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While community engagement has a long history—tracing its roots to the land-grant universities of the 19th century and made vivid in the “Wisconsin Idea” that the boundaries of the university are contiguous with the boundaries of the state—only in the last few years has such engagement become prominently positioned on institutional home pages and alumni-magazine covers.
Over a thousand college and university presidents are now members of Campus Compact, an organization committed to advancing campus-based community outreach, civic engagement, and service-learning. Such involvement with the larger community has been further legitimized by the Carnegie Foundation’s recent development of a voluntary “community engagement” classification that spotlights strong curricular engagement and partnerships with local communities.
Faculty seem to approve of such bridge-building to the world outside the walls of the classroom and the covers of the textbook. A 2005 survey of more than 40,000 faculty by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found that more than 80 percent believed that their institutions have a responsibility to work with their local communities and that students should be involved in community-service activities. These sentiments are consonant with Ernest Boyer’s call for a “scholarship of engagement,” the movement towards a more “public scholarship” in the humanities and social sciences, and a wide range of popular active-learning practices (e.g., community-based research, service-learning, and undergraduate research).
Dan W. Butin is an associate professor and assistant dean at Cambridge College’s School of Education. He is the author of the forthcoming book Rethinking Service-Learning: Embracing the Scholarship of Engagement in Higher Education (Stylus Publishing).
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