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Judith Ramaley's Keynote Remarks
Seizing the Moment:
Creating a Changed Society and University Through Outreach
Judith A. Ramaley
National Science Foundation1 and The University of Maine
October 7, 2002
This conference is built on two very interesting premises; first,
that university outreach can change society and second, that outreach
can also change the university. What is the mechanism by which this
mutual influence can occur? What does the university offer the community
and what does the community offer the university?
The short answer is---the opportunity to learn in the company of
others in a situation where learning has consequences.
Why Do Universities and Colleges Develop partnerships with
the Community?
In the past several years, the importance of incorporating civic
responsibility and civic responsibility into both institutional
missions and into the curriculum has acquired much higher visibility.
It is difficult to keep up with the articles and books being written
about civic responsibility, public scholarship, service-learning,
and community-based learning. Many colleges and universities are
now experimenting with a variety of approaches to
learning communities,
service-learning,
community-university partnerships,
collaborative research models
outreach, and
engagement
that bring together students, faculty and community participants
to work on issues that will
affect the quality of life in communities and create opportunities
for others.
Several years ago, in a report based on the experience of 120 colleges
and universities that had participated in the Pew Roundtables, The
Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of
Pennsylvania outlined three dominant themes that initiated and then
sustained a drive toward institutional change at these institutions
(IRHE 1996). They were
- The need to ensure continued financial viability and continued
support from external constituents.
- The need to focus on the enhancement of the curriculum and pedagogy
and on the fostering of successful student learning.
- The need to establish an institutional culture that is more conducive
to change and capable of overcoming barriers to action.
For many institutions facing these challenges, increasing faculty,
staff, and student community involvement that is mission-related
makes a great deal of sense. The goals of these strategies vary
but they tend to be mutually reinforcing.
The expected consequences of service learning, outreach and campus-community
partnerships include
- to prepare students to be good citizens by providing them ways
to help the institution itself be a good citizen;
- to foster and renew bonds of trust in the community, i.e. “social
capital” and to use the neutrality of the campus
to provide a common ground where
- differences of opinion and advocacy for particular points
of view can be addressed in an open and constructive way and
- where people with similar goals can come together and create
ways to work together.
- to create leadership development opportunities
for students and to foster a commitment to social and civic responsibility;
- to enhance the employability of graduates by
providing opportunities to build a strong resume and to explore
career goals;
- the promotion of learning both for students
and for community members;
- to play a role in creating capacity in the community to work
on complex societal problems;
- to design a more effective way for the campus to contribute
to economic and community development; and, in
many cases,
- as a means to accomplish a campus mission of service.
Over the past several years, I have participated in a number of
fora that have reflected upon transformational change.
All have focused in one way or another on campus-community relationships
and the creation of a new base of knowledge and a capacity to function
in a collaborative mode. One of the most powerful ways to create the
capacity for intentional and constructive change is to open up both
the university and its partners to the learning opportunities created
by engagement.
What is Engagement?
In its report on The Engaged Institution, the Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities defined “engagement”
as
the redesign of teaching, research and extension and service
functions to become more sympathetically and productively involved
with community concerns and needs.
Although the concept of engagement is still evolving, there are
several common elements that are beginning to emerge from the analysis
of the experiences of many colleges and universities with their
communities. A fully realized university-community relationship
has at the very least the following features:
- a common agenda and sharing of responsibility as well as
risk and reward;
- an ability to share power and resources equitably with the
community;
- the creation of extraordinary community-based/service-learning
opportunities for students in ways that require faculty and administrators
to be equally open and responsive to the interests and concerns
of their students and of the community; and
- the inclusion of community concerns as a legitimate set
of expectations about what the goals and successful outcomes of
a community-university partnership or engagement will be.
In sum, engagement is reciprocal, requires the creation of a shared
agenda and must be mutually beneficial to all participants. It should,
in short, generate something of real value in supporting community
development along with the enrichment of the student experience and
the deepening of the scholarly interest of both faculty and students
in the problems presented by the community experience.
The Characteristics of a Learning Organization
The people in a learning organization exhibit a number of shared
features and habits.
- A discipline of reflection (using real information rather than
perceptions)
- New patterns of conversation
- Adoption of manageable risk and a commitment to experimentation
- Creation of new information and new patterns of information flow
According to David Garvin (Garvin, 1995), a learning organization
is
- an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, interpreting and
transferring knowledge and at modifying its behavior to reflect
new knowledge and insights
- systematic problem solving
- experimentation with new approaches
- learning from past experience and past history
- learning from experiences and best practices of others
- transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the
organization
To this list, I would add that any form of organizational change
is a scholarly act (Ramaley, 2000b) and involves all aspects of
scholarship as it is now being defined: discovery, integration,
interpretation, and application approached with rigor, integrity,
and respect for those who will affected by the work.
