The Scholarship of Engagement: 
Enriching University 

and Community 
BY MARCIA A. FINKELSTEIN 

The past several years have seen a renewed emphasis on building bridges between 
higher education and communities outside academia. Spurred by the Kellogg Com-
mission (1999) report on "The Engaged Institution," even universities with little 
history of outreach are establishing centers, colleges, and administrative positions to 
promote and support partnerships with the public. Of course, a commitment to 
outreach, or exporting knowledge from the academy to the community, is not com-
pletely new. For example, land-grant universities have operated with a mission that 
values public service that is now being re-interpreted and expanded to match more 
modem view of reciprocity and mutual benefit. Since the mid-twentieth century, 
many public universities in large cities have claimed an "urban" or "metropolitan" 
mission of which the most distinctive element is an interactive, knowledge-based 
relationship between campus and community. 

What is new, and what the Kellogg Commission report stresses, is a widespread 
recognition that knowledge and expertise can also flow from town to gown. The term 
engagement has been coined to reflect this emphasis on the reciprocity of university-
community relationships. Together, the participants address issues of mutual interest; 
together they determine the questions to be asked, the methodologies to be employed, 
and the means by which findings will be disseminated. 

Increasingly,- faculty are expanding their professional horizons by applying their 
expertise to problems beyond the university. In tum, they find their research, as well 
as their teaching, enriched by the collaborative process. Innovative methodologies are 
explored; new ways of sharing know ledge are developed. The result is a growing 
appreciation throughout academia of the scholarly value of engagement. Engaged 
scholars are expanding the perceptions of faculty roles and responsibilities and of the 
place of the community in higher education. 

The articles comprising this issue of Metropolitan Universities highlight efforts to 
make engaged scholarship central to academia. Faculty and administrators committed 
to their communities examine the structures and strategies their institutions use to 
promote and sustain a culture of engagement. The examples are as varied as the 
universities and communities themselves. While some integrate engaged research and 
teaching into academic units or colleges, others establish centers or cross-college 
learning communities. What all the approaches accomplish is to dispel the notion of 
community-based efforts as separate from scholarship. 

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Rosaen, Fishman, and Fear note that while the extensive focus on engaged scholar-
ship is a recent phenomenon, engagement has thrived for years on the margins of 
university life. Drawing from the experiences of scholars across Michigan State 
University, the authors construct a model of the "engagement interface," exploring 
the dynamics of the processes that underlie successful university-community partner-
ships. The paper also offers an example of the university's commitment to engaged 
scholarship: a learning community of faculty who help each other navigate the 
engagement frontier. 

Amen offers insights into the complexities of that frontier as he examines a failed 
effort at university-community collaboration. He describes attempts over a two-year 
period to forge partnerships among three community-based organizations and the 
University of South Florida. Amen examines the dynamics of the interaction, analyzing 
the roles played by the competing goals and conflicting decision-making procedures of 
each party. The inability of the groups to effectively partner provides lessons for others 
who are interested in applying their professional skills to public concerns. Guidelines for 
universities seeking to establish successful engagement programs are provided. 

That the academy and the community both have much to gain from successful 
partnering is amply illustrated by Shorr, Rothman, and Parks. Using the Temple 
Health Connection (THC) of Temple University's Department of Nursing as a case 
study, the authors identify the institutional structures and resources that are required 
to support and sustain engagement. The reader learns how the Temple Health Con-
nection works with neighborhood groups to seamlessly integrate research, practice, 
teaching, and community needs. 

Like Shorr et al., Schumaker and Woods describe a program that scrves as a model of 
engaged scholarship. The College of Public Affairs and Community Service is 
helping to fulfill the University of Omaha at Nebraska's mission to be of the commu-
nity, not simply in it. This interdisciplinary College promotes research and teaching 
partnerships with the Omaha community. The authors use insights gleaned from the 
College's thirty-year history of outreach and engagement to explore the ingredients 
necessary for sustained collaboration. 

Cope and Leatherwood discuss the challenges of maintaining a university culture that 
embraces engaged scholarship as readily as it does traditional research. The Univer-
sity of Illinois at Springfield was founded on a mission of outreach and community 
service. With the school's recent incorporation into the University of Illinois system 
comes a new emphasis on discipline-based research. The authors explore the difficul-
ties of, and opportunities for, fostering a scholarship of engagement within the 
context of these changes. 

Unifying a metropolitan university's research and engagement missions is the goal of 
the center described by Finkelstein. The Center for Engaged Scholarship at the 
University of South Florida operates from the premise that all scholarly work has 



potential applications beyond academia. The Center's activities help faculty to 
partner with community groups while also meeting the expectations of their depart-
ments and disciplines. Finkelstein notes that efforts to bring faculty activities into the 
public arena hinge on universities recognizing and rewarding engaged scholarship. 

Maser provides an example of how engagement with a public entity is incorporated 
into Portland State University's undergraduate curriculum. The author details the 
development of a service-learning course that combines academic rigor with a commu-
nity-based experience. As with the myriad engagement efforts profiled in this issue, the 
partnership is shown to benefit all participants. Maser notes that the key to successful 
collaboration is uncovering community needs rather than imposing an agenda. 

Together, the efforts recounted in the following articles provide a sampling of the 
many ways in which universities are bringing engagement from the periphery to the 
center of academic activity. A welcome consequence of the emphasis on engaged 
scholarship is a blurring of the traditional boundaries between research, teaching, and 
service (Boyer 1990). As communities demand greater accountability, particularly 
from their public institutions, universities are integr~ting engagement into every 
aspect of faculty work. The result is a true reciprocity of effort and influence that 
enriches academic inquiry as much as it does the community. 

References 
Boyer, E.L., Scholarship Reconsidered (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990). 

Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities, Returning 
to Our Roots: The Engaged Institution (New York: National Association of State 
Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, 1999). 

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