional scholars (e.g., Lindblom and Cohen 1979; Carr and Kemmis 1986; Lindblom 1990; Harding 1991; Lather 1991; Gitlin 1994; Hammersley 1995). In this literature, more civically engaged and explicitly political forms of scholarship are being proposed and critiqued. These include action research (e.g., Greenwood and Levin 1998; Reason and Bradbury 2001), participatory inquiry and research (e.g., Maguire 1987; Fischer 2000), community-based participatory research (e.g., Strand et al. 2003; Minkler and Wallerstein 2003; Israel et al. 2005), citizen science (Irwin 1995), and contextualized science (Gibbons et al. 1994; Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2001).

As they have developed in the academic literature and in some institutional reform and community-university engagement efforts, conversations about higher education’s public-service mission and the problems with conventional research models and practices reflect a general, but not universal, agreement on four related points:

•First, through the work of engagement, higher education’s public-service mission directly links the academy with external partners in both the public sphere and the private sector. Ideally, engagement is a scholarly activity that draws upon both academic and local knowledge and expertise in ways that facilitate and/or produce significant learning and discovery aimed at addressing a wide range of “real-world” problems and issues (Walshok 1995). It should, therefore, not be viewed as being separate from, or unrelated to, the academy’s teaching and research missions, but rather as a particular way of pursuing them in collaboration with external partners.

•Ideally, engagement is a two-way activity. It is mutually beneficial in that it helps to advance the interests of specific external partners and the general public while it also advances and enhances the interests and work of the academy (Kellogg Commission 1999; Holland 2001). According to the authors of a 1993 report to the provost of Michigan State University, as a result of engagement, “on-campus research and teaching become more vital, more alive, and the intellectual life of the whole university is more stimulating” (quoted in Lynton 1995, p. 11).

•Third, engagement has for various reasons declined in the post-World War II era in both status and frequency (Boyer 1990; Lynton 1995; Bender 1997; Sullivan 2000). The conversation, therefore, has focused on the need for renewal.

•Finally, despite widespread rhetoric about the importance of engagement, there are significant barriers and disincentives blocking scholars from pursuing it. In general, engagement is not sufficiently appreciated, valued, documented, assessed, or rewarded, especially with respect to faculty who hold tenured or tenure-track positions (Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff 1997; Driscoll and Lynton 1999; O’Meara 2002; Ward 2003).

There is an additional point, about which there has been relatively little discussion and agreement, particularly with regard to proposals for more civically engaged forms of academic research: Renewing the academy’s civic mission by engaging campus and community holds promise of contributing to the larger task of renewing democracy. This book examines why and how one group of scholars has pursued this promise.

Democracy, Politics, and Scholarship

The study that led to the publication of this book grew out of a concern about the lack of direct attention to the democratic purposes, practices, and contributions of academic professionals, both as an explicit topic of inquiry in the study of American higher education and as a guiding theme in faculty and organizational development efforts. An awareness of the neglect of what might be termed the democracy question—not only in the academy but in K-12 and adult education as well—has recently emerged in educational literature (Boggs 1991; Quigley 2000; McDonnell 2000; Wellman 2000; Schneider 2000; Hartley and Hollander 2005). Such awareness has been inspired in large measure by heightened concerns about the apparent erosion of the overall quality and vitality of American civic life, and even of democracy itself (National Commission on Civic Renewal 1998; Eliasoph 1998; Beem 1999; Putnam 2000; Crenson and Ginsberg 2002; Skocpol 2003).

Democracy is a deeply contested term (Hanson 1985; Held 1996; Wiebe 1995; Crick 2002; Cunningham 2002). Generally speaking, it describes a political system of elected representatives, free, fair, and frequent elections, freedom of expression and association, access to independent sources of information, and inclusive citizenship (Crick 2002). More expansively cast by theorists such as John Dewey (Caspary 2000), democracy is a way of life: not something we have, but something we do.

As David Mathews (1999) and Harry Boyte (2004) have argued, a broad view of democracy as a way of life—an ongoing practice that is located in everyday affairs and not just in periodic elections—suggests expansive conceptions of politics and of citizenship. Politics becomes more than just what politicians do. It is also what ordinary citizens do when they come together to pursue and negotiate their self-interests in relation to larger common interests. As Mathews (1999, p. 122) puts it, politics includes “a wide range of formal and informal efforts to solve common problems and advance the common well-being. Politics is acting publicly to foster the well-being of a polity.” In Boyte’s (2004, p. 5) words, citizenship can be understood as public work: “sustained effort by a mix of people who solve public problems or create goods, material or cultural, of general benefit.”