- In a true learning organization, everyone is a learner and
can contribute to the quality and impact and value of the work that
the organization does.
- Integrated thinking and acting must occur at all levels
of an organization.
- In such an organization the role of the leader, at any level
is to build a shared vision, to bring to the surface and challenge
prevailing mental models and to foster more systematic patterns
of thinking (Senge, 1990).
The effect of this kind of leadership is to cause people to explore
their assumptions and either validate them or work on more effective
replacements for their earlier ways of thinking about the institution
and its purposes.
What Kind of Democracy Shall We Work Towards?
Guarasci and Cornwell (Guarasci & Cornwell, 1997) call for a
new working model of democracy, “a wholly different ideal
of the democratic community in which both difference and connection
can be held together yet understood to be at times necessarily separate,
paradoxical and in contradiction to one another.” In this
new democratic accommodation to our growing diversity and multiplicity,
we will need to build a society in which any individual “may
hold many sub-identities at once and in which power, prestige, and
social standing are multiplicitous and nonhierarchical.” We
must simultaneously be connected and distinct and singular. An educational
institution can model this broader and more inclusive concept of
democracy and civic virtue. This is what we mean by calling colleges
and universities to exercise their civic responsibilities.
Democracy, as well as education itself, must be a “way of
life” built on the concepts of growth and individuality and,
as John Dewey would say, an ongoing experiment in associated living.
The goal of education is not just to produce informed citizens but
more profoundly, to inculcate a democratic character through the
means of moral education as well as through what Dewey called “occupations.”
2In fact, for Dewey, all education is moral education
and in contemporary terms, to be a good citizen we must remain learners
and continue the experiment in associated living that we begin as
students. One of the results of the experience of engagement is
that the participants learn together, no matter what their age or
prior experience and expertise.
What is Civic Virtue?
Civic virtue has classically been defined as both knowledge of the
public good and the sustained desire to achieve it (Dahl, 1995).
Underlying this definition is the supposition that community leaders
have “both the opportunity and incentives to acquire the necessary
knowledge and the predisposition to act steadily on the basis of
that knowledge.” In this era of rapid information explosion
in the absence of understanding and wisdom, where might a citizen
acquire the knowledge required to exercise civic responsibility
today---in a learning alliance with a college or university. David
Mathews (Mathews, 1996) lays out a picture of a true civic society
for our era, ”Civil societies become democratic when there
are opportunities for people to learn the importance of listening
to all views, even those they dislike, of ‘working through’
conflicting approaches to solving a problem, and of building common
ground for action.”
What Does it Mean to be a Responsible Citizen?
We do not all agree on what it means to be a responsible citizen
or what the civic virtues were that we wanted to model and then
instill in our students. We do, however, all agree that public life
in this country is changing and that the very nature of the “public
realm” itself, where all of us come together to contribute
to the building of a just and peaceful community, is in need of
repair. We also agree that colleges and universities must be significant
players in creating such public spaces and in generating and modeling
civic responsibility---both on and off campus.
A college or university is, in many ways, a “public space,”
designed to help us develop shared purposes and pursue shared goals.
One element we all share is our commitment to undergraduate education
and the outcomes of the student experience. Where we differ is in
the extent to which we view research and public service as essential
means to accomplish our mission. An institution that wishes to be
engaged and responsible must rethink some fundamental issues, such
as how knowledge will be created in the future, what the role of
faculty will be, what the goals of the curriculum ought to be, how
the curriculum should be designed to foster civic responsibility,
and how to form and then sustain meaningful, long-term alliances
and partnerships that can promote community capacity to work in
democratic ways. The answers to these questions at a research university
may differ from the responses of a private liberal arts college,
a regional university, or a community college, but we all need to
find answers that authentically reflect our mission and purposes.
- What does it mean to honor our avowed mission to prepare
our students to lead creative, productive and responsible lives?
- What does it mean to renew our democratic way of life and
reassert our role of social stewardship as “vital agents and
architects of a flourishing democracy?”
- How will a commitment to civic engagement and civic responsibility
manifest itself in the daily life, structure and decisions that
we make on our campuses?
