Engaged Scholarship in Promotion and Tenure Policies

Engaged Scholarship in Promotion and Tenure Policies

at Penn State and Its Peer Institutions

Penn State defines engaged scholarship as out-of-class academic experiences that complement in-class learning. These student-centered experiences can be attained in many ways, including but not limited to, undergraduate research, internships, study abroad, study away, embedded travel courses, community-based learning, and service learning. Engaged scholarship is a specific type of student engagement, which President Barron has named one of his “Six Imperatives” that form a basis for the University’s next strategic plan.

Engaged scholarship matters to Penn State because these student-centered experiences:

• Contribute to academic success by increasing retention and completion rates, cultivating career development, and improving satisfaction with college (Astin & Saxe, 1998; Eyler, et al., 2001; Kuh, 2008; Moore, 2013; National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, 2012; Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005)
  
• Positively impact achievement of key learning outcomes, including integrative and ethical thinking and social responsibility (Astin, 1997; Astin, et al., 2000; Brownell & Swaner, 2010; Vaz & Quinn, 2014)
  
• Strengthen interactions with faculty, a key factor in college success, especially for historically underrepresented students (Cress, et al., 2010; Finlay & McNair, 2013)
  
• Enhance personal development, including building self-confidence, self-efficacy, intercultural understanding, and developing leadership and communication skills (National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, 2012; O’Neill, 2010; Engberg 2013; Paige et al., 2009)
  
• Cultivate life-long career success, including long-term employability, a dedication to life-long learning, happiness, health, and sustained wellbeing (Astin, et al., 2000; Hunter et al. 2012; Johansson & Felten 2014)

Despite the vital importance of engaged scholarship to Penn State students and to their success, evidence compiled by the University Faculty Senate indicates that only half of the university’s nearly 100,000[1] undergraduates currently participate in an engaged scholarship experience. The primary goal of the Engaged Scholarship Initiative is to provide every undergraduate student with at least one engaged scholarship experience by 2020. To do so, the Engaged Scholarship Initiative is focused on meeting the needs of students who are not already participating in engaged scholarship experiences, building upon the successes of students who do participate, and, most critically for this paper, sustaining and rewarding faculty and staff who support them.

Initially, it was assumed that an incentives-based program was the best way to induce greater participation in engaged scholarship activities by faculty and staff. This white paper details findings from a benchmarking exercise conducted in 2015 comparing Penn State’s policies to incentivize faculty and staff, especially tenure-eligible faculty, to participate in engaged scholarship activities with those of 49 peer institutions across the United States in order to synthesize a set of best practices. The paper first reviews prior work documenting university policies on engaged scholarship. It then describes the rationale for the benchmarking exercise and the methods employed, and reviews several key findings.

Prior Work

Despite the increasing popularity of engaged scholarship in university education, surprisingly little previous work has been done on the subject of university policies to incentivize engaged scholarship.

We were able to identify only three directly relevant pieces of prior work by other authors. Professors Julie Ellison and Timothy K. Eatman, under the auspices of the Imagining America consortium, authored a report that interviewed faculty about their experiences with “public scholarship” in the academy (Ellison & Eatman 2008). The authors found that promotion and tenure policies at the institutions of many respondents were not conducive to public engagement. They suggest that public scholarship requires better definition, and that university policies should be revised to acknowledge a “continuum of scholarship” that is more holistic than the traditional model. To the authors, this involves recognizing an expanded range of activities that count toward promotion and tenure, developing clear policies for how to document and present public scholarship for promotion and tenure purposes, broadening peer review, and encouraging junior faculty and graduate students to practice public scholarship.

Another relevant report published by the Education Advisory Board for the University Leadership Council addressed promotion and tenure issues for interdisciplinary scholarship (Friedman & Wardell 2010). Even though interdisciplinary scholarship is not always engaged scholarship, revising promotion and tenure policies to credit interdisciplinary work requires addressing a similar set of issues. The authors found that institutions needed to develop administrative infrastructure to support interdisciplinary faculty without drastically changing the tenure process or instituting additional layers of bureaucracy. Many institutions seemed reluctant to enact changes to reduce barriers to interdisciplinary work, such as traditional disciplinary journal publication requirements, but many institutions were supportive of increasing formalization of expectations of interdisciplinary faculty at time of hire. These findings apply just as much to faculty undertaking engaged scholarship activities as they do to interdisciplinary faculty.

Last is a 2014 report by a working group at the University of Massachusetts – Boston, entitled Advancing Community Engaged Scholarship and Community Engagement (Working Group for an Urban Research-Based Action Initiative, 2014). The authors envision a new administrative office devoted to community engagement to support funding of engaged scholarship projects and for coordination of engaged scholarship across departments. The report also suggests that the university revise its guidelines for personnel reviews and annual faculty reports to encourage and document engaged scholarship activities, and to create a university award for faculty engagement.

