I've decided that the end of my term as Associate Vice President for Public Engagement at the University of Minnesota should also signal the end of my Public Engagement blog. I hope to stay involved with some aspects of engagement, and to do significant writing in this area. But my writing should be focused on those aspects, not on daily "news highlights".
Thanks for reading.
Yesterday I received an email announcing the 2007 Fellows of Echoing Green. According to its web site,
Launched in 1987, Echoing Green's mission is to spark social change by identifying, investing, and supporting the world's most exceptional emerging leaders and the organizations they launch. Through a two-year fellowship program, we help our network of visionaries develop new solutions to society’s most difficult problems. These social entrepreneurs and their organizations work to close deeply-rooted social, economic, and political inequities to ensure equal access and to help all individuals reach his/her potential. To date, Echoing Green has invested nearly $25 million in seed and start up grants to over 400 social entrepreneurs and their innovative organizations.
Twenty "Bold Ideas" projects were chosen, involving 25 Fellows. The projects span a broad range, of which some flavor can be gained from this listing of the first four:
On the web site, profiles of each of the projects and fellows are given. Most, but not all, of the fellows appear to be recent graduates, often with advanced degrees. It's heartening to see these talented people use their talent and training to address "society’s most difficult problems."
As I prepare to leave my position as Associate Vice President for Public Engagement and return to the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics, I've been thinking about why I got involved in Public Engagement. Some part of the answer was expressed in a couple of paragraphs from a chapter I wrote a few years ago:
Bloomfield, V.A. "Public Scholarship: An Administrator's View", Ch. 10 in Peters, S.J., Jordan, N.R., Adamek, M. and Alter, T.R. (Eds.) Engaging Campus and Community: The Practice of Public Scholarship in the American Land-Grant University System. Dayton, OH: The Kettering Foundation Press (2005)
I have spent my entire academic career in major public research universities: B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley; Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison; postdoctoral at the University of California, San Diego; and faculty positions at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Therefore I have grown up imbued with the spirit that public research universities are among the most important and contributory institutions in our society. They provide high-quality but relatively inexpensive teaching to a broad range of talented students, they produce much of the research and scholarship on which our modern civilization depends, and they translate this teaching and research to direct service to their society. Given these essential contributions, it has been puzzling and painful to recognize the steady decline in support (as a fraction of state budgets, not in absolute terms until very recently) of public research universities over the past 20 years. I believe that this relative decline in public support can be largely attributed to increasing neglect-on the parts of both the university and society-of the real meanings of civic engagement and public scholarship.
At the University of Minnesota my administrative position is as Vice Provost for Research and Interim Dean of the Graduate School. I also have maintained active teaching and research as a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics. This mix of responsibilities, while demanding, assures that I keep uppermost in mind the raison d'etre of a university-to discover, communicate, and apply knowledge-rather than focusing on administrative issues for their own sake. At the same time, my area of research and teaching-molecular biophysics, specifically the polymer physics of DNA-is hardly the sort of stuff that immediately leaps to mind when one thinks of civically engaged scholarship; so I have been forced to confront some questions of definition that I think are crucially important to the proper understanding of public scholarship. To state briefly a point that I will elaborate later, I believe that essentially all research and scholarship being carried out at modern research universities is deserving of recognition as public scholarship. Lack of understanding of this point, by both the public and the universities, is at the root of declining support for public research universities.
Those last two sentences, I still think, are key.
A recent University of Minnesota news story told about a successfully-completed design project by architecture students in our College of Design, to provide sanitation relief for New Orleans refugees and disaster victimes. To quote from the story:
The Clean Hub is a portable, self-sustained structure that provides basic sanitation services. It contains a composting toilet and a 4,400-gallon water storage tank that is replenished by a rooftop tarp that catches rainwater. Electricity from solar panels powers the lights, water filtration system, and composting toilet.
Under the direction of John Dwyer and Tom Westbrook, students in the Studio 4 architecture class started with an empty shipping container and, over the course of a semester, turned it into a structure capable of providing relief for people in great need.
"This will be the only functioning [sanitation] infrastructure in the whole neighborhood," said Dwyer.
According to Westbrook, the students were aided by the donation of many materials for the clean hub, including the shipping container itself, all of the steel, the toilet, solar panels, water tank, water filter, and sink. And the Clean Hub almost exclusively uses recycled or everyday materials, meaning the hub could be mass produced with relative ease and constructed on site using nearby materials.
For students, it was a chance to put their talents to work in producing something that may have a lasting legacy; in fact, FEMA is interested in the students' prototype.
Aaron Wilson, who worked on the "tank team," said that after three years of learning through books, it was wonderful to build something that will be used somewhere. "It was an amazing learning experience," he said.
"The students worked far more than they should have for this level of class," added Westbrook. What they were able to produce was "nothing short of a miracle."
An animation of the Clean Hub prototype taking shape can be seen at http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/movie/perspective.html.
Medical and dental students at the University of Minnesota are not just learning their professions, they're learning how their professions need to fit into the life of the state. An article by Deane Morrison in today's UM eNews tells about Minnesota's Future Doctors program:
As an immigrant to the United States from Liberia in 2001, Georgette McCauley has seen more than her share of turmoil. But there's one thing in particular she would like to change in her home country: young women's lack of health information.
"I'd like to go back to Liberia someday and educate young women on how to prevent sexual disease and how to take better care of their bodies," says McCauley, who has just completed her freshman year at St. Mary's University of Minnesota.
She is one of 23 Minnesota college students in a new joint program of the University's Medical School and Mayo Medical School to help increase the numbers of minority, immigrant and rural doctors in the state.
Called Minnesota's Future Doctors, the program is the brainchild of two U medical students, Gareth Forde and Matt Fitzpatrick. It brings in high-ability students during the summer and the academic year to learn about topics like the science behind medicine and how to take the Medical College Admission Test. This summer's inaugural group has already toured the Mayo Clinic and UMD's Medical School, worked on a volunteer project, and shadowed doctors to see how medicine is practiced on a daily basis.
"[Forde and Fitzpatrick] wanted to create future classmates who were more reflective of Minnesota," says program director Jo Peterson. "This project aims at narrowing the disparity and increasing the percentage of persons of color.
"The reason that's important is that persons who work with doctors within their same cultural values [and] community of color feel they have better health care, and they continue to work with that doctor."
According to an AAMC report 2006 and Minnesota Department of Health 2007, percentages of physicians in Minnesota aren't representative of minority communities.
Today's posting is a contribution from Ben Winchester, of the Center for Small Towns at the University of Minnesota-Morris, a small liberal arts campus in the western part of the state.
The Center for Small Towns (CST), based at the University of Minnesota – Morris, has been quite successful over the years by regularly involving talented students in our small towns across western Minnesota. The involvement of faculty, however, has been episodic. To address this challenge, we received a grant from the Otto Bremer Foundation to establish a “Small Town Faculty and Student Fellows� program that connects regional development problems and/or issues with the research interests of UMM faculty. Three regional development projects are now underway this summer!
Project 1: Collaborative School Bus Routing
UMM faculty: Dr. Peh Ng, Professor of Mathematics.
The goal of this project is to develop models of school bus routes both within a school district and between five school districts in west-central Minnesota.
The project entails determining optimum models for vehicle routing across our area in a cost- and time-effective way. By determining the location and number of students in the dispersed areas, together with time, models can be built to determine routes, and flows, of student pickups. Mathematically, these are referred to as combinatorial problems. The solutions would allow our school districts to save transportation funds (at the approximate rate of $1.60 per mile) while at the same time providing an efficient solution to overlapping geographic areas brought about by open enrollment. The schools involved in this project are Chokio-Alberta, Clinton-Graceville-Beardsley, Cyrus, Hancock, and Morris.
Project 2: Skills, Careers, Employees and Employers
UMM faculty: Dr. Engin Sungur, Professor of Statistics.
The goal of this project is to identify gaps between employers in the region who have entry-level positions that will lead to higher-wage positions and those individuals seeking employment. Employers report they are unable to find workers who have the necessary skills to enter employment. Prospective employees report they are not able to find entry-level positions in the region. In order to build skills that qualify family members to hold better jobs within the region, it is imperative that we understand what skills are required for positions that allow individuals to move into high-demand, higher-wage positions, directly or through career ladders. This will be completed through interviews and/or a survey of employers, employees, and employee training programs.
The Jobs, Careers and Employability workgroup requested this project. This workgroup is a subcommittee of the Family Economic Success program provided by the West Central Initiative with funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The workgroup will identify a series of questions for employers, adult job seekers and K-12 organizations that provides data to better understand the current gap between the skills that current perspective employees present to the labor market with the skills currently required by employers. In this way, programs or other strategies can be developed to address the gap rather than making assumptions about the needed skills.
Project 3: The Value of Culture and Education
UMM faculty: Carol Marxen, Associate Professor of Education.
The goal of this project is to work with the Long Prairie-Grey Eagle High School to demonstrate the value of culture and education to the Hispanic community. It has been found that Hispanic students that finish high school generally do not pursue post-secondary educational opportunities. The research components of this project will develop curricular, co-curricular, and community-based integrative strategies. The objectives are to provide professional development opportunities for teachers, connect the community to the school to provide role models and mentors, as well as develop and implement a team teaching environment.
This application of knowledge is a perfect example of our land-grant responsibility in action. As our small towns and rural places have changed, we too must change the way we serve our neighbors – and do this in a way that contribute to the sustainable future of our region. For more information about these projects, or if you have any questions, please contact Ben Winchester at (320) 589-6451 or visit http://www.centerforsmalltowns.org.
Two interesting news items today, showing the range of University of Minnesota efforts in engaging with significant public interests:
U of M contributes to the successful recovery of the bald eagle
The bald eagle has been removed from the list of threatened and endangered species. …The Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota's College of Veterinary Medicine made significant contributions to that recovery and preservation effort.
Officials at the Raptor Center have played a key role in restoration programs, investigated the effects of lead poisoning, studied the incidence of chemical contamination in nestling eagles and contributed to habitat preservation. The Raptor Center has treated more than 1,600 eagles during its 30-year history and its work has been critical in providing disease surveillance in the raptor population.
Two U of M leaders to serve on the governor's Next Generation Energy board
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty ... announced his appointments to the NextGen Energy Board, including two University of Minnesota leaders. This new board was proposed by Gov. Pawlenty as part of his Next Generation Energy Initiative that puts Minnesota at the front of states leading the way toward our nation's energy future. The NextGen Energy Board will provide recommendations to the legislature and the governor about how the state can most efficiently achieve energy independence through agriculture and natural resource sustainability.
The University of Minnesota appointees are
Robert Elde,, dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Biological Sciences and the J. B. Johnston Land Grant Professor of Neuroscience in the department of neuroscience. He also chairs the executive committee of the Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment. Elde is appointed as a representative of the University of Minnesota.
Rob King, professor and department head with the University of Minnesota's department of applied economics. He has conducted research on a range of issues related to farmer cooperative formation and management over the past 20 years. King is appointed as a representative of the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture.
I was delighted to learn today that Cindy Gibson has begun her own blog, CitizenPost. Those of us who know and have worked with Cindy value her as one of the most important and productive members of the civic engagement community. Among many other things, she wrote and edited the report New Times Demand New Scholarship: Research universities and civic engagement, "a conference report [on] a collective initiative of representatives of research universities and Campus Compact to renew the civic mission of higher education."
As she writes in her introductory posting,
I do lots of things... write, research, analyze, synthesize, evaluate, communicate, and educate. And I've worked with all kinds of organizations. Right now, I'm doing all that under the auspices of my own consulting firm, Cynthesis Consulting, which specializes in public policy research and analysis, program development, strategic planning, marketing, and communications for nonprofit and philanthropic organizations across the country.
The public engagement blogosphere will be much enhanced by Cindy Gibson's voice. Welcome!
The University of Minnesota has a President's Emerging Leaders (PEL) program that each year chooses about thirty of our top Professional/Academic, Civil Service, and bargaining unit staff to work on five projects of U-wide importance under the sponsorship of U administrators. This year I've been privileged to work with such a group, with co-sponsor Carol Carrier, our Vice President of Human Resources, on "Staff Engagement in the University Community".
The rationale for the project is that staff represent a large proportion of our University community of 80,000 members, and have been major contributors to the Council on Public Engagement. Assessment is needed of staff attitudes toward public engagement, best practices that exist around staff engagement, and recommendations to increase staff engagement both inside and outside the University. The objectives of the project are to determine
The project, along with four others, was reported to the University of Minnesota Regents at their June meeting, and was presented in a poster session. For more information on this and the other PEL projects see the Office of Human Resources web site
Staff are such an important part of this and all other universities, so all our lives will be better and our institutions will be better able to serve society if they are fully engaged in our university communities.
The summer 2007 issue of M, the University of Minnesota’s “quarterly publication for all alumni, friends, faculty, and staff” has a nice article entitled “Making a difference: U students are helping to change the world…while they’re still in school”. It profiles a number of students and lists the different projects in which they’re engaged:
This is a striking set of examples of some of the ways that students are involved in public engagement activities that help both them and the broader community.
Yesterday and today brought a number of University of Minnesota news releases relevant to Public Engagement. They exemplify the marvelous diversity of activities that we -- and most other research universities -- have that connect strongly with important public issues and partners. Rather than writing something of my own, I'll just point you to four of them.
University of Minnesota's Konopka Institute to partner with Kwanzaa Freedom School
The University of Minnesota's Konopka Institute will partner with Kwanzaa Church and the Nia Imani Youth Development Center in North Minneapolis to bring the 2007 Kwanzaa Freedom School to the University of Minnesota campus.
The Kwanzaa Freedom School is a six-week, literacy-rich summer and after-school program designed to create positive learning environments for youth. Freedom School nurtures the belief that young people can make a difference in themselves, their homes and their communities. The program begins June 25 for the nearly two dozen high school students who will participate in Freedom School programs at the university this year. The sessions will be held two days a week for three hours a day and will harness the educational and outreach skills of the university. The Freedom School movement has its roots in the modern civil rights movement and is administered by the Children's Defense Fund. The curriculum is staffed primarily by college-aged young adults -- some of whom will be University of Minnesota students -- committed to community leadership and service to children. Read more...
U of M launches VIRTEx, a new program to promote higher education for youth
The University of Minnesota is launching a new program designed to engage high school students from diverse backgrounds in undergraduate and graduate education. VIRTEx, which stands for Vertically-Integrated Research Team Experience, creates research teams made up of a high school student, an undergraduate student, a graduate student and a faculty mentor to work on a research project over the summer.
Three research teams began projects on campus June 18. These teams will investigate schizophrenia, the role of emotions in political decision-making and discrimination and its effects on mental health. Participants will develop their academic skills and get some real experience in science. This exposure and hands-on participation promotes a deeper understanding of academic pursuits. Read more ...
U of M Center for German and European Studies to hold major health-care forum
The Center for German and European Studies at the University of Minnesota will present a forum on innovation in health care on Monday and Tuesday, July 16 and 17. Participants are experts from Germany and the United States, representing government, business, insurance, health care provider and health educators.
Innovation and change are at the core of medical treatment, technology and any good health care system. Minnesota has a track record of developing exciting new approaches to healthcare policy, while across the United States an unprecedented number of initiatives are being developed at the state and federal levels to improve healthcare. Dialogue between stakeholders from different but comparable national systems can highlight new opportunities. To that end, U.S. and German speakers -- including Germany's federal minister of health -- will present the positions of all stakeholders on innovative health care. Germany, for instance, recently overhauled its health care system and early results indicate that the reforms maintain quality and access while containing the growth of costs. Read more ...
U of M looking for citizen input on the environment - State leaders working with U of M officials to build a conservation plan for Minnesota
Safe water, more forests, the condition of state parks; the state of Minnesota wants to know what environmental issues matter the most to Minnesotans. And the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment has a Web site that allows residents to let their leaders know what they think.
The information gathered from the site will help form the Minnesota Statewide Conservation and Preservation Plan, which is being developed by the Institute on the Environment with consulting partners Bonestroo and CR Planning. The plan will chart a long-term course for safeguarding Minnesota's natural heritage. Read more...
Yesterday evening I attended a program entitled "Civic Minds: Civic Renewal" co-sponsored by the Citizens League and the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Two Humphrey Institute Policy Fellows shared findings from a 2006-02007 project that investigated good citizenship in Minnesota, and Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, also on the panel, gave his views about public engagement in Minnesota.
The ensuing discussion covered a wide range of topics, but one that particularly struck me was the role of community radio stations and newspapers and the Internet for telling true stories about matters of civic importance, at a time when the major news media are seen as increasingly irrelevant and in the control of moneyed interests.
Which led me to think about I.F Stone, whose Wikipedia biography characterizes him as "an iconoclastic American investigative journalist." The Wikipedia article links to a fine article, "I.F. Stone" by Victor Navasky, The Nation July 21, 2003, which summarizes Stone's work and personality in engaging detail. Of particular relevance to our topic is Navasky's description of Stone's working method:
... although he never attended presidential press conferences, cultivated no highly placed inside sources and declined to attend off-the-record briefings, time and again he scooped the most powerful press corps in the world.
His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congressional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line, examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documentation of incursions on civil rights and liberties. He lived in the public domain. It was his habitat of necessity, because use of government sources to document his findings was also a stratagem. Who would have believed this cantankerous-if-whimsical Marxist without all the documentation?
Navasky quotes the journalist Andrew Kopkind about the impact of I.F. Stone's Weekly:
it "organized the consciousness of its readers somewhat in the way a community action group organizes a neighborhood: for awareness, understanding, action." In other words, it mobilized and nourished a community of resistance.
Given the amazing access the Web affords to public documents, position papers, and the like, the information gathering of an I.F. Stone would now be considerably easier, as would be the dissemination of his analysis. His extraordinary intelligence, memory, insight, and determination would be harder to duplicate. But not impossible, particularly if done by a collaborative of committed people. I guess what I'm describing as blogging with depth, persistence, and objectivity: evidence-based but also with a point of view. Without it, it's hard to see how we'll get the honest information and informed democratic perspective we need to maintain a meaningful citizenship.
My colleague at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, Nick Jordan, is lead author on an important Environment Policy Forum in the June 15, 2007 issue of Science, entitled "Sustainable Development of the Agricultural Bio-Economy". The other authors are from Louisiana, Kansas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and California; from a range of disciplines; and from research and policy institutes both inside and outside the academy.
The paper begins by noting that "A 'bio-economy' based on agricultural biomass is emerging in the United States that offers an avenue toward energy independence and a more 'green' economy." Focus is currently on very large-scale farming of monocultures such as corn and soybeans, but this approach suffers from various unfavorable environmental impacts, requirement of large subsidies to close the gap between low commodity prices and cost of production, and growth of farm size precluding entry of new farmers thus "harming rural communities socially and economically". The potential large-scale conversion of corn to biofuel is only exacerbating these problems.
Jordan and his coauthors advocate instead the potential virtues of "multifunctional production systems". They write "Agricultural multifunctionality is defined as the joint production of standard commodities (e.g., food or fiber) and 'ecological services.' Examples of the latter include increased recreational opportunities in agricultural landscapes and protection of biodiversity and water quality."
They propose creation of a network of research and demonstration projects, in watersheds of medium size and "managed by groups that encompass multiple stakeholders and levels of government" , to investigate tradeoffs between such factors as biomass production and wildlife habitat, and to provide a basis for revised federal farm legislation that will best support both biomass production and other desirable outcomes.
What impresses me about this work is how it exemplifies the best of engaged scholarship: a crucial societal issue, addressed in a highly multidisciplinary way, using expertise both within and outside the university.
I spent a couple of hours today at the Powderhorn Phillips Cultural Wellness Center in Minneapolis, at a presentation and discussion of how communities can obtain support from philanthropies using cultural rather than academic approaches.
There were strong challenges to the presumed academic approach of objectivity, personal distance, striving for individual reputation, etc. By contrast, the community cultural approach was stated to rest on history, knowledge based in community elders, group consultation, etc.
Without wishing to oversimplify a deep and important discussion, I maintain that there's more concordance between the academic and cultural approaches than may be immediately apparent. At base, academia is also a culture, with its own customs, expectations, initiation ceremonies, and even elders: leaders of the disciplines, people with long experience and deep acculturation, who embody the history and set the standards of the disciplines. They are both respected and challenged by the young people in the field, and I suspect that challenge by the young is not unknown in traditional cultural communities.
We were also told that discussion in traditional cultural communities values "symbiosis" and related concepts that emphasize collaborative and integrative approaches. I think there's a parallel with academia's growing valuing of "multidisciplinary" approaches, integrating rather than dissecting to help solve the complex problems that we face.
There are differences between traditional and academic cultures, to be sure, but I think there are more similarities than meet the eye - enough to form a strong foundation for fruitful mutual exploration and collaboration.
Scott Peters has written an interesting paper, "Changing the Story About Higher Education's Public Purposes and Work: Land-Grants, Liberty, and the Little Country Theater", #6 in Imagining America series of position papers on "Foreseeable Futures". The paper is based on Peters's keynote address for the joint Imagining America/Outreach Scholarship conference in 2006. An abstract is available at http://www.ia.umich.edu/position-papers.html.
Peters, on the faculty at Cornell University, makes a compelling case that the history of the relations between land-grant universities and the rural communities they have served is much more complicated than we generally realize. He makes that case through three contrasting stories, or narratives.
According to the "heroic meta-narrative",
… land-grant colleges democratized higher education in three ways: first, by providing the common people with access to a college education… ; second, by expanding and equalizing the curriculum to make the professions of the common people … as worthy of study as the classics and the professions of elites; and third, by not only developing but also actively extending new scientific knowledge, technologies, and expertise. … [E]ach of these purposes is viewed as serving mainly … technical, economic, and material ends.
In the "tragic counter-narrative",
… most farmers play roles as futile resistors or hapless victims [of the modernization of agriculture in service of a "cheap food" policy], while land-grant faculty are cast as technocratic experts, colonizers, and oppressors. This is not a story of the "democratization" of higher learning, but rather its opposite.
Noting that both of these narratives have significant short-comings, Peters constructs a third, "prophetic counter-narrative", based on the writings of Liberty Hyde Bailey (founding Director of Cornell's agricultural extension program in 1894, and later Dean of Cornell's College of Agriculture). Peters points out that Bailey, who is viewed either as hero or villain in the first two narratives, had a much broader view of the public purposes of land-grant colleges.
… Bailey viewed the pursuit of a "self-sustaining" agriculture as a multi-dimensional project that had technical, scientific, moral, economic, cultural, political, and even spiritual dimensions. According to him, this project would both require and result in the development of a new rural civilization "worthy of the best American ideals" [not just material well-being, but also] the democratic ideal (and practice) of self-rule, through which the common people, functioning as citizens, work as cooperative producers not only of the commonwealth, but also of the culture and politics of their own neighborhoods and communities.
There's lots more to Peters's paper, which deserves wide reading and discussion. But it's obvious that the prophetic counter-narrative, assuming it moves forward, is a perfect example of what we hope public engagement will achieve.