- How will the experience of engagement affect the community?
What does it mean for a College or University to Embrace its
Civic Responsibility?
An institution that embraces its civic responsibilities sets itself
the goal of playing a role in generating a renewal of democracy through
the expectations we have of ourselves as scholars and administrators,
our aspirations for our students and the nature and intentions of
our own institutional relationships with the broader society of which
we are an integral part. The results of this commitment are both tangible,
in the form of actions that address specific community-identified
problems and intangible in the form of the practice of the habits
of learning and interaction that our concept of democracy requires
of us.
The most fundamental means by which any educational institution can
enhance civic responsibility is (1) to find a means to link learning
and community life through the design of the curriculum and (2) to
serve as a center and resource for community building on the community’s
terms. Beyond these fundamental means, each institution can use its
distinctive strengths based on its traditions, institutional history
and resource base to contribute through scholarship and outreach or
engagement to the strengthening of community life and community capacity
to identify and solve problems. In all cases, what the institution
is doing is helping its students, its faculty and staff and the citizens
of the communities it serves learn how to make informed choices together,
an essential skill of civic responsibility and a core competence of
a civil society (Mathews, 1996).
The Role of Partnerships in Economic and Community Development
As we enter a new century, we can discern the outlines of a new
approach to regional development elicited by the increasingly multidimensional
and interrelated challenges facing communities and regions. Collaborations
and long-term partnerships are especially appropriate as a means
for addressing the reform of large-scale systems, such as education,
health care, public safety, economic development and job creation,
corrections and social services or workforce development that face
communities today. At the same time, the experiences of partnership
nurture core democratic skills. There are a number of lessons to
be drawn from the partnerships that have been formed in recent years.
At its best, any partnership regardless of the reasons for its existence
is at heart a learning collaborative or learning community that
behaves in the ways that any learning organization behaves. Like
any such entity, a good partnership
- Promotes a discipline of reflection (using real information rather
than perceptions)
- Encourages new patterns of conversation that bring university
and community participants together in new ways
- Permits a community to accept a manageable amount of risk and
a commitment to experimentation
- Creates new information and new patterns of information flow
- Each partnership has unique elements shaped by the history,
capacity, cultures, missions, expectations and challenges faced
by each participating group or organization. What must remain as
a constant, however, is that any partnership must be based on the
academic strengths and philosophy of the university. The other constant
feature must be the fact that the needs and capacities of the community
must define the approach that the University should take to forming
a partnership.
- An ideal partnership matches up the academic strengths and
goals of the University with the assets and interests of the community.
- There is no such thing as a universal “community.”
It takes time to understand what elements make up a particular community
and how people experience membership in the community. It is not
easy to define who can speak for the community just as the University
itself is not monolithic. Often partnerships are fragmented by competing
interests in the community itself.
- Unless the institutional as a whole embraces the value and
validity of engagement as legitimate scholarly work and provides
both moral support and concrete resources to sustain it, engagement
will remain individually defined and sporadic. Such limited interventions
cannot influence larger systems on a scale necessary to address
community issues.
- It is important to take time to think about what the University
actually can bring to a partnership. Universities with limited research
capacity and few graduate programs will find it difficult to provide
the kinds of applied research and technical assistance that many
communities need. Sometimes it is possible to make an alliance with
a research university to broker and focus the research interests
of faculty and graduate students on local problems. If sufficient
research capability is not available, it is best to consider engagement
as primarily a function of the curriculum.
- A good collaboration will continue to evolve as a result
of mutual learning. To be successful, a collaboration should be
built on new patterns of information gathering, communication and
reflection that allow all parties to participate in decision-making
and learning. This requires time and face-to-face interactions.
- Some communities are being partnered to the point of exhaustion.
It is often necessary to identify ways to help community organizations
and smaller agencies create the capacity to be an effective partner.
- The early rush of enthusiasm can be replaced by fatigue
and burn out unless the collaboration begins early on to identify
and recruit additional talent to the project or the collaboration.
This is true both within the University community where a few dedicated
faculty cannot be expected to carry the entire engagement and civic
responsibility agenda and within the broader community where a small
number of community leaders and volunteers cannot be expected to
handle a sustained effort over time. Both the university and its
partners need to find ways to involve a truly representative cross-section
of the talent in the community.
- Like any other important effort, community partnerships
must be accompanied by a strong commitment to a “culture of
evidence.” It is important to keep a running assessment of
how well the partnership is working from the point of view of all
participants.