Benchmarking

As previously noted, the original assumption underlying this project was that an incentives-based approach to increasing participation in engaged scholarship activities focusing on promotion and tenure policies was the best tactic. To assess potential strategies for implementing such an approach, policies regarding promotion and tenure incentives for engaged scholarship were examined for fifty universities, including Penn State and various peer public and private institutions throughout the United States. A list of these universities is available in Appendix A.

It quickly became clear that there is a lack consistent terminology and clear definitions related to engaged scholarship and similar concepts in university promotion and tenure policies. A list of the various terms used for various practices related to engaged scholarship in the promotion and tenure policies examined can be found in Table 1.

Table 1: Terms for Engaged Scholarship and Related Activities (by frequency)

Some of these terms appear to be closely related with engaged scholarship – “community-based research”, “public engagement”, and “public scholarship”. Others, such as “extension” or “applied research” seem only loosely related. Critically, these terms are almost never defined in official university promotion and tenure policies, which has the advantage of allowing departments flexibility, but also leaves these provisions vague, and may make them difficult for faculty to interpret. Because of the absence of clear definitions of engaged scholarship-related terms in most promotion and tenure policies, this paper opts for a broadly inclusive approach to including such terms in the analysis.

Categories Credited

The first issue examined was the degree to which schools include any form of engaged scholarship-related activities in their promotion and tenure policies, and under which of the three main categories of promotion and tenure policy that credit falls (research, teaching, service). Table 2 summarizes these findings.

Table 2: Category of Credit at Review for Engaged Scholarship and Related Activities

Only two universities (4%) had policies demonstrating absolutely no clear evidence of credit for engaged scholarship and related activities, although a third university left the issue entirely up to the discretion of individual academic units. Half of the institutions credit it under research, just over a third credit it under teaching, and almost three-quarters credit it under service. Given that many types of external service involve engagement with the public, it is perhaps unsurprising that this is the most common place it is credited. Teaching credit often involves service-learning courses, extension education, or teaching “beyond the classroom.” Research credit typically relates to applied research or public scholarship in various forms.

Categories of Employees Credited

The second issue examined was that of which types of university employees are credited for their engaged scholarship-related activities (Table 3).

Table 3: Categories of Employees Credited for Engaged Scholarship and Related Activities

Almost all universities primarily credit tenure-track faculty for engaged scholarship activities. These include the two universities mentioned above who do not credit these activities, as well as a third that does not clearly state to which employees service-related policies apply. Twenty-eight universities (56%) also credit non-tenure track faculty. Only two of the fifty institutions credit staff for these activities.

Timing of Credit

Engaged scholarship-related activities can be credited at various points in an employee’s career: at hire, at annual review, at review for a promotion, and, in the case of tenure-track faculty, at tenure review. Results from an analysis of timing of this credit are found in Table 4.

Table 4: Time of Credit for Engaged Scholarship and Related Activities

Most universities (92%) credit these activities at promotion and tenure. Given that the focus of this analysis is engaged scholarship in promotion and tenure policies, this finding was expected. Thirty-eight percent of universities also credit these activities at annual reviews, which may provide additional encouragement for faculty to participate. Only nine university policies credit engaged scholarship-related activities at the time of hire.

Student-Centered Approach

Penn State’s approach to engaged scholarship is student-centered. Very few universities directly describe a student focus in their promotion and tenure policies related to engaged scholarship, but in an expanded search of universities’ online materials, eleven (22%) demonstrate a clear commitment to student-centered engaged scholarship. Two clearly do not demonstrate any evidence of such a commitment. For the remainder, no clear determination could be made.

Key Findings and Discussion

Although most of Penn State’s peer institutions provide some credit to faculty for activities broadly falling under the banner of public service and/or community engagement, few use the term engaged scholarship in their promotion and tenure policies. Moreover, such terminology is rarely clearly defined in policy documents, leaving it ambiguous for faculty and staff as to which types of activities will be credited. Relatively few institutions clearly demonstrate a student-centered approach to engagement.

Credit for engaged scholarship activities is most commonly credited as a service activity, although crediting it as a teaching or research activity is not uncommon. Crediting tenure-track faculty is much more common than crediting non-tenure track faculty or other university staff. This is a missed opportunity, as non-tenure track faculty and non-faculty staff together represent the largest proportion of university employees, come from diverse backgrounds, and have a wide range of skills and life experiences. For both tenure track and non-tenure track faculty, credit is more typically offered at faculty reviews than it is upon hire. This would be a potential avenue to target to expand engaged scholarship in the academy, as rewarding these activities at time of hire would raise the likelihood of hiring individuals who are interested in pursuing them.