Drawing on these relatively moderate and populist views, we can view the contemporary renewal of the academy’s public or civic mission as holding promise for contributing to the renewal of democracy, where citizenship is conceived as public work that is grounded in everyday politics. I acknowledge that in most of the literature on American higher education, the theory and practice of service/engagement is not explicitly conceptualized and discussed in political terms. Yet, the way it has been framed in recent years suggests that engagement is in fact a political activity—not defined by narrow, partisan, activities but by the expansive conception of “everyday politics” embraced by Mathews and Boyte. However it is named—as public or professional service, as outreach, or as engagement—the discussion about the academy’s civic mission is focused on the question of how academic professionals and students might more actively and effectively use their knowledge and expertise to address issues of broad public significance.

Ernest Boyer placed this question at the center of his influential and widely read book Scholarship Reconsidered (1990). In the book’s preface, Boyer (1990, p. xii) proclaimed: “At no time in our history has the need been greater for connecting the work of the academy to the social and environmental challenges beyond the campus.” To address this need, Boyer called for the development and adoption of a new and more expansive vision of the meaning of scholarship, one that encourages and rewards scholars who seek to “relate the work of the academy more directly to the realities of contemporary life” (p. 13).

Boyer’s book can be read as a call for scholars to engage with their fellow citizens in public work. Such a call raises several practical and theoretical questions:

•First, how and why might scholars choose to become engaged in public work beyond the campus?

•Second, what roles would scholars play, and what contributions would they make, as active participants in public work? How might such engagement enable them to enrich and enliven their research and teaching? In what specific ways might their engagement contribute to the renewal of democracy? As professionals with specialized forms of expertise and knowledge, how might scholars work out what political theorist Mary Parker Follett (1924, p. 4) once termed a “legitimate” relationship with the non-expert public—that is, legitimate with respect to its implications for democracy?

•Third, what kinds of challenges and barriers would scholars encounter in their efforts to become engaged in public work, and how should they respond to them?

Eight Case Studies from State and Land-Grant Universities

These are large and complex questions. In this book, we attend to them by presenting and interpreting a set of eight contemporary case studies of scholars who are actively and directly engaged in public work with their fellow citizens beyond the campus. Our broad purpose is to contribute to the emerging discussion about the theory and practice of academic engagement by illuminating and interpreting its civic dimensions. Following our own experiences and interests, we pursue this purpose within the context of the state and land-grant university system.

While the ideal of mutually beneficial engagement as a means for pursuing the academy’s public service or civic mission has been embraced across the whole of American higher education, it holds a particular significance in state and land-grant universities (Lerner and Simon 1998; McDowell 2001). This was demonstrated in 1999 when the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities issued a call for the renewal of the “land-grant ideal of public university service to community and nation” through a broad-based, institution-wide commitment to engagement (Kellogg Commission 1999, p. 9). The Commission explicitly emphasized that the kind of engagement it had in mind was not a “one-way process of transferring knowledge and technology from the university (as the source of expertise) to its key constituents” (p. 27). Rather, it called for a “profoundly different” approach, tied to a conception of engagement that is grounded in a “commitment to sharing and reciprocity”:

By engagement the Commission envisions partnerships, two-way streets defined by mutual respect among the partners for what each brings to the table. Such partnerships are likely to be characterized by problems defined together, goals and agendas that are shared in common, definitions of success that are meaningful to both university and community and developed together, and some pooling or leveraging of university and public and private funds. The collaboration arising out of this process is likely to be mutually beneficial and to build the competence and capacity of all parties (p. 27).

The Commission’s call for mutually beneficial engagement reflects a strong, historically grounded sense of civic identity and mission in the state and land-grant system. This is reflected in historians’ use of terms such as democracy’s college (Ross 1942) and people’s colleges (Smith 1949) in the titles of their studies on the origins and development of this system. These titles reflect one of the major reasons the land-grant system was established during the second half of the nineteenth century: to bring the academy into close relation with the common people in the so-called “industrial classes” (Eddy 1956/57).

To make good on this aim, a new kind of scholar was needed, one that would be directly and deeply engaged in the nation’s life. Henry Clay White, a professor of chemistry from the University of Georgia, prophesied the coming of such a scholar in his 1898 address as president of the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, delivered in Washington, D.C., before an audience gathered at the Association’s twelfth annual convention. White drew inspiration for his prophecy from “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa oration delivered in 1837 at Harvard University.

In his oration, Emerson (1837) criticized the received wisdom that “the scholar should be a recluse” and a “bookworm,” that scholars are a remote and isolated “book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul.” White picked up on Emerson’s theme in his 1898 address. But he took it a step further. “The future scholar,” White (1899, p. 37) proclaimed,

particularly he [sic] who should come to illustrate the great Republic, might not be a recluse, a bookworm, a solitary dreamer; he should be filled with the vigor of the young and lusty nation, in intimate touch with and a part of the abounding activities of the nation’s life. But Emerson did not clearly foresee that the scholar might be contributory to these activities as well as inspired by them.

Even as White spoke, “future” scholars, such as Perry Greeley Holden, were already at work in the state and land-grant system. Born and raised on a Minnesota farm, Holden earned two degrees from Michigan Agricultural College before taking up a ...