We talk earnestly about the importance of cultural awareness in our interactions with communities, but do we really understand what that means? After reading Neither Wolf nor Dog by Kent Nerburn (New World Library, 2002, ISBN 1577312333), I realize how far short of understanding I am. To quote the review by Kevin Roddy from Booklist, reproduced on Amazon.com:
Readers looking for another red-man-departs-wise-words-to-white-man-to-lessen-white- man's-guilt will be disappointed by the tone and content of this work. Realists wanting a truthful, fiery, and, ultimately, cleansing dialogue between Indian and white will definitely want it. Nerburn reluctantly agrees to a meeting with Dan, a Lakota elder who asks him to construct a book from a motley collection of notes, diatribes, and political and social commentaries written over seven decades and kept in an old shoe box. Void of the hypocrisy rampant in many books that have whites adopting the ways of "the great spirit," Nerburn exposes the real truth, which whites are unwilling to face: that in "the hunger to own a piece of the earth, we had destroyed the dreams and families of an entire race." Joined by a dog named Fatback, Dan gives Nerburn the ride of his life as they cross the vast Midwest in Dan's Buick. Along the way, Dan alternates between rage and melancholy, and Nerburn between shame and confusion. Nerburn unintentionally touches nerve after nerve and elicits an almost unbearable flood of anguish and despair. The truth revealed in this book will be difficult for most whites to face, but it is painfully necessary if healing is ever to begin.
When we wonder why it's so hard to enlist American Indian students in our minority student programs, or to deal with the issues of poor health and poverty in Indian communities, we might begin by reading this book. It doesn't point to any easy solutions—or any solutions at all, for that matter. But it gives a much deeper view of the nature of the problem: at root a lot more ours than theirs.
I'll be traveling for the next couple of weeks, so no more postings until after June 10. Thanks for reading
Harry Boyte and Dennis Donovan teach Public Affairs 1401: "Community Organizing Skills for Public Action" in the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota. The course description reads
This is a hands-on introduction for undergraduate students wanting to develop skills, confidence, and knowledge to make positive change in public affairs. It shows how to get past the culture of critique and pessimism that often dominates in higher education. It acquaints students with hopeful examples of successful citizen organizers and organizations working to tackle tough public problems, from racism to teen pregnancy, failing schools to environmental degradation. The course will educate students about a new, broad movement for civic revitalization beginning to stir in Minnesota, and how students can make contributions to it. In PA 1401, students will gain concepts and practical skills such as thinking politically, forming partnerships across lines of difference, understanding diverse self-interests, mapping power, and knowing about the culture, history and social networks needed to make change.
Harry gave me copies of some of the Final Reflection papers, and I present excerpts here, with the permission of the students.
Before enrolling in your class I did not consider myself to be very political. This is not because I did not have any interest in politics, which I did; it was more because I was always taught that politics were not something to be concerned with. Through this class and our discussions I have come to find that politics are not a taboo subject. Politics affect society and our everyday lives and to not be concerned with, or participate in them is detrimental to our society and our personal lives. In a way I am kind of agitated by this class - but agitation is good, right? I am agitated because now I find myself interested in participating in my community. I feel that because of this class my lifestyle and attitudes have changed. I know that this may sound drastic, but I do feel very affected by this course. Maybe it will be most helpful if I discuss what I have found to be the most influential aspects to me.
I must agree with you when you told us about people feeling powerless. I remember feeling saddened and maybe even a bit offended when you said this, but after further consideration, I found it to be painfully true. I did not want to think of myself as powerless, but reflecting on my life I realized that I would make excuses and find contentment in my everyday mediocrity. Now I find myself as shockingly quite competent. I feel not only like I can have a say in my community, but I also feel as though it is my responsibility to do so.
Honestly, the most important and blatantly obvious aspect that I took away from this course is the power and possibilities of people working together. I have never been in a class with such interesting and talented young people. Obviously you both can relate to what I am saying. It was a moving experience just to see people of my own age with so much potential and so much passion for changing our world. Like I stated in class, this course has given me a sense of pride in my generation. I no longer look in history books longing to have been a part of something meaningful and worthwhile because now I realize that I am a part of something meaningful and worthwhile. — Maggie Kalda
===== Last semester I took a course in global studies; I had to do a research assignment on shanty towns in Lima, Peru. It was one of the most depressing things I have learned about. When I studied slavery in junior high or the Holocaust in high school they were problems of the past…so as tormenting as they were to hear about, it was something I did not have to live with. But now in the present, billions of children are living in shacks and are drinking out of contaminated water. And if I were a pessimist, I would list the other thousands of problems in the world. In history books a hundred years from now children will be reading about these conditions and probably be appalled that people allowed their fellow mankind to suffer. I left my global cities class at the end of the semester with a heavy heart, feeling that the most I could do is sponsor a child and send them twenty-five dollars a month—because hey, saving one life is better than saving none.
I've always felt like making a difference in the world could only be done if you were Oprah, Brad Pitt, or the President. Like a lot of people, I always felt powerless, I always waited for a super hero to be elected and change things. …
I think something is stirring. I think there is a lot of energy—both positive and negative—out there, but I think eventually this huge movement is going to take off. I can feel it. And I hear you guys say all the time that we are making history, and that gives me chills too because I know you're right. — Kelly Heskett
===== When this class began, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Someone simply told me about a class called "Organizing for the Public Good," and told me that it would be amazing. I had no idea. I came into the class with the mentality that what I was about to experience was going to be challenging coursework, a lot of reading, and a lot of writing. What I actually experienced was a complete shift in the way I see the world and the way I live my life.
As a person, I had to reevaluate my beliefs. I had thought of power as something that was built through relationships, but I don't think I really believed it. As this class rolled onward, I began to truly believe it and it changed the way I see everything. … Instead of trying to gain power through control, we can gain power by sharing it and sharing responsibility.
When I realized that power wasn't what I thought it was, I also realized that I was a powerful person. For the first time, sitting in a position of power with a title didn't define powerful for me. For the first time in my life, I feel like I can really change things and really have an effect on the decisions that are made around me. For the first time I don't feel powerless to change the problems I see in the world around me.
What does it mean then to be a student and a citizen? I know it doesn't mean that I should go vote. It doesn't mean that I need to choose a political party and rally behind their flag. It doesn't even mean that I have to choose a political issue like abortion or gay rights and fight for it with all my energy.
What it does mean is that I am the expert and I am the activist. I am not waiting for other people to fix the problems I see, I can fix them myself and with those around me. As a student, I realize that I have agency and that I can work with others to get things done. It means that I can take power back for myself and return power to those around me. There is no "expert" who will take care of me; I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself. …
What does it mean to be citizen-students? It means we are going to change the world. — Alexander Fink
I'll bet we all wish we could have such impacts on the students in our classes. Perhaps if we put public engagement into what we teach, we would.
I've been dipping into Voices of Hope: The Story of the Jane Addams School for Democracy, the lovely book edited by Nan Kari and Nan Skelton, about which I wrote on May 1. The last chapter, by Kari, is entitled "Shaping Connections with Higher Education". It is a thoughtful account of how the Jane Addams School experience has broken down the distinctions between the roles and allegiances of people in the community and in college, how it connects college students with real life, and how it provides great service-learning and work-study experiences.
I began to wonder, however, how the Jane Addams School experience is relevant to the distinctive role of a research university like the University of Minnesota: to train graduate students to do cutting-edge research and develop their skills and insights about issues important to both scholarship and the broader society. Harry Boyte and I talked about this recently, and came up with a few ideas of what the JAS could provide:
Doing such research would require great skill and sensitivity so as not to reestablish the power differentials and class distinctions between community and higher education that the Jane Addams School community has so successfully broken down. That's the challenge—and the opportunity—of engaged scholarship.
A supplement to the May 2007 issue of TheScientist that just landed in my mailbox deals with "Autoimmunity: Diseases, Mechanisms, and Therapies". The scientific and medical challenges associated with autoimmune diseases (roughly 80 have been identified) are enormous, and it's asserted in the leading editorial that "the overall price tag for treating autoimmune diseases approximates that of cancer and heart disease. What is more, the chronic nature of autoimmune diseases drags whole families into crisis."
Perhaps it's this last factor---the devastating effects on families---that leads to the remarkable number of organizations for specific autoimmune diseases. The last two pages of the supplement list 24 such organizations---a "sampling of international associations, foundations, and societies"---largely organized and funded by patients and their families, that fund research, disseminate information, advocate for services, and even publish medical journals. A sampling of the sampling's web sites
shows the scope and influence of these organizations on the research and treatment of these diseases. Much of the research, and a good deal of the treatment, is done in university medical centers; but it is clear that these activities are strongly influenced by these public patient advocacy groups.
It's an important---if not always recognized---example of public engagement as defined by the CIC Committee on Engagement (2005): "Engagement is the partnership of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, …"
I just got the program for the 9th Annual MCH (Maternal and Child Health) Summer Institute on Addressing Health Disparities: Culture, Communications and Health, to be held July 24-25, 2007 at the Humphrey Center, University of Minnesota West Bank. According to the program,
This Summer Institute will focus on the role of health communications in reducing health disparities affecting women, children, families and communities. Exciting keynote speakers and in-depth breakout sessions will focus on issues of culture and health literacy; the implications of communications inequality; the health communication needs of specific communities of color; and new strategies to increase communication effectiveness. A special feature of the Institute is a sneak preview of the upcoming PBS documentary: “Unnatural Causes: Is Health Inequality Making Us Sick?"
The Institute objectives are listed as
This strikes me as very important, both practically and conceptually. Everything we have learned about working with communities tells us that clear, honest, culturally-appropriate communication is essential to effective public health efforts.
Harry Boyte (personal communication, 2007) argues convincingly that civic engagement is not just "an array of good deeds that can be simply enumerated, without qualitative differentiations", but instead that it is "a field of expanding research that needs to be employed in assessing the nature, quality, and impact of various forms of 'service' or 'voluntarism.' He continues
The most important point to make is that there is, in fact, an interdisciplinary field of public engagement, with parallels to other emergent fields in the past such as environmental studies or women’s studies. This makes “civic� or “public� engagement much richer and more intellectually rigorous than is suggested by simply a listing of voluntary and service activities. Indeed, advances in scholarship and research allow a good many distinctions and judgments. We know, for instance, a great deal about what kinds of experiential learning, pedagogies, and content make for robust, lasting civic and political engagements, knowledge, and inclinations. We also know a lot about what makes for effective deliberative processes in local communities and institutions, or sustained local civic culture change, or effective civic practice by professionals. Since the coin of the realm at research universities is the quality of research and knowledge generation and since special distinction goes to those who are seen as key innovators in important areas of human discovery, it would seem especially important to make the case that there is an important emergent field here…
I'm very much in sync with these sentiments (though I wouldn't totally dismiss well-done volunteering) and would like to see them taken even further. For example, practitioners of community-based participatory research should document their claims that it yields better results (better-designed studies, better subject recruitment, better compliance, more honest responses) than standard community-based research. Practitioners of engaged agricultural research might document—quantitatively rather than anecdotally—that it yields better crops, happier farm families, higher farm income per hour worked, less soil erosion, etc., than traditional agricultural extension work.
Evidence-based demonstrations of effective methodologies and outcomes are rightly expected in medicine, science, and other fields of research. Should publicly-engaged scholarship be held to lower standards?
The Ginsberg Center at the University of Michigan is one of higher education's preeminent centers for civic engagement. Itts mission "is to engage students, faculty, and community members in learning together through community service and civic participation in a diverse democratic society."
One of the Ginsburg Center's most prominent activities is the sponsorship of the John Dewey Lectures. Although Dewey is generally identified with the University of Chicago and Columbia University, he began his academic career as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in 1884, and left for Chicago ten years later.
The Dewey lectures, begun in 2001 when Nancy Cantor was provost at Michigan, have featured some of the most prominent university voices in public engagement: Ira Harkavy (Penn), Judith Ramaly (Vermont), Barbara Holland (Indiana), George Sanchez (USC), Charles Payne (Duke), and the University of Minnesota's own Harry Boyte. Remarkably, Boyte has been the John Dewey lecturer twice, in 2003 and again in 2007.
The seven Dewey lectures are now online, at http://www.umich.edu/~mserve/faculty/lectures.html. They make rich reading.
Jim Kakalios, my colleague in the Physics Department at the University of Minnesota, has made a great name for himself as the author of The Physics of Superheroes, in which he discusses the possibilities (and impossibilities) of the physics seen in superhero comics and movies.
In an op-ed piece in today's New York Times, Jim writes about Spider-Man's nemesis, Sandman, in the latest hit movie "Spider-Man 3". He explains that, once you get past the villain’s mutation into living sand, the properties of sand that he exhibits are generally correct — and often counterintuitive.
I won’t attempt to summarize the discussion: read the piece, and see the movie. What I do want to point out is that this is a good (if unorthodox) example of engaged scholarship, in the sense of Boyer’s "scholarship of application". It takes a popular phenomenon, applies cutting-edge physics (yes, understanding the behavior of sand-piles, or marginally stable piles of granular material generally, is cutting-edge physics), and returns something educational and accessible. A nice partnership of popular and academic culture.
Kathy Draeger, Statewide Director of the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships, sent me a copy of a report, “Community vs. Corporate Wind: Does it Matter Who Develops the Wind in Big Stone County, MN?�, authored by Arne Kildegaard and Josephine Myers-Kuykindall in the Department of Economics, University of Minnesota-Morris. Some excerpts from the report’s Introduction set the stage:
Big Stone County on the western extreme of west-central Minnesota is in many ways emblematic of the challenges facing rural America in general, and the Great Plains in particular. Aging, declining population and stagnant agricultural incomes in many cases directly threaten the sustainability of communities. Often it is the high fixed-cost rural schools and other government and community institutions that feel the pinch first.
One of the few promising opportunities in the region is the possibility of commercial development of the wind resource—and in fact, in Big Stone County, there are presently several projects in various stages of development. …
Recently, a number of researchers have focused on how the development of wind takes place, and what consequences this has for local incomes and economic development. Wind developments can be categorized as either corporate- or community- owned. …
An increasing body of empirical research indicates that corporate and community wind development structures are not equal in terms of their local economic impacts, not limited to the owners themselves. In particular, mounting evidence points to the idea that community wind has greater economic impacts on local economies during the operational phase of the project, due to local spending multiplier effects associated with the higher income streams.
The study concludes
Our simple scenario analysis for a 10.5 MW project suggests that community wind has 5 times the economic impact on local value added, and 3.4 times the impact on local job creation, relative to a corporate-owned development. These numbers should probably be considered an upper bound on the differential impacts, since most projects in practice will involve an outside-the-region equity partner, or at the very least a discounted sale of the PTC.
The report is online at http://cda.mrs.umn.edu/~kildegac/CV/Papers/IREE.pdf. It was supported by IREE (Institute for Renewable Energy and the Environment) and the West Central Regional Sustainable Development Partnership. As Kathy Draeger says, “It is a wonderful example of University research supporting and empowering community owned renewable energy.�
Chip Peterson, a geographer in the University of Minnesota's Learning Abroad Center and a member of our Council on Public Engagement, sent me an interesting Op-Ed piece entitled “Community Geography� from the March 2007 issue of the AAG (Association of American Geographers) Newsletter. The article was authored by Don Mitchell from Syracuse University.
The article describes how the Executive Director of a hot food program in downtown Syracuse contacted the Geography Department to ask whether the department could help to create a “Syracuse Hunger Project� (SHP) to “map the face of hunger in the city�. He suspected that the locus of hunger in the city had shifted over time, but that the social services needed to respond had not followed that shift. The piece goes on to describe how a GIS course was reoriented to make the issue a class project, and how, when
… the students’ maps were presented to SHP meetings, the whole tenor of the conversation changed. Those who had been working on hunger forever began to look at the problem in a new way. They saw that indeed thee were large-scale shifts in the geography of poverty … without a similar shift in service provisions. But even more importantly, they began to apprehend the importance of finer-scale geographies… This resulted in … a raising of critical questions about how entitlement programs like food stamps intersect with the social geographies of the city. … In instance after instance, the maps grounded what had heretofore been quite abstract discussions, providing a specific focus for discussion and debate.
The article goes on to describe how this project led to broader initiatives, including the establishment of a “Community Geographer� , “someone with both social-geographic and GIS/spatial analysis skills, who would have full access to departmental and university facilities, students and courses, and the support of the university’s Center for Community and Public Service, but who would be paid by the community. But then, alas, adequate continuing funding could not be found, unless for narrow purposes, because foundations were unwilling to fund something that is open-ended rather than project-based, and town-gown issues made full university funding impractical. Mitchell writes
This conundrum is doubly frustrating because both the Syracuse Hunger Project and the Community Geographer have significantly transformed our department: how we approach our work, how we interact with students, and what our position is in the city and university. Faculty in other departments urge their students to take our classes and to consider geography as a dual major, students report that they have sought out our classes after hearing about SHP and CG work, student evaluations in classes linked to, or that draw from, the work of the SHP and CG indicate a genuine excitement about geographical learning and thinking that is strikingly different from a half dozen years ago. One of the things students report is that geography is becoming known as a place where “real work� gets done …
One can hardly imagine more eloquent or persuasive testimony that public engagement is not only valuable for its own sake, but that it enriches teaching and scholarship.
I spent late yesterday afternoon passing out certificates and medallions to recognize twenty students who have completed the University of Minnesota's Community Engagement Scholars Program.
According to its web site, the Community Engagement Scholars Program
The requirements of the Program are substantial:
One important reward of completing the Program is a Community Engagement Scholar notation on the official academic transcript, something that many colleges and universities have not been able to arrange.
Some of the projects that the students described briefly but movingly at yesterday’s event:
As Jerry Rinehart, our Vice Provost for Student Affairs, said in his closing remarks, it’s from these engagements with real-world, important issues that students truly learn.
I’ve been reading “Pursuing the Endless Frontier�, a collection of essays by Charles M. Vest written during his tenure as president of MIT from 1991-2004 (MIT Press, 2005). Those years were eventful ones for higher education in general and MIT—with its heavy focus on the STEM disciplines and research agendas strongly shaped by industry as well as federal funding—in particular. Vest’s ruminations on those events, and the underlying principles by which they should be understood and managed, are well worth reading.
In the public engagement/technology transfer context, I was particularly interested in Vest’s reflections from 1993-94 on the changing relations between industry, government, and research universities. In this period, he writes (pp. 75-76), such relations were rapidly changing.
As the cold war faded into history, military security as a dominant motivation for federal support of university-based research and advanced education faded with it. The challenge of the highly competitive global marketplace drove fundamental transformation of the R&D function in U.S.-based corporations. Industry generally ceased to do research with moderate or long time-frames and absorbed R&D directly into its product-development process to accelerate product cycle times and improve manufacturing quality and efficiency. Various federal policymakers and appropriators sought to focus more university research on near-term application and commercialization; policy debates raged about the relative merits of “applied research� versus “basic research�.
This turmoil gave universities a rare opportunity to respond to changing national needs and to sort out and clarify the relative roles of industry, government, and universities in funding and performing research and development. We needed to form a broad consensus that it is a necessary function of government to support the conduct of research of a fundamental and/or a long time-horizon to potential application, and to seek recommitment to the U.S. system in which universities are the primary performers of such research. The elegant system in which federal dollars do double duty—supporting the research and creating the next generation of researchers and scientific and engineering leaders—needed to be reaffirmed. Modern industry, fast-paced, innovation-driven, and globally connected, presented fascinating new intellectual challenges to engineering and management researchers. Industry and universities needed to find new ways of working in partnership, ways that would add value to each other, enhancing education and filling the developing national void in research that has medium time-horizons. While doing so, universities needed to reaffirm and adhere to basic academic values, and to establish sound and effective policies for avoiding conflicts of interest.
It’s interesting to read these paragraphs in the context of the critique by Jennifer Washburn that I wrote about a few weeks ago. Vest clearly believes that universities have a responsibility to work for the betterment of this country, and one important way of doing so is to work with industry. This is so not primarily for economic reasons, but rather because the research problems—if properly chosen—are basic and important; new areas of research and teaching are opened up; and students are given an education about the real-world issues that they’ll face when the leave the university.
In later essays Vest recurs to this topic and presents some ideas that would deal with Washburn’s worst criticisms. First, that applications of intellectual property rights should be flexible, so as not to impede basic research. Second, that more than one company from an industrial sector should be involved in university-industry collaborations. This would help to mitigate some of the biggest concerns with the deals that UC Berkeley has made, with Novartis some years ago and with British Petroleum just recently.
Most engaged teaching, learning, and discovery in higher education tends to originate on campus and connect outward. However, in the arts the direction is frequently reversed. A notable example is the 13th annual international conference of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (PTO), May 31-June 3, 2007, at the Rarig Center on the University of Minnesota West Bank campus. Information about the conference, which features Augusto Boal, the cofounder of PTO, is available here.
According to its web site,
PTO is a not-for-profit (IRS 501C3) organization with the following mission: To challenge oppressive systems by promoting critical thinking and social justice. We organize an annual meeting that focuses on the work of liberatory educators, activists, and artists; and community organizers.
This organization developed from a series of four conferences held in Omaha, Nebraska from 1995-1998. The conference was based on the ideologies and works of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. Using pedagogy and theatre, they each worked with oppressed peoples of the world to develop critical literacies and actions to overcome social systems of oppression.
Biographies of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire are on the PTO web site. They provide striking examples of how critical social thinking, and art that exemplifies and dramatizes that thinking and moves it forward, can arise out of dire sociopolitical circumstances.
Another noteworthy aspect of the conference—and of engaged scholarship generally—is that it brings together educational institutions that don't often connect with each other: The Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota hosts the conference with Metropolitan State University Urban Teacher Program and St. Paul Central High School. Sponsorship is provided by the Institute for Advanced Study and the College of Liberal Arts Scholarly Events Fund at the University of Minnesota, and Macalester College. The media co-sponsor is KFAI Fresh Air Radio.
Today's e-newsletter from the University of Minnesota's Academic Health Center contains an item that reminds us of an eventuality we hope won't happen, but had better be prepared for if it does.
The University's Center for Bioethics has joined with Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Center for Health Care Ethics to develop an ethical framework for allocating essential health care resources during a severe influenza pandemic. To accomplish the goal, the coalition will recruit a broad-based panel of experts and stakeholders to outline the framework and develop recommendations for its implementation. The proposed framework will balance the competing priorities of caring for the sick, preventing spread of the illness, and maintaining critical social systems and economic activities. Jeff Kahn (Center for Bioethics) said, "These are not easy issues, and we appreciate the investment of the Department of Health in efforts to address some of the critical and pressing ethical questions that will arise in the event of a pandemic flu outbreak. We look forward to working with a diverse group of experts and stakeholders on these issues.
This points out how important it is for university, government, and private organizations to work together on crucial societal issues. The university contribution takes a wide variety of forms, and is rarely the whole story.
Today I was shown an article by Brian Rosenberg, President of Macalester College, in the Spring 2007 issue of Macalester Today. I was struck by a passage on p. 17, in which Dr. Rosenberg says
Of the three chief purposes of higher education—career training, self-enlightenment, and preparation for citizenship—it may ultimately be the third that is both the most difficult and the most important. It is the most difficult because it is the one goal of education that is not chiefly about the betterment of the self, to which we might naturally be inclined, but about the betterment of and service to others, toward which we might need to be encouraged and around which advanced civilizations must be built; it is the most important for precisely that same reason.
This connects remarkably with a new position statement on the web site of the November 5th Coalition, which "calls for new federal policies to encourage serious public participation in public education." In particular, note the second of their nine "basic premises":
The purpose of education is not just generating outcomes (such as test scores) that are determined by experts. Education is the process by which a whole community chooses and transmits values, skills, knowledge, and culture to the next generation. Communities must discuss what values they wish to transmit.
Two different but eloquent ways of saying the same important thing.