Overall, the findings of this report suggest that promotion and tenure incentives may not be the best approach to increasing participation in engaged scholarship activities among faculty and staff. The policies reviewed were largely broad with little consistency and little if any specific guidance about unit- or department-level implementation, making it difficult to find a suitable model or synthesize best practices.

There are other reasons that an approach focusing on promotion and tenure policies may not be ideal to achieve the ultimate goal of giving all students the opportunity to participate in engaged scholarship-related activities. First, the promotion and tenure process has developed over many years, and different departments have chosen to implement it in the ways that work best for them. Imposing a top-down requirement would be a significant burden that would likely create problems for units and departments, not the least of which would be changing long-standing traditions in local culture. Second, non-tenure track faculty and staff can play an important role in expanding engaged scholarship opportunities for students, and tenure policies do not affect them at all. In fact, on a system-wide basis, only 48 percent of Penn State’s faculty are on the tenure track.

Moving forward, a student-based approach to increasing participation in engaged scholarship activities may prove a more effective option than a faculty and staff-based approach. It allows academic units and departments more flexibility in implementing the university’s engaged scholarship goals and puts the contributions of non-tenure track faculty and staff on more equal footing with tenure-track faculty.

Prepared by the Faculty and Staff Development Committee of the Council on Engaged Scholarship, October 23, 2015

Martha Aynardi

Deno De Ciantis (Co-Chair)

Jacqueline Edmondson

Nathan Frey

Nicola Gutgold

Angela Linse

Ruth Mendum

Peter Newman

David Retchless

Nicholas Rowland

Victoria Sanchez

Melinda Stearns

Jeremy Warner

Marcus Whitehurse

Brent Yarnal (Co-Chair)

References

Astin, A. (1997) What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Astin, A., & Saxe, L. (1998). How undergraduates are affected by service participation. Journal of College Student Development, 39(3), 251-263.

Astin, A., Vogelgesang, L., Ikeda, E., Gilmartin, S., Yee, G. (2000). How service learning affects students. Higher Education Research Institute. University of California. Los Angeles.

Brownell, J., & Swaner, E. (2010). Five High-Impact Practices: Research on Learning Outcomes, Completion, and Quality. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Cress, C., Burack, C., Giles, D, Jr., Elkins, J., & Carnes Stevens, M. (2010). A Promising Connection: Increasing College Access and Success through Civic Engagement. Boston: Campus Compact.

Ellison, J. & Eatman, T. (2008). Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University. Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship.

Engberg, M. (2013) The Influence of Study Away Experiences on Global Perspective-Taking. Journal of College Student Development, 54(5), 466-480.

Eyler, J., Giles, D., Jr., Stenson, C., & Gray, C. (2001). At A Glance: What We Know about the Effects of Service-Learning on College Students, Faculty, Institutions and Communities, 1993–2000. 3rd ed. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University.

Finlay, A., & McNair, T. (2013). Assessing underserved students’ engagement with high impact practices. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Friedman, D. & Wardell, D. (2010). Aligning Promotion and Tenure Policies to Promote Interdisciplinary Research. Washington, DC: The Advisory Board Company.

Hunter, M. S., Keup, J., Kinzie, J. & Maietta, H. (2012). The Senior Year: Culminating Experiences and Transitions. Columbia, SC : National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, University of South Carolina.

Johansson, C. and Felten, P. (2014). Transforming Students: Fulfilling the Promise of Higher Education. Baltimore, MD; Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kuh, G. (2008). High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Moore, D. T (2013). Engaged learning in the academy. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement (2012). A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education

O’Neill, N. (2010). Internships as a high impact practice: Some reflections on quality. Peer Review, 12(4), 4-8.

Paige, R., Fry, G., Stallman, E., Josic, J., & Jon, J. (2009) Study abroad for global engagement: The long-term impact of mobility experiences. Intercultural Education, 20, S29-S44.

Pascarella, E., & Terenzini, P. 2005. How College Affects Students: A Third Decade of Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Vaz, R. & Quinn, P. (2014). Long Term Impacts of Off-Campus Project Work on Student Learning and Development. Conference Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, p. 1-5.

Working Group for an Urban Research-Based Action Initiative. (2014). Advancing Community Engaged Scholarship and Community Engagement at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Boston, MA: 2014.

Appendix A: Universities Included in Benchmarking Analysis

Auburn University

California State University - San Marcos

Carnegie Mellon University

Colorado State University

Cornell University

Duquesne University

East Carolina University

Indiana University

Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

Iowa State University

James Madison University

Kansas State University

Memphis

Michigan State

Montana State University

North Carolina State University