Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Universities and colleges are increasingly providing internal grants to encourage faculty and staff involvement in community-based research and service-learning projects; however, little attention has been given to the impact of institutional support of these efforts. This qualitative study employed focus group interviews with 17 faculty and staff at one mid-size private research university (high activity) to explore the impact of institutional funding on their professional roles and practice of community engaged work. Findings revealed that community-based projects energized the participants, helped them make their academic work relevant in communities, created formal and informal university-community partnerships, and elevated the University's public image. However, a conundrum was evident in the tension between the University's public expression of the importance of community engagement and participants' concerns that the traditional academic reward structure could jeopardize their long-term commitment to community work. A framework is offered that may assist institutions that are pondering or have already committed to using institutional dollars to support engaged scholarship.
Introduction
The landscape of higher education has changed as a result of campus responses to calls for greater engagement with communities (Boyer, 1990, 1996; Bloomgarden & O'Meara, 2007; Campus Compact, 2000; Percy, Zimpher, & Brukardt, 2006; Peters, Jordan, Adamek, & Alter, 2005). Community engagement has emerged as an unofficial movement in higher education, with terms such as "the engaged campus," "civic engagement," and "the public good" commonly found in institutions' mission statements (Alter, Bird, & Letven, 2006; Hartley, 2006; Holland 1997, 2001). Within higher education institutions, there has been a proliferation of centers that provide pedagogical, programmatic, and research support for community partnerships, most of which have been supported by institutional dollars and, in a few cases, by large endowments. Nearly 1,200 American colleges and universities are members of Campus Compact. Additionally, community partnerships involving a range of institutions attract substantial grant funding from federal agencies (e.g., the Center for Disease Control's Prevention Research Centers Program) and other funding sources.
Part and parcel with this changing landscape, the terms "scholarship of engagement" (Boyer, 1996) and "public scholarship" (Peters et al., 2005) are increasingly being used to capture a type of faculty work that has at its core four dimensions of scholarship (discovery, integration, application, and teaching) that simultaneously meet the mission and...