I've begun reading Voices of Hope: The Story of the Jane Addams School for Democracy, edited by Nan Kari and Nan Skelton (Kettering Foundation Press, 2007, 144 pp., ISBN 978-0-923993-19-1), a fine book that celebrates the 10th anniversary of the founding of this important "school" in Saint Paul, Minnesota. As the jacket copy makes clear, the JAS is different from, and much more than, a traditional school:
The Jane Addams School for Democracy (JAS) was founded in 1996 to create a space for democratic education and practice for new immigrant families, college students, and faculty. It was conceived as a democratic organization—one with minimal, non-hierarchical structures that would allow participants to shape its agenda. Ten years later, more than 1500 participants at JAS—Hmong, East Africans, and Latin Americans—have become U.S. citizens. This book tells the story of the Jane Addams School in many ways through many voices, including those of nonnative English speakers.
The JAS is one of the key exemplars of public engagement at the University of Minnesota (the College of St. Catherine and other colleges have also been involved) and arguably one of the most important and influential experiments in civic education. As Peter Levine wrote in his Civic Renewal blog on March 18, 2004
The Jane Addams School in St. Paul, MN is important to me. In the summer of 2001 (when it was 102 degrees in the Twin Cities), I visited the school. As on most nights, there were scores if not hundreds of people present: mostly college students and neighborhood residents. The majority of people who live in St. Paul's West Side are new immigrants and refugees (Somalis, Hmong, and Latin Americans). I observed a staff meeting and then participated in a project, the "Hmong Circle." We tutored Hmong immigrants to take the Federal citizenship test, and in return they told us about Hmong culture. I was so impressed with the buoyant, democratic, creative spirit of the place that I decided I wanted to start something similar in Maryland. When I found partners with similar motivations, we created the Prince George's Information Commons.
I hope to write more about the Jane Addams School for Democracy as I read further in Kari's and Skelton's book. However, I urge all of you to get hold of a copy. It's an attractive, reasonably priced ($19.95) paperback with lots of charming photos and eloquent text. It's not a textbook, but I can't think of a better place to learn about both the practical realities and the spirit of public engagement.
Last year I posted a guest blog by Dennis Donovan about Public Achievement. I recently was given an Evaluation Brief, which summarizes the nature of Public Achievement as follows:
Public Achievement is a youth civic organization initiative intended to help students learn the habits, skills, and commitments of citizenship necessary to be lifelong contributors to their communities. Sponsored by the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, the specific goals of Public Achievement are to help youth develop the desire, insights, and talents to address society's problems and improve the world. Students learn basic methods for taking public action and develop a conceptual framework for learning by doing. During the 2005-2006 school year, Public Achievement programs served 800 K-12 students at 40 sites throughout the United States.
The evaluation found the following positive impacts of Public Achievement:
In other words, the active citizenship approach espoused by Public Achievement and the Center for Democracy and Citizenship benefits both the students and their schools, as well as planting the seeds of future citizenship. Given concerns about whether schools are adequately preparing students for productive lives, the Public Achievement approach seems well worth expanding.
This is the second in a three part series examining a recent trip that University of Minnesota student Steve Mullaney took to North Carolina to observe the student group and non-profit Nourish International. The first part looked at innovation at NI and the third will look at the implementation of exciting new ideas.
The story of why Nourish International is a high-functioning, successful, non-profit and student group is also the story of NI’s culture, created around engagement and involving people in the leadership process.
In a lot of student organizing at the University of Minnesota there is a constant search for more members, usually conducted with great zeal. The goal is numbers for the sake of numbers instead of really trying to find a win-win situation in which both organization and student benefit. Usually what happens is that numbers will be very high for the first couple of weeks or so, then plummet as individuals find they do not have the opportunity to become co-producers of the group’s output. When a small elite—no matter how well-intentioned—controls the decision-making process, there will be alienation and disengagement. When individuals are thought of as prizes (tokens?) and the goal is putting butts in seats instead of developing mutually beneficial strategies for newcomers to innovate and lead, there will be dropout and abandonment of the organization.
Conversely, NI creates many natural entry points to the organization for newcomers, and then encourages them to take on more leadership until they are seen as "voices of wisdom" for the next crop of newcomers.
The case study for this at the UNC chapter of NI is a guy named Graham Boone. When NI-UNC decided to hold the 2006 version of its highly successful series of poker tournaments, Graham wanted to be a dealer and through one of his friends was given that opportunity. As he met more and more people in the organization he took on more and more responsibility. This year, as a sophomore, he organized and led the 2007 version—one which raised $8,000 and is believed to be the largest poker tournament in North Carolina history. Next year, he’ll be turning over the reins and acting as a mentor to the next person.
Why? This culture helps bring in more people in an organic way. Graham could act on his ideas because the organization empowered him; the next person to run the tournament will be empowered in a similar way and there will be fresh ideas and innovation.
Why else? Needing to pass on the leadership puts a premium on relationships, the currency of engagement. Teaching, learning and innovating brings people together, builds relationships and strengthens the community. In my experience, folks are more likely to take active roles if they are accountable to other people instead of to a faceless entity.
Why else else? Without intentionality, those with the leadership experience will graduate and then, lacking experienced people, the organization will crumble. Organizing students in an undergraduate environment is challenging because of the constant turnover. Instead of moaning about this problem, wise student leaders should embrace the challenge and the potential it holds for a constant injection of new ideas into the organization.
Ultimately, in building a culture of engagement it’s important to look beyond the surface “do we have numbers?� question to a deeper “how can we create win-win situations?�. On a deep level most people want to give back to their communities. However, building a culture that can embrace new leadership and harness relationships into action will function on a higher level than one that uses coercion and artificial numbers-based goals as yardsticks.
A couple of short items today. First, from Terry Cooper at USC, a notice of the 35th anniversary of the USC Joint Educational Project, which he thinks may have been the first service-learning project in the country. Be sure you're on a fast connection if you try to access the pdf newsletter, since it's about 30Mb. Terry writes:
I imagine most of you know of the USC Joint Educational Project (JEP) which may have been the first service learning project in the nation and which has come a long way over its 35 years of work. I am providing below the link to the online version of the 35th anniversary JEP newsletter for those who might be interested.
Âhttp://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/jep/resources/newsletterjep2007_spring.pdf
By the way, I was a witness to the founding of this program in a very "up close and personal" way. I was working on my Ph.D. while leading an experimental urban studies program called "Urban Semester"--a highly experiential learning program in which the 40 students each semester took their entire 16 units of work in an integrated program with 5 faculty and 5 TAs. Barbara Gardner, the founder of JEP, occupied an office across the hall from mine and we often chatted about her vision for the JEP program. My lasting image of her is looking across a narrow hall seeing her bent over her desk talking to someone on the phone with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. She was a woman with a mission and the sales skills to persuade others of its worth.
Second, we've added a new blog to our list of links, from the new Institute for Law and Politics (http://www.politicslaw.org) at the University of Minnesota. Not to belabor the obvious, law and politics are two of the crucial areas in which active citizenship plays itself out.
This is the first in a three part series by University of Minnesota student Steve Mullaney, examining a recent trip that he took to North Carolina to observe the student group and non-profit Nourish International (NI) www.nourishinternational.org. The second part will look at the culture NI built around engagement, and the third will look at the implementation of exciting new ideas.
I’m on a million mailing lists.
There are days when I actually believe this and am sure that they deliver solicitations for money to my apartment in a dump truck. Or a tank.
Unlike most people, I read all of my mail. As a college student I’m always hopeful that the free gift is a car and not just mailing labels with my name misspelled. So I was very excited to peruse Heifer International’s magazine Noah’s Ark. I really like the model of sharing livestock that Heifer uses; it seems sustainable, plays to the strength of community partners, and just seems cool.
As I paged through the magazine an article caught my eye: “UNC Students Fight Hunger on Their Lunch Break� which described how students raised money to fight poverty and hunger with a lunch that everyone threw in a little for. A month ago I guest-posted about how community engagement worked gathering people around meals. Naturally, this idea appealed to me; I maneuvered over to NI's website with the idea of learning as much as possible. Fortunately they’re incredibly user friendly and I quickly made contact with the organization—and within a day they responded.
SCOPE, a student group that I’m a part of, had the funds to send me to North Carolina for a week, and I spent two days observing NI and how they functioned. In short, NI is an incredible source for innovation. But innovation (as my title suggests) is not for the weak.
Innovation requires people to admit that they do not know everything and that they should be open to new ideas. In spirit this is easy—but in practice we fall into set patterns of the-way-we-always-do-things (TWWADT™). Frequently, innovation only happens when TWWADT™ isn’t working; the challenge for those engaging communities is how to strive for constant improvement.
Ultimately, innovation is not a one-time only slate of new ideas, but rather a way of going about work. One of NI’s strengths is the way that it naturally renews its leadership by giving younger members the opportunity to take ownership of the process and ventures they undertake. They make sure to have seniors act as advisors, not leaders, encouraging younger students to take an active role This year they even started a Freshman Executive position to give first year students the skills necessary to lead over the next three years. Giving up control is scary: intuitively I feel like I need to hold on to things that I’m leading. However, when that happens there’s a limit to what can be achieved. Especially for student groups at the undergraduate level a constant reenergizing is necessary to avoid staleness and burnout. The only way that I know how to do this is to lay a foundation in the hopes that those who come after can build it higher. Innovation isn’t for the weak-stomached, but it’s sure a lot better than stagnation.
Yesterday I wrote about the indictment of American research universities by Jennifer Washburn in her book University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education. I think it’s worth noting her proposed solutions (p. 228):
Each of these strikes me as plausible and desirable, yet unlikely to fully reach the desired results:
I think more far-reaching changes in both corporate influence on government and the willingness of the public to more adequately support higher education will be necessary to reach the goal.
I have a deep conviction that public research universities are among the most valuable and most virtuous institutions in society. Therefore, I was dismayed to come across the book by Jennifer Washburn, University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (Basic Books, 2005). Washburn is the co-author of the famous 2000 Atlantic Monthly article, "The Kept University", about the UC Berkeley-Novartis deal.
I haven't read the whole book, but Washburn lays out her case—which is hard to dismiss out of hand—in the first few paragraphs of her Introduction:
Washburn freely admits that much of this behavior is driven by decreasing funding by the states, but she still lays most of the blame on the universities rather than society at large.
I think my discomfort with Washburn's case lies in three points:
One might think that the office of Secretary of State is pretty bureaucratic, but an active Secretary can do interesting things. Here's a paragraph from the newsletter of Mark Ritchie, recently elected Secretary of State for Minnesota:
"Another official job of the Minnesota Secretary of State is encouraging civic engagement. Two weeks ago our office pulled together 60 of the more than 100 groups we've found that are working on civic education and civic engagement. The goal of the meeting was to help people meet each other and to start a conversation about how we could all begin working more closely together. It was a very high energy gathering -- with great ideas and lots of folks looking for partners and collaborators. We talked about creating a state civic education council, hosting an annual summit, adopting a unifying topic during the Sesquicentennial, and finding new ways to communicate and cooperate. We had everyone from disability advocacy leaders to a State Supreme Court Justice. There were teachers, students and school board members along with a number of lawyers, including the president and the executive director of the MN Bar Association. We'll meet again soon!"
Some faculty from the University of Minnesota participated in this meeting, and we're excited about the possibilities.
I received in my mailbox a flyer from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, advertising the 2007 Summer Public Health Institute. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have paid much attention, but the title caught my eye: “Culturally Responsive Public Health Practice�. The courses are on
The purposes of these courses, according to the flyer, are to
This is a clear recognition that, unless the cultures of communities are taken into account and members of those communities are enlisted as partners, public health efforts will fall far short of their goals.
Cynthia Gibson and Peter Levine are two of the leading thinkers and writers in the part of the public engagement movement that deals with civic education and civic learning in the schools. In 2003 they organized and edited The Civic Mission of Schools Report., which among other things, “is probably best known for presenting evidence in favor of “six promising practices� for civic education in schools.�
Last week some of us received an email from Gibson announcing the publication of “A Letter from the Authors of The Civic Mission of Schools Report�, in which they reflect on the the progress made since the publication of that Report. The letter appears in the latest issue of CIRCLE’s newsletter, “Around the Circle.�
In the four years since publication of the Report, Gibson and Levine feel, much good work has been done. There are deep challenges ahead, however. Learning about civics theory and practice in the classroom, or even through service-learning or other programs for active participation of students, is not enough. The political system is seen as unresponsive to citizen input and in thrall to moneyed special interests. The No Child Left Behind Act has focused the attention of schools on standardized tests, leaving little room for “the teaching of values, deliberation, and collaborative skills.�
To help rectify this situation—to “prepare young citizens for politics but also improve politics for citizens�—Gibson and Levine report that
… the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools—a national coalition of more than forty educational, policy, and professional organizations committed to better school-based civic learning—was created. Since then, the coalition has worked diligently to advance and promote the policy recommendations contained in the CMS report.
With a board led by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and former Governor Roy Romer, the coalition has commissioned a national poll that showed parents willing and eager to see civic education reinstituted in schools; created a national database of best practices, programs, and curricula that were vetted by teams of educators and experts; and helped to pass legislation that encourages more frequent testing of civic knowledge.
Efforts like these will bring to our colleges and universities students who are knowledgeable, practiced, and eager to continue their civic learning and activism. We need to figure out how to be ready for them and to raise their engagement—and ours—to even higher levels.
Yesterday afternoon I participated in a Public Engagement Day workshop on "Community: A Partner in Knowledge Production". Let by Elder Atun Azzahir of the Powderhorn-Phillips Cultural Wellness Center, the workshop examined "questions that are central to community-university collaboration in the production of new knowledge. What are community cultural knowledge systems? Is academic knowledge cultural? How can academic knowledge systems and community knowledge systems come together for scholarship, and to solve real world problems?"
The participants came up with a list of characteristics of community cultural knowledge systems, including:
* Based largely on oral tradition
* Transmitted from elders to the young
* Treasured within the community
* Binds the community together
* Grounded on unspoken assumptions
I was struck with how well these describe academic as well as community culture. Not culture at a particular university, but rather academia in general. Not something that undergraduate students are a part of, but something that is inculcated in graduate school and takes some years to become firmly fixed.
I think it would be helpful - perhaps even necessary - for productive community-university engagement to recognize that both sides are coming from deep cultural assumptions, and that it is just as necessary for community to acknowledge academic culture as it is for academia to acknowledge community culture. First to acknowledge, then to understand, then to get behind the uniformities or stereotypes of the culture to the complexities and individualities that lie below.
The University of Minnesota celebrated Public Engagement Day today with an all-day series of lectures, workshops, and exhibits. Our leadoff speaker was Dr. Xolela Mangcu, from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Mangcu's talk, "Public Engagement: On Whose Terms?", put university public engagement efforts into an important context. South African universities, like ours, have had public engagement activities (that is, academic activities expressly intended to affect society) since the mid 1800s. Also like ours (though we tend not to recognize or admit it), those public engagement activities were on terms that justified the existing power structure. In particular, they provided an academic justification for white supremacy and apartheid, in terms of eugenics and other scientific fads of the time.
When the first black African scholars obtained university posts, they tended to be patrician and conservative, counseling a go-slow attitude toward societal change. They were eventually challenged by Steve Biko and his followers, urging a transition from a conservative to a radical conception of public engagement.
Mangcu draws from this the lesson that universities will inevitably be used for leverage to effect societal change, whether patient or radical. Universities must both stand apart from and contend within society; they are places of both reflection and action.
We see these themes playing out in today's universities, even if not usually for such dramatically high personal stakes as in South Africa.
Tomorrow, April 11, is our first annual Public Engagement Day. Information about the event can be found on the Office for Public Engagement (OPE) web site, an associated news story, and the complete schedule.
As my part in the big day, I've been asked to provide a brief overview of the history and context of the establishment of our public engagement activities and of OPE. I thought this would be a good opportunity to review some of the developments that were independent of OPE and its action committee arm, the Council on Public Engagement (COPE), but which have strongly influenced us. I began at the very beginning, with some key dates:
A noteworthy trend is the recent transition from rural to urban emphasis. My colleague Geoff Maruyama, in drafting a report for the University of Minnesota Urban Agenda Task Force, has explained the transition eloquently:
When land grant universities were envisioned in 1862, most of the population of states like Minnesota was rural, and the economy was heavily agricultural. Over time land grant-related funding supported the University as a driver of engaged scholarship, but focused primarily on rural areas and limited parts of the University. The Minnesota Extension Service (now University of Minnesota Extension) and the Agricultural Experiment Stations (now University of Minnesota Research and Outreach Centers) coupled community education with research and outreach that addressed major needs of Minnesotans ranging from farms and crops to those of families and youth.
Now, in the 21st century, 60-70% of the population of Minnesota lives in metropolitan areas, and �urban“concerns that historically were viewed as limited to Minneapolis and Saint Paul have become issues that reach all across Minnesota. We are part of national trends of suburbanization, de-population of rural areas, and people leaving “rust-belt� and Eastern areas for the West and South. Therefore, we believe that it is important to formally extend the research and outreach land grant mission to look more broadly at Minnesota, particularly including urban/metropolitan issues as well as rural ones.
Sunday's StarTribune had a good story by staff writer Kim Ode entitled "A study in serving." It's about the Pay It Forward Tour, an activity started by students at the University of Minnesota four years ago to provide a worthwhile and fulfilling spring break experience for college students.
A diary by Tony Schuster, a student at the University of Minnesota, relates painting, housecleaning, trash pickup, and tree chopping in Peoria IL, Marietta GA, Blacksburg VA, and Washington DC. As important as the service projects was the sense of teamwork and relationship-building that the bus developed. A similar story was told in the Spring break diary of Kari Foley, also a UM student, whose bus went to Milan IN, Nashville TN, Louisville KY, and Canton OH.
The Pay It Forward Tour is organized by Students Today Leaders Tomorrow (STLF), whose website tells us that STLF "was initially founded by four college freshman as a student organization at the University of Minnesota. When a late night dorm room conversation turned into a vision to leave an impact on the world, the idea for the Pay It Forward Tour was created."
STLF now includes chapters on nine Midwestern college campuses. Counting this yeer's spring tour, over 1250 students have made service visits to more than 75 communities.
The national organization, headquartered in Minneapolis as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, is completely organized and run by students, as are the individual chapters. The national runs several leadership development programs throughout the year.
The last paragraph on the "About Us" page is worth quoting in its entirely:
We realize that the Pay It Forward Tour is only nine days out of the year, and we realize that we can’t solve a community’s social issues in one service project. However, we do believe in the power that people united under a common purpose has on this world. We know that we can make a direct impact on thousands of people throughout the country through service, and we can never know what they will go on to accomplish in their life as a result. We know that we can make an even bigger impact on each other as students who are involved in STLF. STLF has a vision of instilling in people values of leadership and service that they will take with them throughout their life. It is about finding ways for us to “pay it forwardâ€? as individuals and as an organization. It is this concept of “paying it forwardâ€? rather than “paying it backâ€? that results in having an immeasurable impact that has endless potential.Â
Constructing a good web site is hard. Our Public Engagement web site has an engaging home page and lots of useful linked content, but it's not easy to grok or navigate.
A book I came across, Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites, 2nd ed. by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton, Yale UP, starts with first principles by urging articulation of goals and strategies at the beginning of the planning phase:
We've defined the mission of the Office for Public Engagement on our brochure, connecting it to the relevant part of the University of Minnesota's mission statement:
Extend, apply, and exchange knowledge between the University and society by applying scholarly expertise to community problems, by helping organizations and individuals respond to their changing environments, and by making the knowledge and resources created and preserved at the University accessible to the citizens of the state, the nation, and the world.
The mission of the Office for Public Engagement is to advocate and foster the public engagement activities of the University of Minnesota, so as to support the University's mission and its goal of becoming one of the world's preeminent public research universities.
Answering the questions posed by the next few bullets is harder. I'll put down some thoughts, which need much more discussion.
How will creating a Web site support your mission? A Web site is primarily a source of information, which society can use in various ways (either directly or with the help of university personnel) and which can keep university faculty, staff, and students informed of the resources, activities, and opportunities that will facilitate and encourage their engagement work.
What are your two or three most important goals for the site?
What is the primary audience for the Web site? There are three important audiences: the University community as a whole (faculty, staff, and students); public engagement activists at the U and their community partners; and the public at large who turn to the University of Minnesota for help and information. If I have to choose just one, it is the U community as a whole, since changing the culture of the U to more highly value public engagement will be the most important factor in realizing our mission.
What do you want the audience to think or do after having visited your site?
I'll leave the last three bullets for some other time, since they relate to strategies rather than goals. Of course, that's the hard part.
Yesterday I received in my email a copy of the latest issue of the Active Citizen Newsletter produced by the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. After overcoming a twinge of jealousy about how attractively the newsletter is put together, I went on to admire the content.
I was particularly interested in the article that described how “Tisch College Dean Rob Hollister met with faculty and administrators from Israeli colleges and universities last month in Tel Aviv to expand the Talloires Network, a global effort that aims to redefine the relationship between institutions of higher education and the communities in which they function.” Hollister met with representatives of both Israeli and Palestinian academies.
The article referred to a meeting that Tufts University hosted in September 2005 with 29 university leaders from 23 countries in Talloires, France, who “inaugurated a global movement to develop strategies to advance the role of higher education in encouraging active participation in civic life.” A product of this Talloires Network was The Talloires Declaration On the Civic Roles and Social Responsibilities of Higher Education .
There’s considerable overlap between the Talloires Declaration and the Declaration on The Responsibility of Higher Education for a Democratic Culture, Citizenship, Human Rights, and Sustainability of the Network for Higher Education and Democratic Culture that I wrote about a few days ago in this space. The Talloires Declaration is considerably more specific in its specification of the ways in which higher education institutions should connect their activities with civic purposes, but the two efforts share highly congruent goals. One hopes that they will find ways to work together productively, rather than proceeding along parallel paths.
Yesterday this blog listed major items identified in a SWOT analysis of our Public Engagement efforts at the University of Minnesota. At a meeting of COPE, our Council on Public Engagement, yesterday afternoon, I asked the group to identify three concrete, actionable steps that might be taken to capitalize on our strengths and opportunities, and to mitigate our weaknesses and threats. Here's what they came up with.
Strengths
Interdisciplinary Work
Role Models
Promotion and Tenure
Weaknesses
Communication
Support
Values
Opportunities
Continue to play the role of convener
Focus on Public Engagement Day
Use grants program (new or current) to start a cohort model
Engage interdisciplinary institutes/centers/programs to leverage expertise on public engagement
Threats
External benchmarks do not value public engagement
Culture shift from cooperation to individualistic means faculty work too much in isolation
U seems overwhelming, inaccessible and hard to navigate
These are all very useful suggestions, in many cases because they suggest new or more focused ways to build on activities that are already underway.
In February the University of Minnesota's Council on Public Engagement (COPE) met for a SWOT exercise to assess our internal Strengths and Weaknesses, and external Opportunities and Threats. The results of that exercise were supplemented by those from a similar workshop conducted by our Children, Youth, and Family and Consortium and the College of Education and Human Development. A small group of us met to shape the results into a more manageable ten in each category; see below. This afternoon COPE will have a follow-up exercise to propose three concrete, actionable ideas in each category. That will give us a dozen initiatives to work on in the next year.
Although this list is specific to the University of Minnesota, I suspect that a similar list could be compiled at almost any research university.
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
I spent last Thursday and Friday at an international meeting at the University of Pennsylvania, hosted by Ira Harkavy and his collegues: the Symposium on Universities, Democratic Culture & Human Rights: An Action Agenda. More than 60 academics, administrators, and a few students from 14 countries met to discuss how to follow up on the Strasbourg meeting of last June 23 which led to the formulation of the Declaration on The Responsibility of Higher Education for a Democratic Culture, Citizenship, Human Rights, and Sustainability. The Declaration is available from the home page of the Network for Higher Education and Democratic Culture.