The Realities of Community-based Work
It is important for university people who are marching out to engage
to take a moment to think about how outreach may be experienced by
their community partners.
It is a challenge to put together healthy and effective partnerships
involving higher education, government and community members.9 The
practical realities of building the framework and foundation for
a healthy partnership often escape the notice of leadership. It
is worth taking time to talk with people who do this kind of work
and learning from them what it takes to make a collaboration thrive.
- It takes time, much more time than you might expect to build
trust and to open up genuine communication across differences in
social status, education, culture and experience. It is often best
to bring people together first and build an agenda later through
dialogue and exploration. Asking people to react to a draft prepared
beforehand will disenfranchise them and probably drive them away
because they think the agenda and the purpose of the group “is
a done deal.”
- People who are accustomed to different kinds of interactions
and a quick pace of decision-making often have trouble if things
are muddy and confusing and it seems to be taking forever to work
out goals and strategies. It is common at such times for people
with higher education, or government experience to leap immediately
to a hierarchical model in which the participants are assigned roles
such as chairperson. Hierarchies do not tap the natural leadership
and responsibility of members of the group.
- It is important to seek to tap the natural leadership capacity
of group members and draw out what they can contribute. Remember
to recognize and drawn upon the tacit knowledge that comes from
the experience of the community members of the group. They think
about and live the issues all the time; other participants from
higher education, government or business do not.
- Groups that do not have a shared culture or agreed upon ways
of managing group clashes can be easily disrupted by one or more
strong individuals or someone acting out of a strong personal agenda.
At times like this, consider breaking the group into smaller subunits
with specific tasks and then carefully introduce the group to new
problem-solving skills.
- Model genuine inclusion in all phases of a partnership. Do not
get very far into a process before including participants from other
organizations or the community. Think about how to pick people you
will invite to participate.
- Avoid the limitations of the “golden rule”, namely,
the partner that has fiduciary responsibility for managing the resources
contributed to the project will tend to try to fit the project into
forms that are measurable. Often these requirements shape the discussion
and the terms of engagement in ways that are not effective responses
to both the needs and assets of the community involved and impose
a worldview on a group that is only familiar and comfortable to
some of the participants.
Creating Conditions that Support Meaningful Involvement in
Community Service and Support for an Engaged Campus Model
Significant change to incorporate a strong community base for research
and education requires (1) the possibility of reward or benefit for
faculty and staff; (2) individual influence and inspired leadership
throughout the institution, not just at the top; (3) an institution
that is responsive to the needs of the community it serves; (4) educational
planning and purposefulness that recognizes the value of active and
responsible community service that has a real community impact; (5)
a willingness to adopt a shared agenda and a shared resource base
over which the institution has only partial control; and finally,
(6) the capacity to change.
Regardless of local circumstances and institutional traditions and
history, there are a few conditions that must be in place for a community-based
strategy to work.
First, community-based work must be valued as a meaningful educational
experience and a legitimate mode of scholarly work.
Second, the evaluation of faculty and student work must include rigorous
measures of the quality and impact of community-based scholarship,
and professional service must be recognized as a component of staff
work as well.
Third, mediating structures must be provided to help faculty and students
identify community-based learning and research opportunities and technical
support must be available to help faculty and students use these opportunities
and assess the results of such programs, both from their own point-of-view
and from the perspectives of the community and its priorities and
experiences.
Fourth, opportunities must be provided for faculty, staff and students
to develop the skills to participate in research and curricular programs
in a collaborative mode with partners from different academic disciplines
and with significant community involvement.
As the Presidents’ Fourth of July Declaration on the Civic
Responsibility of Higher Education made clear:
We have a fundamental task to renew our role as agents
of democracy. This task is both urgent and long-term.
What Might be the Impact of Engagement on the University Partner?
The experience of engagement will become the pathway to a fresh interpretation
of the 21st century university. This conception rests on a rethinking
of the core of the academy---namely, the nature of scholarship itself.
During its examination of the future of this nation’s state
and land-grant institutions, the Kellogg Commission on the Future
of State and Land-Grant Universities reframed the classic triad of
research, teaching and service into a new framework of discovery,
learning and engagement. The reason for doing this was
that the new terms describe shared activities, usually, but not always,
led by faculty, that have shared consequences. The older terms tend
to connote a one-way activity, generally conducted by experts. The
new triad works well for describing the range of ways in which a college
or university can incorporate good citizenship into its traditional
work and move from an expert-centered model to an engagement model
of partnership with the community.
