The Guidebook for the Engaged University

It’s primarily for academics who are looking for concrete actionable reforms that promote engaged scholarship within their colleges and universities. 

If you are an administrator, the guidebook provides examples of university or departmental initiatives enacted at peer institutions that you could scale in your institution. 

If you are a faculty member, the guidebook has resources, best practices, and tips for doing co-produced, community-engaged scholarship. 

If you are a student, the guidebook has a list of asks you should make of your programs to support interdisciplinary engaged scholarship. 

The Guidebook provides a roadmap for people at various points in the university structure. It also provides inspiration for those who have the ability and the resources to take initiative and create models and cultures within their own institution to accelerate these ideas. 

A network of individuals committed to using their power as researchers, administrators and  students to make academia more effective at solving the grand challenges of society, at doing work that’s engaged and action-oriented.

It’s easy to critique the university. Everyone has written about how ill-equipped the academy is to solve big societal problems. That’s a very pervasive narrative.

We in the Network wrote the Guidebook to propose concrete solutions and reforms for making the university more relevant to solving those big problems. And the Guidebook’s numerous case studies also show that many universities in the United States, the UK and Canada are already putting these solutions and reforms into practice. Universities everywhere are changing their structures and business models to advance their ability to do engaged work and help solve world problems. The collective picture the Guidebook presents is amazing and inspiring – it advances a narrative that, if you’re not doing engaged work, you’re behind. Our position is that engaged scholarship is the present and the future of academia, and you can and should expect more of your institution.

Academics will always have to navigate the continuum of scholarship and advocacy. It’s your decision as an individual researcher how you engage in problems, what your role is in analyzing and studying those problems, how you might shift the way that you do your work to be attentive to societal problems, and the degree to which you advocate for specific solutions. Universities have a commitment to research, teaching, and service that distinguishes them from advocacy organizations and foundations. And certainly, many community partners work with universities in part because we offer credibility, legitimacy and expertise. 

However: We in the Network push back on the narrative that there is some objective form of science or research that is not enmeshed in our individual values and beliefs about how the world ought to be. Many researchers – and certainly many students – are very motivated to pursue higher education because they seek to engage in the problems they care about the most. Our values and life experiences motivate the problems that we decide to work on. Leaning into that positionality is an important part of being an engaged scholar and being an effective community partner.

No, and here’s why: Communities have their own priorities. It’s not their job to educate universities on how to do community-engaged work. The reforms detailed in the Guidebook are the responsibilities of universities, and community members aren’t going to be eager to partner with academic institutions until those institutions demonstrate they have the appropriate mechanisms of and incentives for partnership. Their stance is more, “Universities, tell us when you’re prepared to work with us and then let’s talk.”

Not everyone needs to be an engaged scholar! The engaged research model is for researchers who aim for greater external impact through building relationships and aligning their capacities and resources with needs articulated “beyond the academy.” Basic research, applied research, and engaged research are all valid forms of scholarship. The guidebook focuses on engaged research because this type of scholarship runs counter to many traditional academic structures and reward systems.

You don’t have time for it all –  we all have to make tradeoffs in terms of how we allocate our effort. Some of the best practices we uncover in the Guidebook are strategies for aligning research, teaching, service and engagement so that you’re doing engaged teaching, you’re doing engaged service, you’re doing engaged research. That way, engagement isn’t a fourth responsibility, but integrated into your existing research, teaching and service.

In the promotion and tenure policy chapter of the Guidebook, we also talk about how faculty can better communicate their commitment to engagement through their review materials by adding narratives to their numerical CVs that elevate the way that engagement either informed the research questions they asked, the research process itself or the potential outcomes of the research. That’s another way to demonstrate that engagement is on your mind, that it’s part of your process and you’re showcasing that work alongside your traditional scholarship.

The other reform many people discuss is having alternative promotion pathways for researchers, staff, and scholars where you can have your professional goals be tied to your identity as an engaged scholar, and therefore propose a set of metrics and promotional criteria that are tied to your success as an engaged scholar. This approach means other aspects of your workload by definition would decrease in priority, so it might not be for everyone. These kinds of alternative promotional pathways create space for engaged scholars to develop engagement skills without necessarily requiring everyone to conform to the same set of metrics.

Identifying as “an engaged scholar” doesn’t mean you only do engaged scholarship or engagement work. It does mean that you need support for your engaged work to flourish. That support is what the Guidebook focuses on.

It’s realistic because it’s happening right now, at universities all across the world, and there are new initiatives coming online at a pace that the Network can’t even keep up with. It’s unrealistic to think that you can’t focus on engagement at your university when the rest of the world has started to expect and demand that kind of engagement. That doesn’t mean engaged work won’t continue to be hard and demand tradeoffs from individual scholars. It also doesn’t mean that universities won’t continue to be constrained in resources and capacity, and allocating resources and capacity toward engagement could shift investments away from other university priorities. But the groundwork for The Engaged University is already laid. The social and cultural buy-in for it is there in many places, and that train has left the station.

Chapter 1 of the Guidebook actually poses this question and answers it by asking: Think about what your mission is. Why do you want to be engaged? You believe in it, but why?

Then the Guidebook talks through some different assessment criteria you can use to work through your campus’s existing approach to engagement as well as a path forward and how you can evaluate and assess that path over time. 

Engagement isn’t a destination; it’s a process. The demands of our universities right now are  almost certainly different than the demands on universities in 10, 20 or 50 years into the future. The idea is to use engagement to build a dynamic university that can adapt and respond to a changing world.

Yes. First, sign up for our newsletter. Then: Attend our events, contribute your own story of engagement, send us your case studies, invite the network to come to your institution/panel, share copies of the Guidebook. Promoting the #engageduniversity is at the heart of being a member of the Network.