The Declaration is a stirring and important document, but the challenge is to figure out what to do next. One realization was that the Declaration itself should be translated into a variety of languages. In thinking about doing this, one realizes that some of the key terms—democracy, civil society, etc.—have quite different meanings in different languages and societies. Successfully accomplishing this would be a significant step toward an international understanding of the civic aims of higher education.
Beyond this, there are interesting differences among academics in different countries about what their roles should be, based on different national and academic cultures. To oversimplify, the Europeans tend to focus on the theory and meaning of democracy and human rights, while the Americans focus on practical community engagement through things such as service-learning but—for the most part—don't think very deeply about the nature and current (difficult) state of democracy. Further learning from each other about these various approaches should raise the level of the whole enterprise.
The real challenge is to build these issues into our teaching and scholarship, which will require rethinking of many things we now take for granted in higher education. We're most likely to succeed in this if we take care to involve our students going forward.
Postscript: By coincidence, I was catching up with some old New Yorkers, and came across an essay in the January 8, 2007 issue by Milan Kundera entitled "Die Weltliteratur: How we read one another". Kundera writes "All the nations of Europe are living out a common destiny, but each is living it out differently, based on its own distinct experience." He formulates his "own ideal of Europe thus: maximum diversity in minimum space." The ideas Kundera explores help to explain some of the differences in approach and emphasis between European and American participants in the meeting.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a mild dispute in the local newspaper between two of my faculty friends about whether engineering is indeed a discipline that serves people. I think that the answer ended up as a resounding "yes", but that engineering sometimes hides its human side under a barrel. Browsing through some recent notes, I came across two items that make the case clear.
First, a notice from the engineering web site at Purdue University celebrating the selection by Campus Compact of William Oakes, associate professor of engineering education and co-director of Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) at Purdue, as the recipient of the 2006 Thomas Ehrlich Faculty Award for Service-Learning. To quote from the web site,
Oakes was chosen for his effective use of service-learning, which integrates community service with classroom work, as well as for expanding the use of service-learning domestically and internationally by pioneering model programs and publishing guiding literature.
Oakes describes service-learning as his "passion." He co-founded the national EPICS program, which offers a sustainable and adaptable teaching model that has been adopted by 17 universities across the United States and abroad. At Purdue, the EPICS program consists of 80 different projects running concurrently that may last as long as ten years. Projects may be aimed at improving water purity, technology education, playground safety, or myriad other community uses of engineering and technology. Oakes is co-author of a recent textbook titled Service-Learning: Engineering in Your Community (Great Lakes Press, 2006), as well as author of an online resource, Service-Learning in Engineering: A Resource Guidebook (Campus Compact, 2004).
I was at the Campus Compact meeting in Chicago where the award was conferred, and what pleased me most was the clear evidence that an engineer could get tenure at a top-ranked, hard-nosed engineering school largely on the basis of engaged teaching. Of course, Oakes's work is innovative and world-class; but that's how teaching—just like research—should be evaluated in any case.
Second, an item last week from our local African-American newspaper, the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, entitled U program exposes Black girls to science and engineering. According to the article,
Last month, in honor of Black History Month and National Engineers Week (February 18-24), the University of Minnesota’s Academic Programs for Excellence in Engineering and Science (APEXES) hosted 60 girls from the Minneapolis Afrocentric charter school Harvest Prep Academy.
“The purpose of the visit is to expose students to different fields of engineering and sciences through hands-on projects,� APEXES Outreach Associate Richard Pollard explained. “By exposing children to science and engineering at younger ages, we have more time to equip them for academic excellence in math and science, which in turn will prepare them to compete at a higher level in college and beyond.�
...
APEXES is a program in the U’s Institute of Technology that encourages academic excellence in engineering, physical sciences, and mathematics. The program focuses on students of color and women, and works to increase the number of students from underrepresented populations who earn degrees in these disciplines.
Given the shortage of both women and African-American students in engineering and the physical sciences, a program like APEXES is enormously valuable.
This entry was written by Steve Mullaney, an undergrad at the University of Minnesota, member of the Student Committee on Public Engagement (SCOPE), and student employee in the Office for Public Engagement. It's an interesting account of how engagement can be integrated into student life.
Roughly a year and a half ago I ate at Moti Mahal, an Indian restaurant on 29th and Franklin, with other members of the Global Studies Student Association. At the time I was not yet a global studies student, but hung out with them a lot—including this dinner. This, of course made for some really interesting conversation:
“So, what’s your concentration within global studies?�
“Actually, I’m not in global studies.�
“Really?�
“Really.�
“So, what are you doing here?� I had this conversation about a dozen times that night.
Dinner was complicated. People showed up at various points in the evening and the seating at our table spilled into the aisles. Our bill read like the instruction manual for a nuclear warhead. After much mathematical calculation (not our skill set, although we could name the problematic in the numerical quantification of the basic units of survival) we determined what each person owed.
And then, some guy, stopped the conversation: “I have no money. You will have to pay for me.�
Silence. We glanced around the table nervously, hoping that in a fit of Minnesota Nice someone would do something.
“What did you say, I didn’t quite catch that,� someone choked out.
“I have no money. You will have to pay for me.�
That was what he said. Rrrr.
More uncomfortable silence until finally, Everett and Nadia said that they would take that portion of the bill. We really bonded over the experience which didn’t seem to faze either one of them at all. Everett made casual mention of a pasta dinner that he’d hosted at his apartment. Every Wednesday for the past year or so.
“Could I bring something?� It was free. Whatever. He said that he was more interested in gathering people and having a good time. Charging seemed awkward and a donations jar imposing, so it was free.
And wonderful. Pasta Dinner is one of the freest spaces that I’ve ever been to: every week is different and there have been new people at each dinner. I’ve witnessed a break dance battle, an impromptu soprano sax performance, sing-along’s to Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy� and some of the most interesting conversation I’ve ever had. A Wednesday night fixture, I plan on being a part of the community for a long time.
***
The founding of Pasta Dinner, roughly two and a half years ago, is a great story in public achievement. Two guys, Everett and Bobek, found themselves in a new town without people that they knew. Wanting to create a community they opened up their apartment every Wednesday evening to whoever wanted to stop by for pasta. Quickly, they had the meal down to a science—able to feed dozens of people for under thirty dollars a week. Growth was slow: at first just a few members from an Arabic class, but this has since expanded to include various diverse subcultures: Baha’is, Global Studies students, social justice oriented folks, Irish dancers, band members, residents of Franklin Ave, and so forth.
Space really resonates with people at Pasta Dinner. As soon as people walked in the door they were greeted and made to feel valuable and welcome. Many productive things flowed out of this space, whether it was folks attending lectures or concerts, studying something together, planning events or simply going swimming—the space generated action.
The space worked because of the culture of Pasta Dinner: the focus of pasta dinner is the relationships, not numbers (nobody takes/cares for attendance), or other quantifiable ways (we don’t really measure much of anything at all). These relationships, however, do not exist in a vacuum: because everyone is organized around the concept of building a stronger community, the relationships that we have are productive. Although folks undoubtedly value each other far more than an abstract concept like “public engagement� the concept is in the back of most everyone’s mind—whether they possess the academic language of public engagement or not. Ultimately, because Pasta Dinner is a space which is open—as opposed to one more thing in a busy schedule—folks are able to come and go as they please, be it every week or twice a year.
***
With Pasta Dinner as a model a group of us set out to create a space in the Dinkytown neighborhood which takes advantage of space as opposed to events (one time only things) and programs (movie series, etc.). We want to open up space to take advantage of the flexibility that it allows a group WITHOUT losing the intentionality that comes by focusing on public engagement. Taking advantage of free food as a motivating factor a group of students has been meeting at Duffy’s Pizza every late Tuesday evening with the intention of doing something radical in the community.
Originally focused on throwing some large event, we were all moved by the question “How can we build community externally if we don’t build internally first?� So that’s what we’re doing. Although we haven’t made the news yet, keep an eye out. When a dozen or two folks decide to very consciously pursue community-oriented goals there’s no telling what might happen.
By focusing on creating space, valuing relationships, and really consciously building an internal community which we hope to extend externally we hope to build on the model of Pasta Dinner and forge new ways of doing public engagement for busy people who still care about the neighborhoods they live in.
The Sunday Star Tribune had a though-provoking and important op-ed article by Lori Sturdevant, one of our best columnists on public policy and higher education issues. Sturdevant writes
Fifty years ago next month, the Minnesota Legislature did something only one other state had come close to doing before. It decreed that "every school district ... shall provide special instruction and services for handicapped children of school age who are resident of such district."
Special education was born here. It's as proud a Minnesota export as Spam and Scotch tape. Maybe prouder.
The main import of the story is that this requirement is a badly underfunded mandate, and is putting severe financial burdens on school districts that have to make up the difference. However, there's some interesting Minnesota history in the piece. Two of the prime movers were Al Quie and Elmer Anderson, who later became two of our most distinguished governors and elder statesmen. The impetus came from the work of a University of Minnesota professor:
The possibility that many developmentally disabled children might be educated and become full participants in society was ripe for interim commission treatment in 1955. Warehousing the handicapped in state hospitals was increasingly seen as inhumane, costly and, with modern therapies, unnecessary. Research at the University of Minnesota by a visionary professor named Maynard Reynolds was showing what was possible with what eventually was called "mainstreaming."
This is the sort of outcome that shows the full promise of public engagement: a professor doing research that challenges the received wisdom, who then connects with government and civic leaders who use their knowledge, stature, and persuasive powers to improve society.
Disparities in health, education, and other social indicators are among the most troubling features of our contemporary world. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, where the University of Minnesota is located, is noted for its high quality of life and progressive spirit. Yet we have some of the worst disparities between majority and minority populations of all major metropolitan areas. A recent Star Tribune editorial about the difficulty of keeping our middle class gives some dismal statistics. The percentage of children in poverty in Minneapolis-St. Paul has risen by 4% since 1999, to 28.8%, and is now slightly greater than that of Chicago, and significantly greater than some of the cities we most like to compare ourselves to: Austin TX, Denver, San Diego, and Seattle. Poverty and disparities go hand-in-hand.
Our Program in Health Disparities Research at the University of Minnesota is trying to work on disparities as they relate to health. They recently forwarded a Call for Proposals (CFP) from Finding Answers: Disparities Research for Change. The web site says
In 2005, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched a new national program, Finding Answers: Disparities Research for Change at the University of Chicago, to award and manage research grants totaling $6 million to healthcare organizations implementing interventions aimed at reducing disparities. The funds are used to evaluate the interventions and their potential for broad dissemination. With this pool of funds, project leaders hope that health plans, hospitals, and community clinics will be encouraged to focus on racial and ethnic disparities as a priority in their quality improvement agendas.
The Purpose statement in the Overview of the CFP says
Finding Answers: Disparities Research for Change seeks to improve the quality of health care provided to patients from racial and ethnic backgrounds likely to experience disparities. Finding Answers will:
- grant funds to discover and evaluate practical and replicable solutions designed to reduce and eliminate disease specific racial and ethnic health care disparities;
- focus on interventions aimed at health care delivery for one or more of the following health concerns: cardiovascular disease, depression or diabetes;
- conduct systematic reviews of the literature regarding racial and ethnic health care disparities interventions; and
- disseminate results from these research efforts and systematic reviews to encourage health care systems to address racial and ethnic gaps in care.
A lot more information is given about the philosophy and details of the program in the FAQ.
Finding Answers can make a partial but important contribution to solving the broader disparities issue. A full solution involves dealing not just with disease, but also with health and nutrition, education, jobs and job training, housing, and transportation. In other words, a pretty thorough revamping of major pieces of our society.
Higher education, both through its expertise and its potential for convening a broad spectrum of players, can play a major role. For potential solutions to be realistic and accepted, that spectrum will have to include community members, whose on-the-ground expertise is a crucial part of the mix.
An interesting conference announcement turned up in my email late last week, from Student Pugwash USA announcing its 14th National Conference on Science and Social Responsibility: Promoting the Integrity of Science.
Its web site states:
Student Pugwash USA (SPUSA) is an educational, nonprofit organization that strives to add a dimension to scientific study that goes beyond formulas and figures. Activities encourage young people to probe the reasons for scientific advancement and the implications of technology on citizens' everyday lives.
While examining all sides of an issue, SPUSA increases students' ability to think independently about the issues that affect society -- issues that range from international conflict to environmental protection, from genetics research to civil rights. SPUSA focuses on the interplay that lies at the juncture of science, technology, and public policy.
The 14th National Conference celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. The Pugwash Conferences were prominent in the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear warfare. According to Wikipedia,
The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs is an international organization that brings together scholars and public figures to work towards reducing the danger of armed conflict and to seek solutions to global security threats. It was founded in 1957 by Joseph Rotblat and Bertrand Russell in Pugwash, Nova Scotia following the release of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955. Pugwash and Rotblat jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for efforts on nuclear disarmament. International Student/Young Pugwash groups have existed since 1979.
The Pugwash Conferences, and the bridge between contending world powers that they represented, were an important part of the scientific-political landscape when I was a student and young faculty member. I'm delighted to learn that the tradition is being vigorously carried on by today's generation of students. I was particularly impressed by the SPUSA Pledge
I promise to work for a better world, where science and technology are used in socially responsible ways. I will not use my education for any purpose intended to harm human beings or the environment. Throughout my career, I will consider the ethical implications of my work before I take action. While the demands placed upon me may be great, I sign this declaration because I recognize that individual responsibility is the first step on the path to peace.
This is the kind of engagement between academic and public issues that our contemporary world needs so badly.
Yesterday's blog was based on a March 15 column by _New York Times_ columnist Bob Herbert, in which he describes the dreadful job and life prospects of young black men, especially those who drop out without a high school diploma.
Herbert followed that column with another, on March 22, entitled "Stepping on the Dream", in which he points out that even if young people get high school diplomas and do well enough to be admitted to college, they may not be able to afford to go, or may accumulate so much debt that their future choices are severely constrained. The average debt of a college graduate is about $20,000, and the average debt of the average newly minted M.D. is probably in excess of $100,000.
Herbert writes "At the state level, per-pupil spending for higher education is at a 25-year low, even as government officials and corporate leaders keep pounding out the message that a college degree is the key to a successful future."
We see this here in Minnesota, where a "no new taxes" governor, backed by a like-minded legislature, imposed drastic budget cuts on higher education. This, piled on a long string of inadequate appropriations, has had the consequence that tuition at the University of Minnesota has gone up more than 110% in the past 10 years. This year we thought we had elected a different-minded legislature, but the reluctance to raise or redistribute taxes, even for obviously socially beneficial purposes, seems to be a nonpartisan mindset. Other states have similar attitudes.
Colleges and universities genuinely and justifiably view themselves as agents for good in society. They are very unhappy about having to raise tuition to cover the educational costs that the states are no longer willing to cover, but they have no choice if they are to maintain quality programs. They are particularly distressed at the difficulties this puts in the way of economically disadvantaged students, who may be so discouraged by the financial barriers that they choose not to pursue higher education, thereby depriving them of a good living and society of the contributions they would make.
We want to provide affordable access to high-quality higher education. We used to be able to do it, but society seems no longer willing to pay the cost even though it is clearly able to afford it. Without it, the engagement efforts of our higher education institutions, significant though they are, are handicapped because we cannot adequately carry out the core of our mission: to educate and inspire the young people of today to be the fully contributory citizens of tomorrow.
A high priority for colleges and universities these days is to improve affordability of, and access to, higher education. We care because we want to have students who reflect the diversity of society, and we want to keep our classrooms and laboratories filled. We also care because we know that we can’t have a good society in the future unless most of today’s young people grow up to hold productive, decently-paid jobs, which increasingly requires some college education.
What we may not fully realize is the dire consequences, both to young people and to society, if the young people do not get a decent education or have decent job prospects. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, in his March 15, 2007 column, paints a dismal picture of the prospects and consequences for young black men. He writes,
Black American males inhabit a universe in which joblessness is frequently the norm, where the idea of getting up each morning and going off to work can seem stranger to a lot of men than the dream of hitting the lottery, where the dignity that comes from supporting oneself and one’s family has too often been replaced by a numbing sense of hopelessness. ...
[M]ost black men do not go to college. In big cities, more than half do not even finish high school. Their employment histories are gruesome. Over the past few years, the percentage of black male high school graduates in their 20s who were jobless (including those who abandoned all efforts to find a job) has ranged from well over a third to roughly 50 percent. … For black males who left high school without a diploma, the real jobless rate at various times over the past few years has ranged from 59 percent to a breathtaking 72 percent. ...
Jobless rates at such sky-high levels don’t just destroy lives, they destroy entire communities. They breed all manner of antisocial behavior, including violent crime. One of the main reasons there are so few black marriages is that there are so many black men who are financially incapable of supporting a family.
Herbert points out that some of the most useful job-training programs to move poor young people into productive jobs have been gutted, rather than expanded, and that our educational programs are faltering and largely ineffective.
Many colleges and universities are trying to ameliorate this situation, if only in small ways, through programs with schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods, service-learning, literacy tutorials, clinics and nutrition programs, and so forth. But these efforts have small chance of success if they are not bolstered by other societal investments, and particularly by the prospect of decent jobs.
At yesterday's screening of "50-50: The American Divide", a prominent theme in the discussion was that just voting, and trying to hold candidates to account for their promises, is—though important—not nearly enough. If our democracy is to survive (or revive) in any useful form, we need to have much more citizen involvement. We can't just vote for politicians and expect them to be our saviors. They can't do that, and we shouldn't expect them to. What we should expect is that they and we find ways, together, to realize our visions.
These ideas are being brought into clearer focus by the November5 Coalition (named for the day after the 2008 presidential election). The coalition is just getting started, but its web site has a lot of interesting material. A few paragraphs from the manifesto give the flavor of the enterprise:
Elections have become too much about celebrities and consultants, not about citizenship. They treat people as consumers, not as citizens who want to be involved with each other, informed about issues, and engaged with our government.
It’s time to break this pattern. We need a new politics of respect for citizen voice and citizen capacity. During the coming months, interactions between voters and candidates will offer opportunities for citizens to take campaigns back from pundits and pollsters, big donors and consultants. How? By creating chances to ask real, rather than scripted, questions. By opening space for citizens to discuss issues with one another, as well as with candidates. Most of all, we need to hear how candidates’ policies will tap civic energies and develop civic capacities. What are candidates’ ideas for engaging people in government’s day-to-day efforts if they get elected? How would they involve citizens in policy matters that they are considering? How would they structure government to support such work? Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous observer of American democracy, observed almost two hundred years ago that “Action of [citizens] joined to that of the public authorities frequently accomplishes what the most energetic centralized administration would be unable to do.� This is more true than ever today - and we know more than ever about how to structure and sustain these kinds of citizen-government collaborations. We should be past the stage where candidates can utter vague pronouncements about citizenship and public life without having to say exactly how they are going to implement their ideas.
We also need change on the voters’ side. As the bipartisan National Commission on Civic Renewal put it in their report about democracy, we have become too much “spectators and consumers.� Our ability to work across differences has weakened. We have a private culture of avoidance and accusation, not a public culture of accountability and action. We must roll up our sleeves, change this culture from “Me to We,� and advance ideas about work that has been done and needs to be done. We need to stop simply asking, “What can you give us?� We need to ask, “How will you work with us?�
If their comments and questions at "50-50" are any indication, it appears that students are particularly attracted to this line of thought and action. Let's hope that they—and we—follow through. We need to make our politics an example of genuine, sustained engagement, not a spectator sport.
This afternoon I introduced a screening of a documentary movie, 50/50: The American Divide, for about 150 students, faculty, and staff at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Campus. The movie was made by two people from the University of Minnesota Duluth campus. To quote from the publicity information:
50/50: The American Divide is a documentary about why people vote and why they don’t vote, shot during the 2004 presidential election. The movie was produced by Follow Productions based in St. Paul and the UMD Office of Civic Engagement as part of the American Democracy Project sponsored by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
Videographer Zack Swanson, a young conservative and UMD alumnus and director Bill Payne, a middle aged liberal and UMD faculty member, set out to find a divided country, the red/blue reality that was being hyped by the mainstream media. What they found was an electorate that was more intelligent, more passionate about the political process, and more reasonably centrist than the media were reporting. This documentary presents the voices of we the people and inspires hope about the future of America. The movie starts in Duluth on Election Day 2003 and ends on Election Day 2004. It features Duluth Mayor Herb Bergson, St. Louis County Commissioner Steve O’Neil, U.S. Congressman James Oberstar, and former U.S. Senator Mark Dayton, along with over one hundred American voters and non-voters from across the nation.
The documentary was effective: engrossing and thought-provoking. We broke halfway through for some panel discussion and remarks from the audience. Among the many interesting points raised, these particularly struck me:
I'm particularly pleased that this effort comes from the University of Minnesota Duluth, since Public Engagement is a system-wide and state-wide activity, and the coordinate campuses are an important part of the U's efforts.
50/50: The American Divide has a fledgling web site. More content will be added there soon. Keep an eye on it.
Should anthropologists work with the military, the CIA, and other national security agencies? Last Tuesday's on-line Chronicle of Higher Education had an article on this vexing topic, which is of considerable pertinence to public engagement by university researchers in the social sciences. Entitled "Anthropologists Discuss Where to Draw Ethical Lines in Dealing With National-Security Agencies" and written by David Glenn, it describes a panel discussion of the Ad Hoc Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology With the U.S. Security and Intelligence Communities , a temporary committee of the American Anthropological Association. Some of the points that were raised:
There are important modern instances of academics being forced to deal with ethical dilemmas brought about by a confrontation between their scholarly skills and the demands of the broader society: e.g., the Manhattan Project, the Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA technology, and restrictions on foreign students being able to work on defense-related projects. The dilemmas faced by anthropologists (and other social scientists) are significant additions to this list.
For a change of scene, I'd like to turn my gaze from Minnesota to a western university that is vigorously pursuing civic engagement: USC. Director Terry Cooper, Associate Director Chris Weare, and their colleagues have an active Civic Engagement Initiative, with an impressive publication program. They have just published a newsletter in which they detail their efforts to reach out to the community with their research results. The newsletter can be accessed at through the CEI home page or directly as a pdf file
Most of the research is focused on the Los Angeles neighborhood councils -- organizations through which citizens interact with government officials to try to find an effective voice in governance. Links to several publications about these studies (as downloadable pdfs) are on the home page.
The interactions between the USC Civic Engagement Initiative and the neighborhood councils are so close that the former Deputy Director of the CEI, Carol Baker Tharp, very recently took a job with the city of LA as general manager of Neighborhood Empowerment, where she will oversee the entire Los Angeles Neighborhood Council system, which consists of 86 local councils.
Every university has a different portfolio of public engagement activities, and different types of interactions with community partners. USC provides a very interesting example.
In October 2006, Alan I. Leshner wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education on "Science and Public Engagement", which I've used to title today's blog. Leshner, who is chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of Science, is deeply involved in issues of the public understanding of science.
Leshner argues, in a way that I find convincing,
Many scientists argue that the solution to the tension between science and society is to increase public understanding of science. But the problem is not simply a lack of comprehension. The case of stem-cell research is instructive: It is not that opponents do not understand somatic-cell nuclear transfer; they do grasp the fundamental nature of the process, and they don't like it. The notion of destroying an embryo, no matter how noble the cause, conflicts with their core religious beliefs about when life begins, and its sanctity. More education would not be enough. (Chronicle)
He goes on to say "Instead of simply increasing public understanding of science, scientists need to have a real dialogue with members of the public, listening to their concerns, their priorities, and the questions they would like us to help answer." He articulates some important points about how to have such a dialog. (I list just summary phrases; you should read the whole thing.)
