Forum on Civic Engagement in Graduate Education
Yesterday we held a forum on "Civic Engagement and Graduate Education", cosponsored by the Office for Public Engagement, the Graduate School, the Career and Community Learning Center, and Minnesota Campus Compact. The forum was a warm-up for the Wingspread Conference "Civic Engagement in Graduate Education: Preparing the Next Generation of Engaged Scholars", to be held March 1-3, 2006.
I started the forum with an overview of my paper "Civic Engagement and Graduate Education: Ten Principles and Five Conclusions", which will serve as a basis for discussion at the Wingspread Conference. A link to the full paper is here. The main points are.
Principles
1: Connection with the public is crucial to the future of higher education, including graduate education and the contributions that graduate education can make to society.
2: Consciousness of the social meaning of scholarly work is an essential part of graduate education.
3: Graduate students want to make better connections between their scholarship and the real world.
4: Civic engagement has broad support from leaders in higher education.
5: Civic engagement is also encouraged by potent environmental factors.
6: Studies of graduate education emphasize the need for more civic engagement.
7: Engagement is based on scholarship, integrated with teaching and learning, and reciprocal with community partners.
8: Civic engagement is based on public scholarship, which can be local or
universal.
9: Civic engagement can enrich research and teaching.
10: Acceptance of civic engagement by graduate students and faculty requires support by all sectors of higher education.
Conclusions
1: National professional organizations should do more to recognize engagement as an intrinsic part of scholarship.
2: Rankings should take engagement into account.
3: Graduate deans and other central administrators should support, facilitate, and reward engaged scholarship.
4: Faculty should recognize the many ways it is in their best interest to value
engaged scholarship.
5: Graduate students should recognize their own interests in civic engagement and, if necessary, take things into their own hands.
In the next post I'll describe some of the discussion of these and the many other ideas that arose at the forum, deftly moderated by Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Gail Dubrow.
For now, I'll just note one cogent comment from the audience: There should be a Principle 0, asserting that public research universities exist to serve the public. Goes without saying, but it should have been said.