Why this blog?
There are many ways to approach public engagement in academia. Perhaps the most prominent approaches are those that view it as a subject in its own right, with a theoretical and practical base that needs thoughtful scholarly presentation and debate. Harry Boyte and Peter Levine are prime exponents of this approach.
My motivation in this blog and in my role as Associate Vice President for Public Engagement is more pragmatic. My contention is that public engagement pervades virtually everything we do at a public research university like the University of Minnesota, but that most faculty and students don't make the connection. Therefore, what I've been trying to do is to find and publicize examples of engaged teaching, scholarship, and outreach that sample the amazingly wide range of activities at a university such as ours.
The challenge is not so much to do more public engagement, though that would not be a bad idea. The challenge is rather to help people within the university realize the public importance of what they're doing; to get them to value and reward the engaged work that their colleagues are doing; to persuade students - especially graduate students - that engaged research and teaching are not detours on their career paths; and to point out that the increased range of interactions - both with community members and with university people from different specialties - that typically accompany engaged scholarship can enrich both academic and personal life.
Academics are used to dealing with generalities and abstractions. But all of us respond to, and learn from, good stories. That's what I'm trying to do: tell good stories about public engagement.