In January of this year, Leshner followed up with an article in Science entitled "Outreach Training Needed", where he takes the idea further. He points out that "engaging the public effectively is an acquired skill, and preparation for outreach strategies has seldom been part of scientific training programs", and proposes two necessary steps.
First, the reward structure of academia needs to be modified. Academic institutions need to support engagement efforts by "putting public outreach efforts among the metrics used to decide promotion and tenure" and funding agencies should expect such efforts to be intergral parts of research proposals.
Second, graduate student and postdoc educational programs should include training in communicating with public audiences, which is different from communicating with students or scientific peers.
This communication needs to be a genuine two-way dialog. As Lesher concludes his editorial,
This will doubtless be an additional burden on existing systems. Unfortunately, there is no alternative. If science is going to fully serve its societal mission in the future, we need to both encourage and equip the next generation of scientists to effectively engage with the broader society in which we work and live.
Sarena Seifer has sent a summary report about a Wingspread conference on "Community Partner Perspectives on Community-Higher Education Partnerships" convened last April by Community-Campus Partnerships for Health with the collaboration of several other organizations. This meeting involved just community members, many working with Research 1 universities - but there were "no academics in the room". The recommendations from the conference:
Community partners have the responsibility to share their collective wisdom and knowledge about community-higher education partnerships with community members, colleges/universities, and funding agencies.
Community involvement and capacity building is needed at the local, regional, and national levels. Supports are needed to develop community members as civic leaders, change agents, and community-based researchers.
Community partners should develop principles of participation to clarify terms of engagement and expectations in their partnerships with higher educational institutions.
To facilitate greater understanding, community partners must familiarize themselves with the culture and daily realities of their academic partners, and vice versa.
Community partners must work together with academic partners/allies to change the culture of higher education into one that values and supports communities as equal partners.
Community partners must work together with academic partners/allies to elevate the credibility and recognition for the life/work experience of community partners and the context/environment in which they do this work.
Funding agencies need to reexamine funding priorities, as well as how funding is structured, reviewed, distributed, and evaluated, to ensure that these advance and do not undermine the potential for authentic community-higher education partnerships.
Community partners should form a collective body to reduce the feelings of isolation experienced by many community partners and increase capacity through mentoring, networking and advocacy.
These recommendations, if put into practice, could make a huge difference in the effectiveness of our public engagement efforts.
By coincidence, my post yesterday about the need for engineering to better emphasize its human dimension if it is to attract students with a strong motivation to help people rather than just solve technically challenging problems, is eloquently supported today by an article, "Holistic Engineering", in the March 16 issue of The Chronicle Review.
The article, by Domenico Grasso, dean and professor at the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Vermont, and David Martinelli, chairman of the department of civil and environmental engineering at West Virginia University, asserts
In this evolving world, a new kind of engineer is needed, one who can think broadly across disciplines and consider the human dimensions that are at the heart of every design challenge. In the new order, narrow engineering thinking will not be enough. American higher education is in an unusual position to create the 21st-century engineer.
They point out that many more engineers are being trained worldwide than ever before, many of them in Asia and as technically competent as US-trained engineers. But they assert that technical competence, though certainly necessary, is no longer sufficient. "The crucial question facing academe is whether we are adequately preparing our future engineers and designers to practice in an era that requires integrated and holistic thinking, or are needlessly limiting their solution spaces to those that contain only technological answers, with scant or passing consideration of the myriad other influencing and dependent factors." They write
In engineering, a discipline that purports to design for humanity and improve the quality of life, the unity of knowledge should be a sine qua non that asks engineers to look outward, beyond the fields of math and science, in search of solutions to entire problems. To better serve humanity, engineers must at least attempt to understand the human condition in all its complexity — which requires the study of literature, history, philosophy, psychology, religion, and economics, among other fields.
I'm tempted to quote the whole article, but it's simpler (and less in violation of copyright laws) to refer you to the Chronicle of Higher Education web site to read it yourself.
These arguments apply not just to engineering, but to every academic specialty. To be fully engaged with public concerns—and thus to justify the public support that we expect—we need to broaden our horizons and enrich the education we provide our students.
Last Wednesday I blogged about an opinion piece by Thomas Fisher, Dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Design, which argued for a more integrated approach to design for human purposes in modern life. Yesterday Bruce F. Wollenberg, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, wrote a Counterpoint in which he challenged Fisher's seeming criticism of engineers as responsible for "for the 'inefficient, even dysfunctional' design of cities", and points out that "cities are usually designed by people educated in 'urban planning.' Engineers may be part of the teams designing cities -- but they are not the principal designers."
Wollenberg goes on to say
It is often thought that engineering is a field that manipulates things and that human need is not within its scope. The reality is quite the opposite. Engineers do what they do to meet human needs. To be truly effective, engineering and design have to work hand in hand in cooperative, interdisciplinary, ways to meet people's needs.
Both Tom Fisher and Bruce Wollenberg are friends of mine, and I have no intention to take sides. However, I think that this dispute holds a lesson about how engineering—which is indeed concerned with people's needs—doesn't make that case strongly enough in trying to attract and educate students. Wollenberg writes
The mistaken idea that engineering is not fundamentally interested in people's needs becomes a barrier to exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary work that is needed to solve complex problems. Perhaps more harmful is the effect this myth has on the career choices of young people. We often hear students say that they would like to pursue engineering but need to find a field where they can help people. This is wrong: the best and the brightest, the compassionate and the caring, driven from a field where they could help people, all by a myth.
Unfortunately, this is a message that doesn't come through as clearly as it might. The home page for undergraduates in the Electrical and Computer Engineering program says
What is engineering?
Engineering is both a science and an art, requiring a combination of imagination, creativity, technical skills, and business acumen to make things that benefit people. Engineers design bridges and automobiles, biomedical materials and robots, mass transit systems and communication networks, processes for cleaning up toxic spills, and systems for improving harvest yields; and that is only scratching the surface. Basically, engineering is the process of producing a technical product or system that meets a specific need.
This does mention benefiting people by meeting their needs, but only in a passing way. The equivalent statement on the home page of the College of Design does somewhat better.
The College of Design encompasses the full range of design disciplines from graphic design, apparel design, and interior design to architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. The college also includes programs in housing studies and retail merchandising. The faculty and students in the college seek to advance the quality and value of the natural, designed, and social environments, with a focus on the interaction of people and their world.
The real emphasis on the role of these disciplines in dealing with issues that affect people and communities comes in their outreach and service pages:
The College of Design Research & Outreach Units
The College of Design encourages faculty and students to engage in problem-focused research and outreach that has regional, national, and international significance. Research and Outreach establishes professional learning communities of scholars in centers, laboratories, consortiums, museums, and institutes. Such learning communities focus on innovative solutions to design problems relating to architecture, apparel design, interior design, graphic design, housing, landscape architecture, and merchandising, and make up-to-date knowledge available in the classroom.
The mission of Engineers Without Borders - University of Minnesota (EWB-UMN) is to partner with disadvantaged communities around the world, and to improve their quality of life through implementation of engineered projects that prove environmentally and economically sustainable. Our goals are achieved through cooperation with each other, fellow institutions, and mentors on the basis of commitment, persistence and concern for the recipients of our efforts. We strive to uphold and advance our principles for international responsibility and look forward to applying the experience in our future engineering careers.
Engineering might do better in attracting students who want "to find a field where they can help people" if it put such sentiments—and educational possibilities—up front on its undergraduate and graduate home pages.
As colleges and universities pay increasing attention to issues of poverty, minority and non-traditional students, preK-12 education, housing, transportation, and urban affairs generally, we are awakening to the fact that we need to encourage business and economic development in our neighboring communities. As nicely stated on the web site of Community-Wealth.org:
Institutions of higher education have an obvious vested interest in building strong relationships with the communities that surround their campuses. They do not have the option of relocating and thus are of necessity place-based anchors. While corporations, businesses, and residents often flee from economically depressed low-income urban and suburban edge-city neighborhoods, universities remain. At a time when foundations which help establish community-based projects are commonly unable to continue with ongoing involvement over long periods of time, universities are inherently an important potential institutional base for helping community-based economic development in general, and civically-engaged development in particular. The question is how to tap this potential in a major way.
John Hamerlinck, of Minnesota Campus Compact, has compiled a list of examples of community investing by colleges and universities. I think this list is a valuable resource, so I'm putting up links to web sites that describe the programs he has found.
I'm not usually a fan of David Brooks's political positions, though I enjoy his lucidity and style. But in his Op-Ed piece in the February 22 issue of the New York Times, he makes some recommendations to potential Republican presidential candidates that are remarkably pertinent to Public Engagement:
Third: Don’t Be a University. Most campaigns organize their policy experts like academic departments — economists on one committee, social policy types on another, religious leaders on a third. They come up with utterly conventional recommendations.
You want to organize your committees according to priorities. For example, create a Flourishing Families Committee. Get economists, religious activists and psychologists in one room to figure out how government can reduce stress on struggling families. You’ll be surprised by how much interdisciplinary creativity you can unleash and how much closer you get to the problems of real people.
Most of all, you’ll break free from the useless categories most pundits use to define Republicans: social conservative, free market libertarian, neoconservative. If you define yourself by those categories, you’re dead.
Good advice can come from any direction.
Early last week we had a workshop in which about 30 faculty and administrators talked with each other about barriers—real or perceived—to multidisciplinary and civically engaged work. The two are, of course, closely connected, since as someone has said, "Universities have disciplines while society has problems."
In addition to the standard obstacles to multidisciplinary research (dangers to promotion and tenure of probationary faculty, lack of professional recognition in the discipline, shortage of funding, etc.) I pointed out two that became clear to me from my service in the Graduate School.
The first obstacle is the strong influence of the National Research Council (NRC) rankings on departmental behavior. If their disciplines are ranked by the NRC, as are most in the core arts, sciences, and engineering, departments may be reluctant to have their faculty's effort (publications, research grants, dissertation guidance) diverted to collaborative efforts such as interdisciplinary graduate programs.
The second obstacle is recruitment and support of graduate students. Again, this is largely a departmental function. Departments tend to provide financial support—mainly in the form of teaching assistantships—to graduate students who enter the departmentally-centered graduate program. Interdisciplinary graduate programs have trouble finding such financial support for the students they are trying to recruit. The Graduate School can try to help, but (at least at Minnesota) has limited resources.
When we look for barriers to more engaged scholarly work in research universities, we find them deeply embedded in values and practices that we too readily take for granted.
The Opinion section of Sunday’s Star Tribune carried an interesting interview with Thomas Fisher, Dean of the University of Minnesota’s College of Design. This is a new college, formed by combining the former College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture with the Department of Design, Housing and Apparel in the former College of Human Ecology. This new configuration has led to a broader mission for the College, grounded in a conviction that design—in all its manifestations—is crucial to the quality of our lives.
An example: In response to the question “So design has a chance to liberate us?”, Fisher responds:
Yes, from this highly engineered, inhumane, ugly, heartless and low-morale environment that’s based more on the efficiency of systems than compatibility with people. We’ve been doing work with homeless teenage mothers. In wondering how to make things better, I asked if the problem was housing or training or transportation. They said it was all of those. They can’t get from affordable housing to day care to a job and back again because we’ve designed a bus system for the benefit of the operators, housing at the behest of zoning codes and jobs that require a car, which people can’t afford. This is a classic design problem
Tom Fisher has been an advocate of design in the service of people for a better society for all of his career, an advocacy which he shares with many of his faculty and students. The new College of Design is a great opportunity to implement this vision, and for the University of Minnesota to be in the vanguard of devoting university-based scholarship, teaching, and creative activity to the most important public purposes.
Ezra Hyland, an instructor in the Department of Post-Secondary Teaching and Learning in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, has developed an innovative African-American Read-In program (web site here).
"The Read-In is a literacy initiative addressing the attainment of reading and writing skills in African American students and encouraging reading and writing across the curriculum."
In mid-February, Hyland learned that the program had won $50,000 award from the James Patterson PageTurner Awards, established by the best-selling author, which annually give $500,000 "to celebrate the people, companies, schools, and other institutions which find original and effective ways to spread the excitement of books and reading."
In addition to annual participation in the National African-American Read-In, the University of Minnesota program involves a book drive and a Black Men Reading book club/study group.
A link on the web site leads to an imaginative list of suggested activities for various kinds of host organizations:
This is a terrific example of a university program, spearheaded by an imaginative and energetic leader who has garnered broad community support, that effectively implements our public engagement mission. It's great to see it receiving tangible national recognition that will enable it to carry out its objectives even more effectively.
I was flattered at having this blog chosen as one of the "most engaging" by Smart Communities. The recognition inspires me to resume, although I hope in a way that involves more contributions from other members of the Public Engagement community in higher education.
Last Friday and Saturday I attended a conference, hosted by Franklin Gilliam at UCLA, on "Research Universities and Civic Engagement". It was the follow-up to one hosted by Rob Hollister at Tufts in October 2005. There was bigger group of universities this time, and I think we were all impressed by the range of activities that each of our institutions is engaged in (pun intended).
Rather than trying to summarize those activities, or the conference itself, I am listing links to the web sites of the participants. Visiting those links will give a great sampling of the public engagement efforts currently underway in our research universities.
I've decided to discontinue my Public Engagement blogs, at least for a while, so I can devote more time and energy to other projects. Thanks for reading.
Harold Shapiro, in his book A Larger Sense of Purpose (Princeton, 2005), makes the following challenging observations about science:
Although the cumulative accomplishments of science can hardly be overstated, we must acknowledge that they necessarily bring in their wake a series of problematic issues. It is doubtful, for example, that more science always leads to more social dividends, that the scientific agenda is always focused on the most important issues, that the norms of science are adequate to ensure public accountability, that the promise of science is always fulfilled, that science can take the measure of all things, or that new knowledge is neutral in its moral and practical consequences. Science is a social activity. Scientific activities cannot benefit everyone's interests at the same time, and they are inevitably influenced by ideologies and conflicts of interest. Indeed, some have gone so far as to suggest that science, like other activities and policies, simply serves those who profit from the existing social order. (p. 123)
None of this should be taken to mean that specific scientific results are socially contingent; but Shapiro's words should force scientists to acknowledge that the locus and support of their research, and the reception and use of their results, are strongly affected by social, ideological, political, and economic factors. This means that the interactions of academic scientists with their various publics---students, funders, peers outside of academe, government officials, and the public at large---have a more reciprocal character than might superficially be recognized.
Examples are not hard to come by. One that is currently pertinent is the growing interest in biofuels---especially corn---as a renewable source of energy that reduces our dependence on Middle East oil and promises new profits to corn-growing states. While such benefits should not be minimized, the accompanying costs, such as diversion of an important food source with accompanying rise in food costs, the limited ability of corn to substitute for more than a small fraction of petroleum usage, and the continued generation of greenhouse gases, should not be overlooked. Support for research on other energy alternatives, e.g., non-foodstock vegetation, nuclear and solar power, and conservation, could be deemphasized in universities located in states that stand to profit from corn-based biofuels.
There are no guarantees that this will, or won't, happen. But alertness to potential economic and political influences on research is an important part of engagement between universities and the broader society.
I've just returned from a month in India. I'll get back to blogging about standard Public Engagement topics soon, but first some reflections from the trip.
A renewed recognition of how much our research universities depend on Indian graduate students, especially in engineering and computer science. We met many college students on our trip, most of them anxious to come to the USA for further education. When we define public engagement as a reciprocal exchange of resources between universities and publics, we shouldn't forget bright, motivated students as a key public resource.
A sense of how powerful India and China, each with well over one billion inhabitants, will become as they modernize their educational and economic systems. We may only hope that their competition with "the West" and with each other will be basically peaceful; and that they can find ways to minimize environmental impacts as they enhance their standards of living.
A recognition of how important it is to find ways to keep people productive in the countryside, rather than having them flock to the cities where overcrowding and poverty are uncompensated by the intricate support systems of traditional village life. We see similar issues in the USA, as the viability of rural America is challenged. Perhaps nations can find ways of learning from each other, and perhaps universities could play a role in such exchange of knowledge and ideas.
I'll be traveling for the next month, so there will be no more blog postings until early February.
Have a happy, productive, and engaged New Year!
Harold Shapiro's A Larger Sense of Purpose: Higher Education and Society (Princeton, 2005) is a thought-provoking book. In Chapter 3 he writes about "Liberal Education, Liberal Democracy, and the Soul of the University". He points out that as universities are now constituted, there is usually a strong separation among undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. The undergraduate experience is typically looked on as the time to get a “liberal education�, while graduate and professional schools are the places to be trained in a profession.
This separation is unfortunate because, as Shapiro (p. 89) says, “…the philosophy of a liberal arts education presumes learning experiences that enable citizens to understand their interrelated social, moral, and professional responsibilities. This view is as central to high-quality professional education as to education in the arts and sciences.�
He goes on to point out that professional training—in theology, law, and medicine—has from earliest days been the main purpose of universities. Only recently have the liberal arts been viewed as the central core of the university. In fact, professional and liberal education have much overlap and should be more tightly integrated. As Shapiro (p. 113) writes, “Indeed, the most valuable part of education for any learned profession is that aspect that teaches future professionals to think, read, compare, discriminate, analyze, form judgments, and generally enhance their mental capacity to confront the ambiguities and enigmas of the human condition.� These outcomes are also the benefits claimed for a liberal education.
These arguments also apply to education in public engagement. We have recently put more public engagement-related content into the undergraduate curriculum, through service-learning, multicultural requirements, etc. In fact, the fully aware and responsible practice of a profession (whether prepared for in graduate school or professional school) also demands attention to respectful and reciprocal partnership with the public that the profession serves.
Our professional schools acknowledge this truth to some extent, through law clinics, medical and dental clinics in underserved communities, and the like. Our graduate programs largely lag behind. In neglecting the potentially rich public engagement content of their disciplines, they are doing neither their graduate students nor their disciplines a service.
9/11, anthrax, Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, bird flu, tainted spinach... This has been a time of great anxiety about real or potential disasters. The challenges to our public health preparedness systems are immense, and much responsibility falls on schools of public health to educate practioners, as well as students and the public, about how to prepare and cope.
The feature story in the Fall 2006 issue of Advances, the quarterly magazine of the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota, describes the work that the SPH is doing in public health preparedness. Among the efforts mentioned:
Many of these efforts are overseen by Debra Olson, Associate Dean for Public Health Practice Education. According to the article,
Olson believes that there are two essential components to the success of the programs: collaboration and coordination. The school's strong collaborative ties to leaders in the workforce mean curriculum and research are relevant and up-to-date. And coordination within the school means preparedness trainings and practices aren't duplicated.
Collaboration with community partners and coordination within the university's programs: key aspects of any successful public engagement effort.
A few days ago I received an email newletter: U-News from the Minnesota Youth Community Learning Initiative (MYCL) of the University of Minnesota. The Table of Contents is a generous sampling of youth-related issues that the MYCL and its community and university partners are dealing with:
According to its web site,
The Minnesota Youth Community Learning (MYCL) Initiative, funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, partners Konopka Institute staff at the University of Minnesota and seven Minnesota community coalitions. Their shared goal: to re-engage students who are disconnected from learning by connecting them with school and caring capable adults who provide skill-based mentoring.
It does so "by partnering with seven Minnesota communities to:
The Konopka Institute, located in the Adolescent Health and Medicine Division of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, has the disarmingly simple goal "to get reliable information into the hands of everyone who is in a position to help adolescents." It is named after Dr. Gisela Konopka, a professor of social work at the U who pioneered work with adolescents. Some key parts of her intellectual biography can be seen here.
It's noteworthy that Konopka's vision and work, coming out of the Department of Social Work (in the former College of Human Ecology on the Saint Paul campus) is being carried forward in large measure by the Department of Pediatrics in the Medical School on the Minneapolis campus. There are lots of barriers broken down here: Minneapolis/Saint Paul, Human Ecology/Medical School, clinical medicine/social work. This kind of boundary-crossing is crucial if universities are to be adequately engaged with key societal issues.
The December 11 issue of The New Yorker has an enlightening article by William Finnegan entitled "New in Town: The Somalis of Lewiston". The article doesn't seem to be available online, but a slide show is.
The article describes how Somalis by the thousands have moved to the relatively small city of Lewiston, Maine, and how both they and the townspeople have adjusted.
What particularly struck me is the complexity of the Lewiston Somali community. (The New Yorker is good about getting under the apparent surface unities of unfamiliar situations, as evidenced by its coverage of the Middle East.) There are in fact two disparate groups: the Somalis and the Bantus, belying the apparent homogeneity of the immigrants. In Somalia, the Bantus were slaves of the Somalis; and many of the resultant attitudes have carried over to Lewiston. Needless to say, this introduces serious complications into who speaks for the community, who can be a reliable translator or social welfare worker, who dares to speak in whose presence, etc.
The implications for public engagement are obvious: a well-meaning service-learning or community-based research project can easily step into a minefield of inter-group competition and resentment. As our colleges and universities do more of this work, they should try to build up and share with each other a sustainable infrastructure of understanding of each community's dynamics.
A press release earlier this week tells about an impressive and important pertnership between the University of Minnesota's Center for Urban and Rural Affairs, the Labor Market Information Office at the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, and other government agencies and nonprofit organizations. They have developed a web-based mapping system called Minnesota 3-D (M3D), that provides "employment, housing, services and economic development information and analysis tools."
The web site for M3D is http://map.deed.state.mn.us/m3d/.
According to the press release,
The first-of-its-kind application in the nation, M3D brings together more than 90 data layers that may be displayed visually on a map and in report format using geographic information systems technology.
"The future vitality of our region depends on our ability to efficiently connect housing, jobs and services," said Kris Nelson, CURA project director. "M3D provides a significant tool for communities to inform policies and implement strategies for efficient and sustainable development to assure the well being of working families."
As reported in a recent study by the National Center for Housing Policy, working families in the Twin Cities metropolitan area spend 30 percent of their household income on transportation (and more than 27 percent on housing). The report recommends that "regions coordinate their housing and transportation policies to ensure they fully reflect the needs of working families--one example includes building more affordable housing near existing and planned transit hubs."
Over the next year CURA and other M3D community partners will be working to apply M3D to planning and development projects to achieve a greater balance between housing and employment opportunities within communities.
A project like this reminds us that in university-public partnerships, the public partners may be not just individuals or citizen groups, but also governmental or nonprofit organizations whose goals, just like the university's, are to serve society; and that the partners have much information and technical knowledge to contribute to the joint venture.
Yesterday, Kathy Draeger dropped off a just-published book, From the Farm to the Table, by Gary Holthaus. Kathy is Statewide Director of the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships (about which I've written before in this space), and the book was published with the financial support of the Experiment in Rural Cooperation, which is the Regional Sustainable Development Partnership in southeastern Minnesota.
Over the past eight years, the Experiment "has been putting funds [provided by the State Legislature] into the hands of citizen leaders so they can use the resources of [the University of Minnesota] in projects that will lead to as sustainable society in this region."
The Experiment writes that it supported the publication of this book because it "believes that there is a story to tell about farming in Southeast Minnesota that is different from the story often told by mainstream media. The Experiment believes it is a story of success, at least some successes, even on small farms, and of people who are having satisfactory lives, making a living by adapting their farm practice to their particular landscape and nourishing it to bring health to the land, the animals, and the humans who live on it."
To quote from the description on the University Press of Kentucky web site,
In From the Farm to the Table, over forty farm families from America's heartland detail the practices and values that relate to their land, work, and communities. Their stories reveal that those who make their living in agriculture--despite stereotypes of provincialism perpetuated by the media--are savvy to the influence of world politics on local issues.