Discovery can encompass community-based scholarship
and the development of new knowledge through collaborations with community
participants. Learning can be done in a way that
links educational goals with the challenges of life. As John Dewey
wrote, “Education is not preparation for life. Education is
life itself.” Common forms of engaged learning are service-learning
and problem-based learning, both utilizing community issues as a starting
point for accomplishing educational goals. Engagement
can be achieved through community-university alliances and partnerships.
All three of these classic elements of campus life---discovery, learning
and engagement---can be conducted in an “engaged mode.”
Whether it is discovery, learning or engagement, the activity can
be community-based. It can have shared goals that link the mission
of a college or university with the goals of the community participants
as well as an agreed-upon definition of success that will be meaningful
to the institution and the community. An engaged activity can also
be supported by a pooling of resources across sectors of the campus
as well as within the community. When these features are present,
the resulting partnership is likely to be mutually beneficial and
can build the capacity and competence of all parties.
There are a number of lessons to keep in mind when developing sustainable
partnerships that can support discovery, learning and engagement
in community settings. (Holland & Ramaley, 1998). As many of
us have discovered, it is not easy to work in a collaborative way,
but the rewards are well worth the effort. No other model affords
the same rich context for exercising the habits of good citizenship
or for exposing our students to the realties of the complexity of
a democratic way of life. It is also true, however, that unless
the institution as a whole embraces the value as well as the validity
of engagement as legitimate scholarly work and provides both moral
support and concrete financial resources to sustain this work, engagement
will remain individually defined by the interests of committed faculty
and sporadic in nature. Such limited interventions cannot influence
larger systems on a scale necessary to address significant community
issues. They also will not offer the stimulation and scope necessary
to involve a significant proportion of the student body in meaningful
public work. When embodied in the mission, values, structure, scholarly
agenda and educational philosophy of an institution, the concept
of engagement can be truly transformational. As the ACE/ Kellogg
Project on Leadership and Institutional Transformation explains
it (Eckel, 2002), transformation
- alters the culture of the institution by changing select underlying
assumptions and institutional behaviors, processes and products;
- is deep and pervasive, affecting the whole institution;
- is intentional, and
- occurs consistently over time.
Drawing upon both the traditions of the land-grant movement and
contemporary critiques of the land-grant university today, I would
propose the following working definition of the defining qualities
of a 21st century university. To avoid the connotations and assumptions
associated with the term “land-grant,” I will use the
term “engaged university” to describe the features of
an institution committed to service to society.
- The primary purposes of the 21st century engaged university
are to conduct research on important problems, ideas and questions,
to promote the application of current knowledge to societal problems
and to prepare its students to address these issues through a curriculum
that emphasizes scholarly work in both the liberal arts and in the
professions.
- Scholarly work consists of discovery, integration of new
knowledge into an existing discipline or body of knowledge, interpretation
to a variety of audiences and application of knowledge to a variety
of contemporary questions. In a land-grant university all faculty,
staff and students can and should engage in scholarly work, either
to address societal concerns or to strengthen the educational environment
or to promote effective use of campus resources.
- The faculty, staff and students will participate in diverse
forms of scholarly work at different times in their careers. No
single profile can properly accommodate disciplinary differences
and individual interests effectively.
- The classic tripartite mission of research, instruction
and service must support a full range of inquiry and application
both within the curriculum and research environments created by
the university and in field, community, and other applied settings.
The University cannot and must not be insular. Scholarly work that
involves instruction and research combined with service must be
valued, rigorously reviewed and effectively rewarded.
- Although many institutions are oriented to address directly
the social and economic problems of our society, the research university
is distinguished by the comprehensiveness of its academic mission
and its range of graduate and undergraduate programs and by the
effective integration of scholarship and service within both the
curriculum and the research mission, and by integral involvement
of students in the generation and application of knowledge.
- Success in the university of the future will be defined
by the rigor of scholarly work, by the quality of the educational
experience of undergraduate and graduate and professional students,
by the effectiveness of the partnerships that link the university
with the community, and by the impact of the institution on the
quality of life of citizens of the state, the nation and the world.
It is an exciting picture.
1 The ideas presented here are those of the author and
do not necessarily represent the official position of the National
Science Foundation
2When John Dewey wrote about “occupations,”
he was not talking about vocational education. He meant any activity
that engages the whole child and draws upon his or her natural interests
in the hopes of building genuine curiosity about intellectual matters
(Boisvert, 1998), p. 103)
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