Gary Holthaus demonstrates how outside economic, governmental, legal, and business developments play an increasingly influential, if not controlling, role in every farmer's life. The swift approval of genetically modified crops by the federal government, the formation of huge agricultural conglomerates, and the devastating environmental effects of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides are just a few issues buffeting family farms. From the Farm to the Table explores farmers' experiences to offer a deeper understanding of how we can create sustainable and vibrant land-based communities by adhering to fundamental agrarian values.
This is obviously an important story to tell, and it is interesting—in the context of public engagement—to recognize that in this case universities (in Minnesota and Kentucky) didn't take the lead but played a facilitating role in enabling members of the public to tell their own story.
Research Universities and Civic Engagement
A couple of days ago I received copies of New Times Demand New Scholarship: Research Universities and Civic Engagement - A Leadership Agenda. This is the report of a Fall 2005 conference convened by Campus Compact and Tufts University of representatives from 12 leading research universities—six public and six private—"to discuss how their institutions are promoting civic engagement on their campuses and communities". The report (I was on the Editorial Committee) was insightfully written and edited by Cynthia Gibson. It is available as a PDF file at http://www.compact.org/resources/research_universities
The premise of the report is that the burgeoning civic engagement movement has largely been led "by community and liberal arts colleges and state universities [and that most] research universities have been much quieter, despite the ambitious efforts many have undertaken to promote and advance civic engagement in their institutions." The introduction continues:
The group not only shared their ideas; they decided to take action by becoming a more prominent and visible “voice for leadership� in the larger civic engagement movement in higher education. As a first expression of that voice, they have developed a case statement that outlines why it is important for research universities to embrace and advance engaged scholarship as a central component of their activities and programs and at every level: institutional, faculty, and student.
This statement, which has been endorsed by the entire group, argues that because of research universities’ significant academic and societal influence,world-class faculty, outstanding students, state-of-the-art research facilities, and considerable financial resources, they are well-positioned to drive institutional and field-wide change relatively quickly and in ways that will ensure deeper and longer-lasting commitment to civic engagement among colleges and universities for centuries to come. To advance this process, the group developed a set of recommendations as to what research universities can do to promote engaged scholarship at their own institutions, as well as across research universities, and ultimately, all of higher education.
The recommendations about what individual research universities and leaders at research universities can do to advance civic engagement across higher education are on pages 22 and 23 of the report. They are too lengthy to reproduce here, but propose an important, ambitious agenda for future work.
The Minnesota Landscape Arboretum is one of the University of Minnesota's prime public engagement efforts. Part of the Department of Horticultural Science in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, and situated on more than 1,000 acres of land about 20 miles southwest of the Twin Cities, it conducts horticultural research and has educational programs for both adults and children. It has been used by university researchers to develop many cold-hardy varieties for decoration and commercial use, and is frequented by hundreds of thousands of visitors each year who get ideas for landscaping, hold a party, or just enjoy the beautiful grounds which include northern woodlands, prairie, and marsh as well as formal gardens.
Among the many good activities of the Landscape Arboretum, some that stand out are education programs for school: field trips at the Arboretum; a Plantmobile that brings "live plants, activities, investigations, and take-home planting projects" to the classroom; and Learning Habitats for Neighborhood Schools. This last has been particularly exciting and successful for inner-city schools.
Imaginative and dedicated staff at the Arboretum are making a real contribution to enriching the lives and neighborhoods of more than 30,000 kids each year.
Universities: Servant, Critic, or Partner?
I've been reading Harold T. Shapiro's 2005 book, A Larger Sense of Purpose: Higher Education and Society. His major theme, neatly summarized on p. 15, is that the American research university must retain
“its dual role as … society’s servant and society’s critic. [U[niversities … must continue to provide programs that the society itself has identified as important as well as raising those questions and issues that society does not want to address. In some ways, universities can meet their responsibilities only by being a nuisance to the existing order of things."
This is a formulation that I like quite a bit. However, in this simple form it glosses over the great and growing differences in society. Evidently, Shapiro means the dominant, prosperous components of society; but we need to remember that there are many who don't share those comforts. Perhaps the formulation needs to be supplemented with that which Finley Peter Dunne concocted about newspapers a century ago, but which applies just as well to universities:
"The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
In addition, in the context of public engagement, the idea of partnership between the university and the public is missing. Casting the university as either servant or critic makes its interaction with society too unidirectional. There is a middle way.
Wikipedia has a stub that defines "Public History" as "the practice of history outside of the traditional academic setting of the university. Public historians are historians who work in museums, archives, preservation, government agencies, or private historical research consultant firms. Public history is history that both engages the public and invites the public to participate in the writing of history."
At the University of Minnesota we introduce public history to students in a course—HIST 3001 Public History—which places it both inside and outside academia. The topic this semester is the history of Dinkytown, the neighborhood that abuts the UM Twin Cities East Bank campus on the northeast.
The instructors for History 3001, Lisa Marie Blee and Andrew Theodore Urban, have given the following course description:
History need not be resigned to books and classrooms. This semester, we will research and design exhibitions that explore the history of your local community: Dinkytown. This course provides an introduction to the theory, methods, practice, and politics of "public history." Public history refers to the possibilities and challenges of producing and disseminating histories in nonacademic settings. Through readings, workshops by professionals in the field, and course assignments, students will learn about diverse forms of public history, including exhibitions, oral history, documentary film and radio, and web sites. This class also emphasizes the ways in which historical knowledge may enhance community and civic engagement. The major project theme this year - a history of the Dinkytown area - reflects this emphasis. Finished exhibitions will be on display along side the Weisman Museum's forthcoming national exhibit on Bob Dylan, who lived in Dinkytown for a time. The class will create a neighborhood history made up of linked projects, each produced out of collaboration between students and community partners. The final neighborhood histories will be presented to a broad public audience and made available to the community as a resource. Students may conduct projects on a wide variety of themes. For example, social protest and the anti-war movement or changes in the commercial and residential landscape of the neighborhood are two possibilities.
The course culminates in an exhibit, "Dinkytown Histories: Multiple Stories, Multiple Meanings", which opens today at the Nolte Center Library before it moves next year to the Weisman Art Museum. The exhibit is composed of five different projects:
This is rich stuff, from which all of us at the U—whether resident, business owner, student, faculty, or staff—will learn a great deal in an enjoyable way.
Yesterday's Star Tribune had a good story about a University of Minnesota program that places third-year medical students in rural practices, to work as a physician's apprentice. The program is "gaining national attention as a better way to train doctors."
The advantages for the student are that they gain continuous, integrated experience with a generational cross-section of patients, rather than seeing "cases" in a medical specialty context. They get front-line, hands-on experience, seem to learn at least as much as in the traditional curriculum, and don't develop the cynicism that now sometimes results.
The advantage for the rural physician is that they get some help, and the satisfaction of teaching.
The advantages for society are that more medical students may be attracted to rural practices, where the need is increasingly great; and that it may lower the cost of medical care. As the story says, "Rural care often emphasizes keeping patients well rather than treating them when they're sick, and providing continuous care -- sometimes across generations -- rather than the sporadic encounters with different doctors that define modern health care."
This is a great example of engagement: enriching teaching and learning, true involvement of community partners, and dealing with a crucial societal issue.
As I've written before in this blog, our energy future - with all the attendant issues of global politics and global warming - is one of the most important issues to which university research can make a contribution. I was therefore pleased that today's Star Tribune carried an editorial about the important work being done by David Tilman and his collaborators at the University of Minnesota's Cedar Creek research station. Some of the findings:
Perhaps by coincidence, the Star Tribune also carried a front-page story about Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty's "ambitious proposal to make the state more energy independent." Somewhat surprisingly, the connection between the front page and the editorial was not explicitly drawn. But it's clear that energy science, technology, and policy is a realm where university engagement with real-world governmental and commercial issues can have a big impact.
The National Endowment for the Arts has just released a report "The Arts and Civic Engagement: Involved in Arts, Involved in Life", available as a downloadable pdf file at http://www.arts.gov/pub/CivicEngagement.pdf.
The conclusion states "Americans who experience art or read literature are demonstrably more active in their communities than non-readers and non-participants. Their lifestyles reflect the same level of vigor and social commitment as those of sports enthusiasts. ... Thus, literary reading and arts participation rates can be regarded as sound indicators of civic and community health."
The conclusion is based on survey results from the U.S. Census Bureau, summarized in the first five of 10 ten findings. (The summary data are available on the pdf.)
However, the results are not encouraging with respect to young adult participation, which shows a 20-year decline:
Very likely these results correlate strongly with higher education, which should make us feel good about results with past generations of college students, but not so good about the current generation.
The December 10 issue of the New York Times has an interesting article by Amy Harmon entitled "DNA Gatherers Hit a Snag: The Tribes Don’t Trust Them".
The DNA gathering project at issue is one funded by the National Geographic Society "to collect DNA from indigenous groups around the world in the hopes of reconstructing humanity’s ancient migrations".
The fear is that origins and migrations reconstructed from DNA evidence may undermine other important concerns of indigenous groups: religious stories of origins, land rights, access to government-provided benefits such as health care, etc. Although it seems that peoples in most parts of the world have not worried about these issues, some in Alaska have pointed to potential difficulties.
“What if it turns out you’re really Siberian and then, oops, your health care is gone?� said Dr. David Barrett, a co-chairman of the Alaska Area Institutional Review Board, which is sponsored by the Indian Health Service, a federal agency. “Did anyone explain that to them?�
However this eventually works out, the lessons for researchers who want to do community-based research are clear: There's a lot of mistrust out there, much of it justified; benefits to the community as well as to the investigators need to be understood; and trust needs to be earned before research can, or should, be done.
On Wednesday I sat in on a Campus Conversations Lunch Series session on "Engaging Students in Campus Life". The discussion began with observations on the rewards of getting engaged, but quickly turned to the obstacles. Some of the points that were raised:
Most of these obstacles are not insuperable, and some useful suggestions arose from the discussion:
I'm pleased to report that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has announced its new Community Engagement classification, and that the University of Minnesota is one of the initial group of 76. To quote from the press release
Institutions were classified in one of three categories:
Curricular Engagement describes teaching, learning and scholarship which engage faculty, students and community in mutually beneficial and respectful collaboration. Their interactions address community-identified needs, deepen students' civic and academic learning, enhance community well-being and enrich the scholarship of the institution. (5 institutions)
Outreach and Partnerships describes two different but related approaches to community engagement. The first focuses on the application and provision of institutional resources for community use with benefits to both campus and community. The latter focuses on collaborative interactions with community and related scholarship for the mutually beneficial exchange, exploration and application of knowledge, information and resources (research, capacity building, economic development, etc.). (9 institutions)
Curricular Engagement and Outreach & Partnerships includes institutions with substantial commitments in both areas described above. (62 institutions)
The U of MN was one of the 62 institutions that qualified for both Curricular Engagement and Outreach & Partnerships, one of a handful of public research universities.
The press release notes that "even among the most compelling applications, few institutions described promotion and tenure policies that recognize and reward the scholarship associated with community engagement" and that "few institutions acknowledge community engagement as a priority in their search and hiring practices."
However, even though there's room for improvement, this new classification is a big step in the right direction. As Lee Shulman, President of the Carnegie Foundation, said, "Finding new and better ways to connect with their communities should be a high priority for higher education institutions today. The campuses participating in this elective classification provide useful models of engagement around teaching and learning and around research agendas that benefit from collaborative relationships."
We're pleased to be one of those models.
The lead article in the Fall 2006 issue of the University of Minnesota's Bioethics Examiner is entitled "The Impact of Pay-for-Performance Beyond Quality Markers–A Call for Bioethics Research". It's written by David Satin, MD, Assistant Professor in the U's Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, and a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Bioethics.
The pay-for-performance (P4P) approach to physician reimbursement, which Medicare and Medicaid are about to adopt across the country, pays clinicians more "if their patients score well on a particular set of health care quality markers." Satin proposes the following research questions to investigate potentially serious adverse effects of P4P:
He argues that examining these questions "from the perspectives of disciplines such as ethics, psychology, sociology, economics, epidemiology, public health, and clinical medicine is exactly the kind of interdisciplinary research bioethicists ought to be doing." I can't help but agree, and ask rhetorically
This approach to P4P is well on the way to being an exemplary piece of publicly engaged scholarship. What it needs to take it all the way is involvement with health insurers, government agencies, and concerned citizens to fully inform such research and take action on the results.
The Fall issue of Bioethics Examiner is on-line as a downloadable pdf at http://www.bioethics.umn.edu/publications/be/2006/BE-2006-fall.pdf.
Yesterday I had lunch with a group of faculty and staff from the Human Resources and Industrial Relations Center in the Carlson School of Management, along with their guests from several nonprofits and government agencies in the Twin Cities. The occasion was to thank the guests for having provided opportunities for students to intern in various HR capacities in the nonprofit and governmental sectors.
This is a program with many mutual benefits. The agencies get bright, motivated students to help them with the many HR tasks (writing policy and training manuals, developing on-line employee surveys, etc.) that are important but tend to get set aside in resource-thin organizations. The students get great experience and valuable entries on their resumés. The HRIR program gets a valuable attractor for students and an important augmentation to its teaching capabilities. The many benefits of a good public engagement partnership are manifest.
At lunch I talked with an HR representative from the Courage Center, a remarkable organization about which I had heard a little but was glad to learn more. According to its web site,
Since 1928, Minneapolis-based Courage Center, a nonprofit rehabilitation and resource center, has had a legacy of advancing the lives of people experiencing barriers to health and independence. Our continuum of care includes rehabilitation therapies, transitional rehabilitation, pain management, vocational and community-based services, and camping and sports and recreation programs for people of all ages and abilities. Courage Center offers comprehensive rehab services for people of all ages and abilities. We specialize in pain management, brain injury, spinal cord injury and congenital disabilities. We offer accessible fitness centers, aquatic therapy, vocational and community based services, a transitional rehab program, and sports, recreation and camping.
What a great opportunity for our students to develop their professional skills and resumés while aiding an organization with such an important mission.
The main article in the Books section in the November 6 issue of The New Yorker is "Sick City" by Steven Shapin. It's an essay on cholera occasioned by Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.
The article, and the book, focus on the discovery by John Snow, a mid-19th century London physician, that cholera is transmitted by contaminated water. By mapping the incidence of chlolera deaths, Snow traced the locus of terrible London epidemics in 1848 and 1854 to a well in Broad Street, and stopped the spread of the disease by having the handle removed from the pump. Sounds simple now, but it wasn't at a time when cholera was attributed to miasmic air and blamed on the unsanitary habits of poor people, and water-borne bacteria were not recognized as a cause of disease.
This is a fascinating and enormously important story, but I was particularly struck by the following passage near the end of Shapin's article:
The brilliance of Snow's map lay, as Johnson argues, in the way that it layered knowledge of different scales--from a bird's-eye view of the structure of the Soho neighborhood to the aggregated mortality statistics printed in the Weekly Return to the location of neighborhood water supplies--all framed by particular understandings of how people tended to move about in the neighborhood, of the physical proximity of particular cesspools to particular wells, and of the likely behavior of specific, still invisible, and still unnamed pathogens. A city is a concentration of knowledge as much as it is a concentration of people, buildings, thoroughfares, pipes, and bacteria. Maps like Snow's allowed the modern city to remake itself and to understand itself in a new way. They collected different sorts of knowledge, represented them vividly on the scale of a tabletop, and made that representation available as a resource for urban reform: a plan and a plan of action.
I have written before about the relation of the "universal" and "local" aspects of public scholarship. Snow's work is about the best example I can think of.
The October 30 issue of The New Yorker has an interesting article by Connie Bruck, "Millions for Millions", exploring the development and ramifications of microcredit and microfinance. This concept has become prominent since its "godfather", Muhammad Yunus, won the Nobel Peace Prize this year.
Much of the article focuses on whether microcredit/microfinance should be non-profit or for-profit. This debate has some relevance to considerations by colleges and universities, and other substantial institutions (e.g., churches and synagogues) about whether they should deposit some of their funds in neighborhood banks. The banks can then lend to small local businesses and civic organizations, funding local development that can improve the social health of the neighborhood.
This approach, called community (re)investment, seems like an attractive additional way to move toward the goals of neighborhood improvement that institutions now try to implement by community service, service-learning, and similar volunteer efforts.
Hesitations about community investment arise because of concerns about fiscal prudence and maximizing investment income. The data show that microcredit loan defaults are very infrequent, and neighborhood banks specialize in assessing such risks.
Maximizing investment income is a different issue. If an institution has made trying to improve a neighborhood one of its priorities, does it make more sense to maximize return on investment and then use the money to fund neighborhood improvement programs, or to accept a slightly lower return on an investment that enables the neighborhood to help itself?
These options are not mutually exclusive, and some of each might be the most productive strategy.
Yesterday I participated in a lively discussion about chaaracteristics of community-engaged scholarship that can "be used to inform the development of criteria for the review of community-engaged scholars" in the promotion and tenure (P&T) process. The discussion was led by Cathy Jordan, Director of our Children, Youth, and Family Consortium, who chairs the Peer Review Workgroup of the Community-Engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative under the aegis of Community-Campus Partnerships for Health.
The draft document that served as the basis for our discussion listed eight characteristics that should serve as the basis for the development of criteria:
1. Clear Goals
2. Adequate Preparation
3. Appropriate Methods: Scientific Rigor AND Community Engagement
4. Significant Results/Impact
5. Effective Presentation/Dissemination
6. Reflective Critique
7. Leadership and Personal Contribution
8. Consistently Ethical Behavior
These are all excellent characteristics, and the sample P&T dossier that was prepared using them was a model of thoughtful articulation and presentation. And yet, something seemed to me to be missing, in the context of P&T decisions at a Research I university: a clear statement and demonstration of the goal to become a leader in the discipline.
Top-ranking research universities expect that their faculty will be leaders in their fields, doing research that notably advances the disciplines by contributing to the solution of outstanding problems, developing new and improved methodologies, changing the way that outstanding problems are conceived, and writing about those accomplishments in numerous journal articles and/or books. Tenure is granted to probationary faculty members who demonstrate substantial evidence of being on track to fulfill those expectations.
These expectations seem to conflict with the ideas of community-based research in at least three ways: an emphasis on disciplinary standards, an expectation that the research will have broad impact rather than being focused on a particular local community, and an expectation of multitudinous publications in professional journals or books. I think that these conflicts are only apparent, and that top-quality community-engaged research can in fact satisfy the highest "traditional" academic expectations.
First, disciplinary standards: Academic disciplines that work with communities to do their research (e.g., the health professions, law, social sciences) need the cooperation of those communities if the research is to be reliable or even feasible. Careless or arrogant research in communities—all too common, unfortunately—can adversely affect cooperation and, thereby, the quality of the research. Careful cultivation of good relations with communities as active partners is likely to lead to much better (more complete, better follow-through with longitudinal research, more insightful) research results and thus a higher level of satisfaction of the best disciplinary standards.
Second, broad vs. local: Although community-engaged research is done in and with a specific local community, the research problem is likely to be a general one (e.g., nutrition, environmental toxicology, developmental effects of poverty). Therefore, the results are likely to have broad implications. Of course, the appropriate generalizations need to be made by the investigator in presenting and publishing the study.
Third, productivity: It may take several years to develop the trust and interactions needed to do good community-based research, but that time need not be devoid of publications. Community-based research is a relatively new approach, and there is much need for discussion of ways to do it well under various circumstances. Therefore, publications in professional journals—and presentations at professional meetings—on methodologies for community-based research, before the research is fully underway, would seem natural and desirable.
It is true that traditional academic attitudes do not easily fade away; but although significant conceptual and methodological transformations—those that are eventually recognized as having changed fields of research—take more time and effort, those who accomplish them are ultimately recognized as the true leaders of the disciplines.
Yesterday I drove up to Duluth to meet with Casey LaCore, Director of the Office of Civic Engagement at University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) and other faculty and staff active in engagement on that campus. They have a lively web site at http://www.d.umn.edu/outreach/civic/.
Several things particularly struck me during the day:
At lunch I joined a group that was following up a previous discussion about how to teach citizenship, defined in a way that goes well beyond voting. Each participant had been asked "to name a skill related to citizenship that they wished our graduates would possess", and this session was devoted to discussing how these skills could be fostered in each academic department. The list of desired skills was
The questions for consideration, which led to a lively discussion, were:
I was particularly intrigued with how the last-listed desired skill, "Have a basic working knowledge of the Constitution and Bill of Rights", might be integrated into the teaching programs of departments other than history or political science. A professor in the Theater Department described how he had incorporated such issues into the preparations for a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. In the sciences, current issues such as restrictions on the ability of international students to work on "national security-related" research projects might lead to broader discussions of free speech.
One participant pointed out that we need to remember that the Constitution is a living document. A good example for discussion with students would be the recent Supreme Court decisions about affirmative action in admissions, in response to the University of Michigan cases. Each department could have a useful dialog about how those decisions might pertain to their academic discipline.
Noting that few faculty outside the specialist departments have more than a rudimentary knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, we agreed that such discussions would be a good opportunity to arrange interdisciplinary teaching sessions and all-campus convocations.
Few issues are of greater long-term importance to society than renewable energy and the impacts of energy production and use on the environment. The Institute for Renewable Energy and the Environment (IREE) has for several years supported research in this area, with an annual conference to showcase progress. This year's conference is Tuesday, November 28, and will feature more than 70 poster presentations on
This is an area of research where extremely interesting science and technology challenges intersect with pressing societal needs. Minnesota, with its large expanses of land for growing biofuels, stands to benefit greatly—both economically and environmentally—if the challenges can be solved, so the state has been unusually generous in its support of renewable energy research. Seldom is the case for the public engagement aspects of research so clear.
More details are available on the UM News Service website.
On September 11 I blogged about the work of University of Minnesota Interior Design students and their professor, Caren Martin, in designing flexible office space for both community and university groups in north Minneapolis. Now it seems they're at it again!
The Parkway Theater in south Minneapolis was built in 1931. It is still open, but has a new owner who wants to rehab it to become a neighborhood destination that can accommodate small live theater productions and banquets. A story by Linda Mack in last Friday's Star Tribune tells how the students, grouped into seven design teams, "showed their drawings to neighbors and community leaders in the theater's lobby and auditorium." The designs will next be used to inform potential investors.
Public engagement projects such as this give students valuable real-world experience and enhance their enthusiasm, while providing real benefits to neighborhoods and the urban environment. And, Mack's article indicates, it might not have happened had not Caren Martin been acquainted with the Parkway's new owner: a good argument for university faculty and staff to be active members of their communities.
A University of Minnesota News Service story earlier this month told how the U is studying the driveability of vehicles using E20, an experimental fuel that is 20 percent ethanol and 80 percent gasoline. According to the story,
"By August 2013, state law will require all gasoline sold in Minnesota to contain 20 percent alcohol by volume. Minnesota has required 10 percent ethanol in gasoline since 1997. In order for this requirement to take effect, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must certify E20 as a motor fuel through a waiver under the Clean Air Act.
The state of Minnesota has contracted with the U of M to conduct a year-long drivability evaluation as the state aims to increase the use of alternative fuels in the state. The Council of Great Lakes Governors has supplied additional funding in support of the project. Results of the study will help the state pursue the EPA waiver."
A nice aspect of the study is that the test is being carried out by the U's Parking and Transportation Services:
"Eighty vehicles out of the university's fleet of 525 on the Twin Cities campus have been chosen for this test. As a control group, 40 of the vehicles have been running on a base fuel containing no ethanol. The other 40 are running on E20 fuel. The 40 pairs represent a cross section of vehicles with a variety of manufacturers and engine sizes, including hybrid vehicles....
Drivers regularly complete surveys measuring vehicle performance and driver experience. The university handles all vehicle maintenance at the Fleet Services Building. Mechanics have been monitoring mechanical problems and recording any drivability issues. Drivability issues include things such as non-starting, poor starting, the check engine light coming on and hesitation while accelerating or driving at a fixed speed. During the first three months, no drivability issues have been noted. The upcoming cold weather and a change in fuel blends for fall and spring may impact subsequent findings."
A story from the Star Tribune, written after the Legislature passed its mandate last May and preserved on a Minnesota State University Mankato web site, gives some Q&A about the increasing use of ethanol. The story has also been picked up by local TV station KARE 11 and is on its web site.
As a colleague of mine exclaimed, "Here's a superb example of engagement; it has all the elements!" A critical societal issue; close involvement by university, governmental, and (implicitly) private interests; careful research design; participation by U staff and facilties personnel, not just faculty; and thoughtful notice by the media.
Today is Thanksgiving, and yesterday's Star Tribune, in a preamble to the holiday, had an interesting story about the dramatic change in turkey production over the past 20 years. Turkeys grow larger and faster, but more cheaply, than they used to.
These changes are due to remarkably effective breeding (not genetic engineering) to get desirable characteristics. The breeding is done these days by two major companies, but much of the groundwork was laid by researchers in the Animal Science Department at the University of Minnesota. Their work has made Minnesota "the turkey capital of the world". It's interesting to look at the "Poultry U" web site to see the range of information that the U offers in support of turkey management:
This type of service and direct connection to an agriculturally important industry typifies the traditional land grant mission of state universities. It is the forerunner of what we now term "technology transfer"; and it has the characteristics of a partnership of knowledge and problem definition between the public and the university that qualifies it to be called "public engagement". It also raises some issues, e.g., Does the university become too dependent on support in the state legislature from a commodity producer group? Do commercial interests unduly shape the U's research agenda? Does focus on an agricultural industry shortchange other aspects of rural life?
Despite these questions, most of us would conclude that, on balance, the U's involvement with the turkey industry has been a good thing. The next question is: How do we transfer this model to the key issues facing our state in the 21st century? Not just new high-tech industries, but also education, health care, aging, and similar issues that don't have a clear economic focus but which will determine the well-being of our society.
At a meeting this week I learned about Juxtaposition Arts, a new community organization connected with the Service and Engagement efforts in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota.
According to their web site, Juxtaposition Arts is
"A non-profit youth focused visual arts organization engaging audiences through its community collaborations, studio arts workshops, public mural programs and special festivals and art exhibitions.
Two visual artists founded the organization in 1995 as a means to engage artistically inclined urban youth in high quality creative experiences in ways that are practical, relevant, and life changing."
I did a little further exploration, and found that Juxtaposition Arts is one of community partners in the course Landscape Architecture 1202, Making the Mississippi, taught by Patrick Nunnally. According to the course web site,
"This course examines how urban communities in the Upper Mississippi region are reconnecting to the river. Students are given a pragmatic sense of what people do in planning and then apply their research through community engagement. The final project generates ideas in riverfront planning for the community organizations involved and students are left with a wealth of knowledge and experience in community planning and design along the Mississippi.
Community engagement
Students work in teams on a community design project associated with a local partner organization. This project makes up thirty percent of the course and incorporates material covered in the other sixty percent. Community partners speak with students at the beginning of the project and attend a final review of student presentations. Additional fieldwork exercises focus on what has already been accomplished in riverfront planning."
Juxtaposition Arts points up several important lessons:
The University of Minnesota is undertaking a major revision of its tenure guidelines. Public Engagement is proposed to be, for the first time, an explicit component of the activities that may be considered in evaluating performance. The proposal that will be discussed by the Faculty Senate at the end of this month is:
7.11 General Criteria. What the University of Minnesota seeks above all in its faculty members is intellectual distinction and academic integrity. The basis for awarding indefinite tenure to the candidates possessing these qualities is the determination that each candidate has established and is likely to continue to add to a distinguished record of academic achievement that is the foundation for a national or international reputation or both. This determination is reached through a qualitative evaluation of the candidate’s record of scholarly research or other creative work, teaching, and service. Interdisciplinary work, public engagement, international activities and initiatives, and technology transfer will be taken into consideration, when determined to be relevant by the department or equivalent academic unit, in evaluating the candidate’s satisfaction of criteria; such contributions can involve scholarly research or other creative work, teaching, and discipline-related service.
We use the CIC definition of engagement:
Engagement is the partnership of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to
- enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity;
- enhance curriculum, teaching and learning;
- prepare educated, engaged citizens;
- strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility;
- address critical societal issues; and
- contribute to the public good.
Some comments seem useful to elaborate on how this definition fits into our usual academic criteria:
This past Saturday a dialog on health disparities was hosted by two student groups at the University of Minnesota: the University chapters of the Foundation for International Medical Relief of Children and the American Medical Student Association.
According to a story in today's Minnesota Daily, "The six-hour discussion highlighted inequality in the health care system at state and national levels." This is an especially appropriate topic for Minnesota and its medical professionals-in-training, because although Minnesota has among the best health statistics in the country, we also have some of the worst statistics for people of color. And according to the World Health Organization, the U.S. health system is only 37th in the world, although America spends at least 50 percent more per capita than any other country.
Participants from outside the U included some of the most prominent people in Minnesota health care, including Courage Center CEO and Minnesota Public Health Association President Jan Malcolm, Health Partners C.E.O Mary Brainerd, and Founder of United Family Practice Clinic Timothy Rumsey.
It's noteworthy that current and future medical students and other budding health care professionals are taking the lead about being informed about these issues and having the opportunity to discuss them with real-world professional leaders. We need more of this sort of education-focused public engagement.
A couple of weeks ago I had a visit from Dr. Michael Cuthill, Director of the UQ Boilerhouse Community Engagement Centre at the University of Queensland, Australia. It's encouraging to get more evidence of the international spread—see my October 27, 2006 blog—of the public engagement movement, and to recognize both the fundamental similarities and local differences of different institutions. The web page about the Centre has a nice summary of the basic purpose and philosophy that could be used by many of our organizations:
The purpose of the Boilerhouse is to facilitate just and sustainable community outcomes. To achieve this purpose, the centre engages with diverse stakeholders from the private, public, and community sectors in developing informed and collaborative responses to both existing and emerging community issues.Â
Why do we want collaborative responses? It has been argued that no single entity, be it public, private or non-government, can deal effectively with the complex interweaving of issues confronting modern society. Limited knowledge, time, abilities and energy constrain any one organisation in its efforts to build a just and sustainable society. Collaboration however opens up new possibilities for innovation - responsibility is shared, diverse perspectives are heard and resources can be used more effectively. Â
The following principles provide a clear philosophical foundation for our work. These include our commitment to:
Collaborative responses to local issues;
Active citizenship;
Personal relationships as a basis for collaboration, and
Sustainable development incorporating a balance between
- Social justice
- Economic stability and equity
- Environmental protection, and
- Participatory governance
The UQ Boilerhouse is undertaking an audit of UQ Community Service/Engagement Activity. One of its hoped-for outcomes is an identification of "[b]enefits to both University of Queensland and external stakeholders (including economic value of UQ community service/engagement activity." This will be tough to obtain, and we'll be looking with interest at whatever methodology may be used, in hope that we might replicate it.
2006-11-16 Removing Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria from Our Water Supply
The increasing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is one of the most serious threats to public health. It is therefore suitable and gratifying that the Center for Urban and Rural Affairs (CURA) at the University of Minnesota has sponsored a study on "Municipal Wastewater Treatment: A Novel Opportunity to Slow the Proliferation of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria?" and published an account of the findings in the Fall 2006 issue of the CURA Reporter. The report is available online at http://www.cura.umn.edu/reporter/06-Fall/LaParaetal.pdf.
The report gives a sophisticated but layperson's-level overview of antibiotic resistance, its origins, biological mechanisms, and dangers. The study was designed to determine whether standard municipal wastewater treatment is adequate to remove resistant bacteria from the water supply. The disturbing answer is "No." Even from a good municipal system, trillions of resistant bacteria are released into the water supply each day. The report suggests an additional step—sand filtration—that should be used, and points out that thermophilic (high-temperature) anaerobic digestion, though more costly, may be even more effective.
Implementing such additional purification steps may be costly, but the inability to treat bacterial infections due to antibiotic resistance will be a lot more costly. We may hope that University researchers will engage with government agencies and politicians to work out viable solutions to this problem.
It is interesting to note that the investigators include faculty, graduate students, an undergrad and a postdoc from a range of departments and colleges at the University of Minnesota: Civil Engineering; Soil, Water, and Climate; the College of Biological Sciences; and the Biotechnology Institute. Such interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary to solve real-world problems. Now they may need to drag some political scientists and economists into the mix.
Transportation determines so much of our lives: where we live, where we work, where we send our kids to school, where we shop and find recreation, which neighborhoods prosper and which decline, etc. The University of Minnesota's Center for Transportation Studies (CTS) and Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) are leading centers for study of transportation and its effects on modern life.
Hence I was interested when an impressive report/disseration arrived in my mailbox recently: Politics and Freeways: Building the Twin Cities Interstate System by Patricia Cavanaugh. Jointly sponsored by CTS and CURA, the report traces the history, politics, and decision points from the "Mega-Projects" era (1956 to the late 1960s) through the expansion of the debate (1970 to the mid-1990s) to the current period of falling behind (1990s to present). The report is available on the CURA web site. It is well worth browsing or reading. Here I'd like just to note the questions at the end of the Conclusions (p. 111):
What is congestion?
What levels are tolerable, and how much are we willing to pay to provide relief?
Minnesotans, like many Americans, are strongly attached to their cars and expect unlimited mobility. Is that a reasonable expectation?
Despite our tradition of providing access to transportation as a public good, is the region better served by requiring people to pay for the use of certain facilities?
Are there land-use patterns that have potential for reducing the need to drive?
What factors would have a significant effect on decisions about location and transportation for business and households?
What mix of transit and roads would fit our region?
How do we balance transportation needs against other social goods, such as education and healthcare, when resources are scarce?
If there is no money, will there be innovation, or does the innovation have to come first?
Key questions indeed, which will vex the public, government agencies, and politicians for a long time to come. The University has a key role in engaging with the other stakeholders to provide an objective and informed voice in the debate.
The Fall 2006 of Medical Bulletin, a publication of the Minnesota Medical Foundation that profiles activities in the University of Minnesota Medical School, has an important article "Preserving a critical pathway" about the Medical School's efforts to save the Center for American Indian and Minority Health (CAIMH).
The Center has graduated more American Indian physicians than all but one other US medical school: 123 over the past 30 years, which is more than 7% of all American Indian physicians practicing in the US. Further, more than half of them serve American Indian communities. Despite this successful record, CAIMH lost 83% of its budget when its federal funding ended September 1.
According to its web site
University of Minnesota Center of American Indian and Minority Health (CAIMH) strives to raise the health status of the Native American population by educating Native American students in the field of health care and Indian health. CAIMH provides support to Native American students to attain their medical degree, with many returning to their communities to deliver culturally sensitive health care to their own people.
The Indian Health Pathway was developed by CAIMH to support American Indian pre-health professions students and medical school students throughout all stages of their education. The IHP stresses the importance of allowing each American Indian student to retain unique qualities and belief systems that are the essence of being American Indian while progressing through the education system.
The Indian Health Pathway is grounded at the K-12 level and continues through undergraduate to medical school and a fellowship program.
All stages of the Indian Health Pathway include activities in academic monitoring, cultural competence, experiential/service learning, research, and professional development.
This pathway through the full educational career has led to much higher rates of high school graduation and college attendance for those who participate compared to those who don't, not to mention the subsequent high rate of enrollment in medical school.
Training American Indian physicians is important not only to the trainees, but even more so to the communities that they return to serve. High rates of mortality and morbidity are endemic in American Indian communities, in large measure because medical care is scarce. Under these circumstances, it is hard to understand why the federal Title VII program that supported the four National Centers of Excellence devoted to American Indian education had its funding eliminated by the Government Accounting Office. As so often happens, those who have least are cut the most, damaging both their own lives and America's vision of a just and equitable society.
Peter Levine, in his "blog for civic renewal", gives the text of a speech he gave in November to "the annual convention of the grantees of Learn & Serve America, the federal program that supports community service tied to education."
He had "been asked to speak about the measurement and assessment of service-learning." He does so by discussing three points:
* The definition of civic engagement
* The importance of measurement and assessment
* The importance of service-learning
This is one of the most thoughtful pieces I've read recently. I won't try to reproduce Levine's arguments, but I would like to note his thoughts on a definition of "civic engagement":" any ethical way of addressing a public or common problem."
This is a lot simpler than the CIC's definition,
"Engagement is the partnership of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good."
because it's not directly focused on the various manifestations of engagement in higher education and it doesn't explicitly include the notion of reciprocal partnership. But it's an attractive way of phrasing the general concept.
Levine's speech is interesting to read in context with the findings of the National Survey on Student Engagement (NSSE), reported in today's Chronicle of Higher Education. See http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i13/13a03901.htm
Earlier this week I attended a lunch discussion on Student Engagement Best Practices. This was the first in a series of Campus Conversations, organized by the Student Engagement and Leadership Initiative in the Office for Student Affairs and designed to bring the university community together to discuss and share ideas that will create a more engaged campus.
The focus on the university as community was emphasized in the event flier: "At this large institution, there are many creative and meaningful ways for students to be engaged. In the classroom, on campus or in the community, students are developing skills to enhance their ability to be leaders and active citizens. Come share your ideas and learn what others are doing on the U of M Twin Cities campus." About 30 staff and a few faculty engaged in a lively exchange of ideas.
One theme that struck me was the importance of getting students engaged where they are, taking advantage of what they already do and are interested in. It connected with an article I had recently read, "Public Work at Colgate: An Interview with Adam Weinberg", written by David Brown, co-editor of the Higher Education Exchange, in the 2006 issue (pp. 12–26) of that journal published by the Kettering Foundation. Weinberg describes the process by which Colgate moved its residence halls from the "professionalized model, where people solve problems for students", to a "public work" model in which "students think of themselves as members of a community who have a responsibility to work with others to create a healthy living environment."
Weinberg says "[W]e need to capture all the educational moments. Civic education takes place in campus controversies, residential halls, student organizations, campus planning, and a range of other places. Finally, we are challenging people to move beyond values. We need to make sure that our students have the skills and habits to act on their values." His account of making the residence halls places to teach, learn, and practice "the arts of democracy" is well worth reading.
New things have happened regarding a couple of the previous posts to this blog.
First, on March 13 I wrote about the work of Prof. Ann Markusen and graduate assistant Amanda Johnson in the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs on Artists' Centers. Prof. Markusen and a different set of collaborators, in California, have just published a related study entitled Crossover: How Artists Build Careers Across Commercial, Nonprofit and Community Work. The study may be read on, or downloaded from, the web site.
They asked about 1800 artists (visual, music, dance) in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas how they divided their time between the commercial, non-profit, and community sectors. To their surprise, they found that "Large numbers of artists split their arts time among the three sectors." Each sector provided different and important rewards:
Commercial sector:
* understanding of artistic and professional conventions
* broader visibility
* networking that enhances artwork opportunities
* higher rates of return
Not-for-profit sector:
* aesthetic satisfaction
* exploring new media
* collaborating with artists across media
* satisfying emotional needs
Community sector:
* enriching community life
* affirming cultural identity
* pursuing political and social justice goals
This study, like the previous one, provides invaluable insights into how the arts—and academic study thereof—engage with the various sectors of society.
Second, the same day (November 7) I wrote the blog Neighbors about the Cedar-Riverside community that abuts the West Bank campus of the University of Minnesota, The Minnesota Daily published an article reporting that the City of Minneapolis Department of Community Planning and Economic Development had established a Bridging Communities Grant Program, and asked the U's Center for Urban and Regional Affairs to design and administer the program. The goal is to resolve issues of prejudice against immigrants, and to "encourage immigrant and non-English speaking resident involvement in neighborhood groups". Such three-way community-university-city partnerships are an encouraging development.
Yesterday I went to a lecture entitled "New Bioscience Frontiers in a Flat World", given by William Hoffman.
As described on his web site, Hoffman "is the founding executive director of the Minnesota Biomedical and Bioscience Network (MBBNet), an Internet gateway to the state’s life sciences and health care industries and research centers. Based at the University of Minnesota, MBBNet provides open global access to 1,400 regional companies, laboratories, institutes, and support and service organizations. Hoffman has created a series of interactive, online global maps that chart developments in the biosciences including human embryonic stem cell research and policy, bioscience clusters or hubs of activity, and biotech crop production."
His talk showed how to use these maps to identify locations around the world where biomedical and biotechnological activity is clustered (this world is spiky, not flat), and how the Internet enables collaborations between far-separated institutions (Yale-Fudan, Minnesota-Zurich). In response to questions, Hoffman demonstrated the MBBNet directory, which enables search of 1400 Minnesota companies and University of Minnesota research labs for particular topics and technologies. Powered by Google and boasting impressive access statistics, it's a remarkably fast and powerful way to find common interests, needed expertise, and potential partners.
As I've said numerous times on this blog, technology transfer is an important form of public engagement. MBBNet is an innovative and useful mechanism for facilitating partnerships, and is an important contributor to the University of Minnesota's public engagement mission.
People often assume that the University of Minnesota Twin Cities consists of the Minneapolis and Saint Paul campuses, and that the two are separated by the Mississippi River. In fact, the UM-TC consists of three locations: Saint Paul, Minneapolis East Bank, and Minneapolis West Bank; and it's the East and West Banks that are separated by the river. The West Bank campus houses the social science and arts departments of the College of Liberal Arts, the Law School, the Carlson School of Management, the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, and Wilson Library (where the U Libraries has its headquarters). Most of us who have been around the U for a while manage to keep that much in our heads.
We tend to forget that we have other neighbors on the West Bank (also known as Cedar-Riverside, after the intersection of its two main streets), including the Riverside Campus of the Fairview-University Medical Center, Augsburg College, and the largest Somali population outside of Somalia along with many other East African, Asian, and Hispanic immigrants. The West Bank has for many years been a locus of settlement for immigrant groups, the Somalis being the latest. (See my June 2, 2006 blog "Public History as Theater".)
I was reminded of these other neighbors yesterday, when we had a get-acquainted meeting between the new President of Augsburg, Paul Pribbenow; the President of the University of Minnesota, Bob Bruininks; and several administrators from each institution who are concerned with community relations and civic engagement. Augsburg has a long-standing tradition of focusing on public education and immigrant issues, and the University of Minnesota also has numerous engagement initiatives on the West Bank, so we identified many possibilities for collaborative work. These range from service-learning and community service to making the Cedar light rail station more hospitable.
But we at the U can sometimes forget how big our footprint is. We're currently planning a new Fairview-University Children's Hospital on the West Bank, which will have a major impact on the neighborhood: land use, housing, traffic and transportation, population density, etc. The new hospital will be a great addition to the children's health capabilities of the Twin Cities; but I have the sense that the planning—which thus far has mainly involved the medical community and the U's Academic Health Center—has not yet taken much into account the concerns of our West Bank neighbors. I hope that will change, going forward.
This morning's Star Tribune has an article about the decision of the University of Minnesota's Department of Theater Arts to keep a production of Dario Fo's The Pope and the Witch on this year's schedule. As summarized by the play's director, Robert Rosen, on the department's web site
With The Pope and the Witch, Dario Fo creates a world turned upside down.ÂThe Pope is in crisis. 100,000 poor, starving orphans from third world countries are arriving in St. Peter’s Square in what he believes is a plot by fanatical birth control activists to embarrass him and the church.  He becomes, literally, frozen with anxiety. There begins a surreal journey, guided by a healer from Burundi, into a world of poverty, drug addicts, Mafia hit men and illicit commerce.
Faced with these realities the Pope takes an unpopular stand: The man of great power takes the side of those who have no power. He puts out a revolutionary Encyclical and the world explodes into anarchy.
Absurd, grotesque frightening, and thought provoking, The Pope And The Witch will simultaneously amuse, engage and provide perspective. A fusion of comedy and vital reality.
The play has provoked strong protests from some Catholic organizations and their spokespersons. From the Star Tribune article:
The New York-based Catholic League, whose president, Bill Donohue, calls the play "pure hate speech," has criticized its appearance at theaters that receive public money from the National Endowment for the Arts. Demonstrations have been held at several colleges where the play has been staged.Colleen Perfect of St. Paul, a representative of Catholic Parents Online, said [via email]
"Tolerating this type of hate is giving license to defamation ... One can only imagine what kind of upheaval would take place on campus if the U staged a play smearing Mohammed.
Rosen explains: "I chose this play because it is political. It takes a stand on issues in the forefront of our daily lives. It is funny, irreverent and to the point. It was written, after all, by an epic clown, the foremost political farceur of our time. Some people will disagree with the message and still others with the means with which the message is conveyed. Students of the theatre must learn to use their art form to express their views of the world in which they live."
University of Minnesota President Robert Bruininks met with Archbishop Harry Flynn of the Archdiocese of St. Paul to discuss the U's intended performance, and (through U spokesman Daniel Wolter) averred that "the academic and artistic value of the satirical play ... is stronger than Catholic claims that it's blasphemous." Appropriately, several forums will be held at the U next year that will offer opportunities to debate ideas about the play,
This is the proper outcome. Colleges and universities, while wary of offending various groups, need to remember that their prime role in society is to critically examine received wisdom and existing intellectual and sociopolitical structures. Critical examination demands fair opportunities for both challenge and response. Only in this way can higher education fulfill its responsibilitiy to engage with important public issues.
I live in Saint Paul, in a building that's on the National Historical Register. The upper four floors are condominiums, the ground floor and basement are commercial space. The big news is that we now have a bookstore in the basement. Not just any bookstore, but one owned by Garrison Keillor. With his usual verbal cleverness, he's named the bookstore "Common Good Books". Good books serving the common good.
That's one connection to the public engagement theme of this blog. The other is that there is a real partnership between the public Keillor and the University of Minnesota. He was an undergraduate here in the 1960s, and edited the student literary paper, then called the Ivory Tower. (He recruited Patricia Hampl to its staff.) In recent years, Keillor has been an important spokesman for the University and for the importance of public higher education. What's not so well known is that Keillor has taught—for free—a creative writing course, "Composition of Comedy" in 2001 and again in 2005 and 2006. The links at the end of this blog point to Minnesota Daily articles about this effort. It's clear from these stories that the benefits are mutual, which is always the desired outcome of a public engagement partnership.
http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2005/11/23/66299
http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2006/01/24/66676
This week's Chronicle of Higher Education has a Point of View article by Rebecca F. Goldin, criticizing The Washington Monthly College Rankings in the September 2006 issue of the magazine. Goldin, an associate professor of mathematical sciences at George Mason University, raises some useful points, but her critique has a couple of unfortunate flaws.
A minor but annoying point: Goldin distorts the The Washington Monthly (WM) article when she frequently (five times in her commentary) asserts that the WM ratings are based largely on the "patriotic" contributions of colleges and universities. In fact, the word is used only once in the WM article, with a slightly ironic tone: 'Adults can see how "patriotic" their alma maters are.' (Quotes in original.) There may at one time have been a teaser, "How patriotic is your college?", on the WM web site, but it's not there now.
In fact, the expressed rationale behind the WM rankings is considerably more nuanced:
"...when colleges are doing what they should, they benefit all of us. They undertake vital research that drives our economy. They help Americans who are poor to become Americans who will prosper. And they shape the thoughts and ethics of the young Americans who will soon be leading the country. It's worth knowing, then, which individual colleges and universities fit the bill. And so, to put The Washington Monthly College Rankings together, we started with a different assumption about what constitutes the "best" schools. We asked ourselves: What are reasonable indicators of how much a school is benefiting the country? We came up with three: how well it performs as an engine of social mobility (ideally helping the poor to get rich rather than the very rich to get very, very rich), how well it does in fostering scientific and humanistic research, and how well it promotes an ethic of service to country."
More fundamentally, Goldin seeems to defend the ivory tower view of the purposes of higher education while impugning the motivations of WM. She writes
"Furthermore, the magazine's rhetoric veils a frightening (but popular) point of view. No longer are academic excellence, the advancement of human knowledge, and the preservation and proliferation of ideas sufficient reasons for a university to exist — or sufficient demonstration of benefit to the country. By claiming to measure patriotism, The Washington Monthly garners an immediate base of popular support, useful in the world of demand-driven journalism."
Some of Goldin's criticisms are solid: The use of metrics that privilege larger institutions, the confusing mix of absolute numbers and percentages, the use of enrollment in ROTC as a good measure of contribution, the assumption that scence and engineering are more beneficial to the country than other areas of study, etc.
The most interesting point for discussion, in my mind, is the assumption that "academic excellence, the advancement of human knowledge, and the preservation and proliferation of ideas [are] sufficient reasons for a university to exist — or sufficient demonstration of benefit to the country." Well, yes and no. I would contend that they are necessary but not always sufficient. It will often, if not always, be the case that teaching and scholarship are better, and contribute more, if they are practiced with an explicit recognition of their importance for society and with an eye to educating students for engaged citizenship.
An important initiative these days is to try to interest students from underrepresented groups in careers in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. Mathematics is key to all of these fields, so it is particularly noteworthy that the University of Minnesota Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications will host the Blackwell-Tapia Conference, the premier national event for underrepresented mathematical sciences researchers on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 3 and 4. The UM press release continues:
This is the fourth in a series of bi-annual conferences honoring David Blackwell and Richard Tapia, two seminal figures who inspired a generation of African-American, Native American and Latino/Latina students to pursue careers in mathematics. This conference is designed to carry forward their work, informing the next generation of students about career opportunities in mathematics and providing a chance for them to network with other students and with mathematical scientists who play a leadership role in their communities.To kick off the conference, Tapia will entertain more than 100 area high school students with his “Math is Cool� presentation.... Tapia was the first Hispanic elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering. As part of the presentation he will explain how he used math to improve the sport of BMX bicycle racing and how he defeated “the curse of lane eight.� Also, math major Josef Sifuentes will show how he combined his artistic and mathematical sides to create a psychedelic music video. Conference highlights include talks by William Massey and Erhan Cinlar of Princeton University, Illya Hicks of Texas A&M University, Mark Lewis of Cornell University, Ricardo Cortez of Tulane University; poster presentations; panel discussions on career opportunities in mathematics and the recruitment and retention of a diverse mathematics faculty.
A high point of the meeting will be the awarding of 2006 Blackwell-Tapia prize to Massey for his outstanding achievements in queuing theory, stochastic networks, modeling of communications systems, and for increasing diversity in mathematical sciences.
Last night Minnesota Campus Compact hosted the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Partnership Award for Campus-Community Collaboration dinner. Former astronaut and Senator John Glenn was the keynote speaker. The event is described on the MCC web site.
The Carter Partnership Award tries to recognize "the best academic service work of students, faculty and staff at universities and colleges as they partner with community groups and community agencies." We were treated to an inspiring video of the five finalists, and those of us from the University of Minnesota were delighted that the winner was declared to be the University of Minnesota Morris and the City of Morris for The Center for Small Towns. As described on the web site,
The Center for Small Towns is a community outreach program housed at the University of Minnesota, Morris (UMM) and serves as a point-of-entry to the resources of the University of Minnesota. Small towns, local units of government, K-12 schools, non-profit organizations, and other University units are able to utilize the Center's resources as they work on rural issues or make contributions to rural society.Vision
The 21st century will bring enormous challenges and opportunities to rural Minnesota and its many small communities. By working cooperatively, the University of Minnesota and small towns in the region can find new ways to successfully transition through this period of rapid change.Mission
To focus the University's attention and marshal its resources toward assisting Minnesota's small towns with locally identified issues by creating applied learning opportunities for faculty and students.
This is public engagement at its finest.
As public engagement efforts grow and ramify around the country, the need increases for national coordination and leadership. A February 2006 Wingspread Conference on "Creating the Higher Education Network on Community Engagement" has led to the establishment of an organization, HENCE, that plans to assume that role. This promises to be a very important effort. Here is the mission statement from the HENCE web site.
"The Higher Education Network for Community Engagement (HENCE) is a response to the growing need to deepen, consolidate, and advance the literature, research, practice, policy, and advocacy for community engagement as a core element of higher education's role in society. Increasingly, higher education institutions are intentionally connecting academic work to public purposes through extensive partnerships that involve faculty, staff, and students in active collaboration with communities. This idea of "community engagement" is renewing the civic mission of higher education and transforming academic culture in ways that are both exciting and challenging.
HENCE represents a new, high level of commitment to cooperation across diverse engagement-related organizations to provide support for the next phase of growth and improvement. On February 24, 2006, at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin, individuals representing several national organizations agreed on the following network objectives:
HENCE organizations committed to meeting these objectives by forming workgroups on these related tasks:
Links:
About HENCE: http://www.henceonline.org/about
Wingspread Report: http://www.henceonline.org/about/founding_documents
The engagement movement in higher education has taken on an important international aspect. In June 2006, the Council of Europe's Steering Committee for Higher Education and Research organized a Global Forum in Strasbourg. A delegation of 37 U.S. college and university presidents attended the forum. The Forum adopted a Declaration that asserts
The Commitment of Higher EducationAs higher education leaders and policy makers we affirm our commitment to democratic principles and practice; our conviction that higher education has an essential role in furthering democratic culture; and our responsibility to educate each successive generation to renew and develop the attitudes, values and skills needed for this to become a reality. We recognize that the contribution of students as well as academic and non-academic staff to this effort is essential.
We further affirm our conviction that complex environmental, economic and societal issues can only be solved at the local, national and global levels if citizens can combine basic democratic values with a knowledge and understanding of the relationship of these challenges.
We subscribe to the responsibility of higher education to foster citizen commitment to sustainable public policies and actions that go beyond considerations of individual benefits.
We accept our responsibility to safeguard democracy, and promote a democratic culture, by supporting and advancing within higher education as well as society at large, the principles of:
• Democratic and accountable structures, processes and practice;
• Active democratic citizenship
• Human rights, mutual respect and social justice
• Environmental and societal sustainability
• Dialogue and the peaceful resolution of conflicts
The Higher Education and Democratic Culture web site has information on activities by the member institutions and instructions on how to participate.
An important international movement could be getting underway.
Links:
Higher Education and Democratic Culture web site: http://dc.ecml.at/
Declaration http://dc.ecml.at/index.asp?Page=Declaration
The School of Public Health (SPH) at the University of Minnesota has a podcast page on its web site. The page has rich and diverse content:
* Public Health Moment, which asks and answers the question "What health policy issues are important in this election?"
* Public Lectures, currently presenting "Where is the Political and Economic Leadership to Balance Health Gain and Health Care?" by Dr. Derek Yach, Director of Health Equity, Rockefeller Foundation
* Public Health Planet, a video highlighting several SPH partnerships with the community, on environmental toxins and eating disorders
* Blogs by SPH students, about their lives in the Twin Cities and their field experiences in Chile, Ghana, Thailand, Kenya, and elsewhere.
The page is very content-rich, and the video may take a long time to fully download, depending on the speed of your connection; but it's worth the wait.
Most of my blog postings have dealt with public engagement activities on the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota. The UM also has four coordinate campuses, in Crookston, Duluth, Morris, and Rochester. Each has its own profile of engagement activities. Casey LaCore, Director of the Civic Engagement office at University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) sent this report.
UMD Office of Civic Engagement activities have been focused in six areas:
1) Currently there are two Civic Engagement Reading Groups which meet monthly. The purpose of these groups is to discuss the theory and practice of civic engagement as well as how to encourage civic engagement activities at UMD. Participants read materials about civic engagement and meet for group discussions. Reading group participants included representatives of all five of the collegiate units at UMD (CLA, CEHSP, SFA, LSBE, and CSE), and Student Life.
2) The Office of Civic Engagement awarded $20,000 in mini grants during the past year. Grants were awarded to faculty from the following departments for incorporating civic engagement activities in to their curriculum; Composition, Chemical Engineering, Outdoor Education, Elementary Education, Theatre, Psychology, Sociology/Anthropology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Early Childhood Education, Social Work and the School of Medicine.
3) The New York Times pilot project distributes approximately 200 papers a day to students and faculty. Currently seven faculty members have incorporated the New York Times into their course curriculum.
4) At this time, fall semester 2006 the Office of Civic Engagement has placed over 900 UMD students in the community. 800 of these students are placed as a part of a civic engagement component in a course. The other students are America Reads work study students and general volunteers.
5) The Office of Civic Engagement was asked by the Duluth-Superior Area Community Foundation and Harvard University to participate in the most in-depth survey on the civic engagement of Americans ever conducted. More than a dozen University of Minnesota Duluth faculty members have agreed to provide analysis of the local data. In addition, two graduate students from the Master in Advocacy and Political Leadership program are serving as interns to the project
6) Lastly, the office of Civic Engagement is involved with several Community Projects including; Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, Methamphetamine Abuse, and Issues related to Homeless.
I was educated as a chemist, and have been a member of the American Chemical Society (ACS) for over 40 years. As a benefit of membership, I receive the weekly newsmagazine of the ACS, Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN). C&EN used to have a strong pro-industry bias, but over the past decade or so has broadened its coverage both to include more academic science and to deal with a wider range of social and political issues with a chemical connection.
On July 10, 2006 the editor of C&EN wrote an editorial “Demonizing the Press� about the administration’s response to the New York Times’s expose that the NSA was monitoring domestic communications. The editorial provoked a firestorm of criticism from some readers of C&EN, contending that the magazine should stick to issues more directly related to chemistry.
The August 28 issue, which I’m just catching up with, has letters responding (pro and con) to these criticisms. Among those urging a narrow view, this quote is typical: “The editorials in this scientific magazine should offer some chemical or engineering news and opinions, not political views.�
There were more letters that took the other side, fortunately. Some brief but eloquent defenses of the importance of public engagement in chemistry or any profession:
“I would hope that being a knowledgeable contributor to the democratic process would be at least as important to chemists and engineers as being knowledgeable in their field.�
“…no scientist or engineer lives in a vacuum, and we must learn to have civil discourse on issues that affect us all.�
“…part of being a creative editor is … addressing issues that go beyond the narrowest confines of the profession… When C&EN no longer has an editor who believes that, and acts accordingly, it won’t be worthy of the American Chemical Society.�
The University of Minnesota today unveiled the web site of its new Academic and Corporate Relations Center (ACRC). The ACRC, which was announced this summer and was the subject of an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, hopes to serve as a "front door" to industries and other organizations.
As articulated on its web site, "The ACRC has a mission to enhance the ability of the world-wide business community to connect and collaborate with the University of Minnesota’s rich lodes of expertise, technology, and talent." It lists five major resources for business:
RECRUITING STUDENTS AND GRADUATES: The University of Minnesota brings employers and students together to satisfy the needs of both.CONTINUING EDUCATION OPPORTUNITIES: Take advantage of the high-quality, comprehensive, and convenient continuing education opportunities available at the University of Minnesota.
FINDING FACULTY AND STAFF EXPERTISE: Connect with our faculty, staff, and students to locate experts, research partners, and mentors and to learn more about their research, creativity, and scholarly works.
UTILIZING OUR RESOURCES: Connect with the breadth and depth of University resources, facilities, and programs to improve your business and make it stronger.
SPONSORING AND LICENSING RESEARCH AND INNOVATION: Find opportunities to sponsor research with our world renowned faculty and license available technologies. Sponsoring research and transferring the results from the University to the marketplace benefits the public and private sector.
Engagement with the private sector and tech transfer (with graduates being our most important "product") is a legitimate and important part of the public engagement mission of universities. The ACRC is an ambitious public engagement effort that will benefit both university and community if it succeeds.
Today's StarTribune had a good front-page story on the burgeoning alliance between the University of Minnesota and the North Side of Minneapolis. The article focuses on the work of Prof. Dante Cicchetti to set up a family center at which "children and adults from across the Twin Cities will receive research-based treatments for child abuse, depression and other problems that tear families apart." However, it notes that the family center is part of a broader partnership "that will also [bring] a business incubator, child development center and other projects to the area."
This proposed partnership, which also includes Hennepin County, has provoked more than a little controversy in the North Side community, some of whose residents viewed the center as "a white institution experimenting on black children". However, as more efforts were made to explain the concept and scope of the project to the community, and to work not just with community leaders but also with groups of concerned citizens, most attitudes have shifted to being strongly supportive.
This is a remarkably ambitious project, which might have had a smoother start had the ground been prepared more carefully, but which now seems on a good path. If approved by the University of Minnesota Regents it will be a long-term venture, which will stretch financial, academic, and community resources to their limits; but which has the promise of great returns to both the community and the university. As Robert Jones (Senior Vice President for System Academic Administration at the U) said, "...we're an urban university and we need a stronger urban agenda."
A Dow Jones article from September 21, 2006 tells an interesting story about three seeming unconnected topics: snow, corn, and driving. The connection: University of Minnesota researchers, working with the Minnesota Department of Transportation, to augment farm income and make winter driving safer in rural Minnesota. A typical story of engaged research.
Minnesota DOT To Pay Farmers To Leave Corn Stalks StandingCHICAGO (Dow Jones)--The Minnesota Department of Transportation will pay farmers to leave corn stalks standing along roadsides in an effort to improve winter driving conditions.
The state's transportation department said it will pay $3.30 a bushel to farmers that are willing to leave at least eight rows of corn stalks standing in snowdrift areas.
These "living snow fences" help improve driver visibility and road surface conditions and will help save money, especially with high fuel costs, the department said Monday in a press release.
The department said it is "looking for farmers with fields to the north and west of state highways where there is a demonstrated drifting problem in the windblown maintenance area of southwestern and south central Minnesota."
A University of Minnesota study conducted during the 2000-01 winter found that as much as nine tons of snow can be captured per lineal foot of standing corn stalks, the release said.
I've just returned from the 20th Anniversary meeting of Campus Compact in Chicago. It's stimulating to be with so many people talking and thinking about how to advance engagement in higher education, with an opportunity for broader-range thinking that we have regrettably little time for at our home institutions.
I participated in a roundtable examining the question "What kinds of evidence of the impact of engagement on faculty, students, and communities would be convincing to key external constituencies (e.g., policy-makers, funders, media)?" Some of the points that were made:
I've written before about the University of Minnesota Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships, a citizen-driven program of the University that strives to create a more vibrant relationship between the citizens and their University, address issues according to sustainable development principles, and promote active citizenship through local citizen participation in designing and implementing projects in the region. The following article from the September 2006 Annual Newsletter of the West Central Regional Sustainable Development Partnership highlights one of the collaborative efforts between the Partnership and the University. It portrays a striking and worrisome picture of our agricultural economy and food supply.
IMMENSE FINANCIAL LOSSES INSPIRES EXPANSION OF LOCAL FOODS CAMPAIGN
The West Central Regional Sustainable Development Partnership (WCRSDP) is expanding its ongoing campaign along with its Pride of the Prairie partners to place locally produced foods in local markets. This effort will also bring policy ideas to political leaders such as Congressman Collin Peterson.
This initiative builds on an economic study showing that our region loses over $1 billion each year — an amount equal to one of every three dollars earned by the region's residents — because farmers and consumers trade with firms that draw wealth out of our communities.
Expanding local foods trade is one way to stem these losses.
Speaking at the 2005 WCRSDP annual meeting, economist Ken Meter cited public data that shows that West Central Minnesota farmers have lost, on average, $150 million dollars producing crops and livestock each year for the past 11 years. Although federal subsidies compensate farmers for these chronic losses, these payments end up drawing wealth from the region, Meter said.
Federal subsidies help hold commodity prices low even while they raise land prices, Meter added. Further, subsidies encourage producers to take on debt, and buy more inputs (supplies), from distant firms than the region can afford. He estimates that the region's farmers spend $600 million each year buying farm inputs from outside vendors.
Meanwhile, as farmers struggle to pay their bills, West Central consumers buy their food from sources outside the region. Meter estimates that residents buy at least $250 million of food from outside suppliers each year.
These three outflows of money total $1 billion each year, he added. Meter, president of Crossroads Resource Center in Minneapolis, has taught economics at the University of Minnesota. He draws his data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), an impartial federal agency.
His study, commissioned by WCRSDP, covers the 12-county region including Big Stone, Chippewa, Douglas, Grant, Kandiyohi, Lac qui Parle, Pope, Renville, Stevens, Swift, Traverse, and Yellow Medicine counties, with 173,000 residents. Meter conducted similar research in northwest and southeast Minnesota as well as regions in other states including Iowa, California and Hawaii.
The region has 12% of the state's farms, with 21% of Minnesota's farms over 1,000 acres in size, as well as 21% of the state's irrigated land.
Yet direct food sales to consumers are small. USDA reports that 271 farms in the region sell $871,000 of food directly to consumers. Seven percent of Minnesota's organic foods (valued at $562,000) are produced in West Central.
Farm production losses result from day-to-day transactions, rather than big events. BEA data show that the region's 10,011 farm families sold $1.44 billion of farm commodities on average each year from 1993 to 2003.
However, they spent $1.59 billion, on average, to produce these crops, for a net loss of $153 million per year. This means a total loss of $1.7 billion over those 11 years.
Farm families collect $167 million in federal supports, and earn $80 million of other farm-related income each year, to cover their costs. Even taking this income into account, one of every three farms in the region lost money in 2002, according to the Agriculture Census.
Meter concluded his presentation by citing national trends that affect farmers and consumers in West Central Minnesota. Nearly half of all groceries sold in the U.S. is sold by five supermarket chains, with Wal-Mart & Sam's Club ranking first and seccond. The large distance between producers and consumers creates huge imbalances, he added. Studies show that 85% of food industries lack competitiveness, forcing food costs higher.
The “buzz� at the meeting — which included farmers, lenders, chefs, and educators — expressed great concern over the Wall Street Journal's report that the U.S. is about to become a net food importer on a permanent basis.
As a follow-up to Meter's presentation, WCRSDP is engaging West Central citizens in a broad dialogue that will lead to meetings with state, local and congressional leaders, including Collin Peterson, a member of the House Agriculture Committee.
Yesterday I went to a meeting of the Upper Midwest Campus Compacts (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa). It was a rich program. A few of the points that stick in my mind:
* In Minnesota we have three major systems of higher education: the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MNSCU), and the private colleges. All are valued members and collaborators in Campus Compact, but they are not-always-friendly competitors for state funding (the privates through Minnesota's generous financial aid program). It's probably a given that the relative shares of the pie will not change much, but mightn't the pie get bigger if the three systems cooperated on a coherent vision for higher education in the state, rather than competing as baldly as they do? The legislators might have more patience with us. MN Campus Compact could be an agent in making this happen.
* We're all concerned about access, but higher education is getting more expensive a lot faster than the the general inflation rate. We've been coping by rapidly raising tuition, to offset state cuts as well as to keep up with increasing costs. But we're not as clear as we should be about why the higher ed inflation rate is as high as it is. We also need to better inform students, particularly those from families with no previous college experience, about how to navigate the system, apply for aid, meet deadlines, and so forth.
* In questions after her keynote address, Judith Ramaley was asked how a small college in a very small town can effectively do service learning, when the number of students would overwhelm the carrying capacity of the town. Ramaley strikingly replied that the college should become "Clerk of the Whole", taking on many of the community administrative functions that a very small town doesn't have the resources for. A very interesting idea, but one that requires a major shift in teaching and course design if the college is not to become just a social service agency. The community service must be connected to rigorous teaching, which means that courses must be aligned to their community functions. For example, focus a chemistry course around water purification, or an economics course around municipal finance and taxation. Sounds like an interesting challenge!
I've just learned about a remarkable example of public engagement from the Law School at the University of Minnesota: the Minnesota Criminal Justice System DWI Task Force. Its founder (24 years ago) and director is Steve Simon, Clinical Professor in the Law School. The following information comes from Prof. Simon.
The Task Force, which meets at the Law School, is made up of criminal justice system professionals: judges, police officers, driver's license administrators, traffic safety professionals, assistant attorney generals, prosecutors, chemical dependency treatment workers and MADD and other traffic safety advocates. They identify problems in Minnesota DWI law and enforcement practices and work with the legislature, law enforcement and the courts to effect change. This is a volunteer, unpaid effort on the part of Prof. Simon and his colleagues; the Law School simply provides meeting space and some assistance with photocopying.
The research projects of the Task Force include:
As Prof. Simon says, "The Task Force represents a unique combination of University faculty and institutional commitment and expertise with criminal justice system and members of the public. The Law School serves as a catalyst to bring together members of the criminal justice system, driver’s license regulators and concerned citizens from the general public. It existence for over 20 years is a strong indication of its perceived value by the legislature and the people who continue to support it by their participation."
Recently I've met with the three Faculty Senate Committees at the University of Minnesota whose charges have the greatest connection to public engagement issues. After describing the organization and activities of the Office for Public Engagement, I presented each with a list of the issues that I thought were most germane to their interests. Here are the three lists.
Educational Policy
• Engaged teaching: service learning, multi/interdisciplinary focused on societal issues
• Lower limit estimates of service-learning curricular activities: 75 courses in 13 colleges, involving nearly 60 faculty and instructors and more than 2000 students.
• High concordance (typically 80-90+%) between service-learning outcomes and life-long learning and citizenship goals established by UM Committee on Enhanced Student Learning, and student development outcomes established by Office of Student Affairs.
• Connection with liberal education themes: multiculturalism, citizenship and public ethics, international perspectives
• Service learning: Should there be U certification and transcript notation? (Community Engagement Scholars Program)
• Public Engagement as part of research ethics training for graduate students
Research
• NSF broader impacts criterion
• Involvement of under-represented students and communities, and pre-college educational institutions, as criteria for large grants
• Classification of research activities as engaged
• Database of engaged research and teaching activities, including GIS information
• IRB issues for community-based research
• Community partners as co-PIs or subcontractors on grants
• Funding of engaged research: paucity of substantial funding, and low/no ICR allowance
• Inter/multidisciplinary engaged research
• Public Engagement as part of research ethics training for graduate students
Faculty Affairs
• Evaluation of faculty work in promotion and tenure policy statements
• Faculty development programs on how to do effective engaged research and teaching
• Interaction with Council of Academic Professionals and Administrators on rewards and incentives for engaged teaching, research, and service
Last Thursday (Oct 5, 2006) I posted a blog entitled "Science, Government, and Truth" about an effort—Scientists & Engineers for America—to counteract the increasing misuse and suppression of scientific evidence in policy making by some government officials.
A few days earlier, Harry Boyte had sent the text of a speech by Michael Edwards, Director of the Ford Foundation's Governance and Civil Society Unit in New York, and author of the recent book Civil Society (Polity Press/Blackwell, 2004). The speech was the Keynote Address for the 40th anniversary of the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex, UK (www.ids.ac.uk ). It's entitled "Looking back from 2046: Thoughts on the 80th Anniversary of the Institute for Revolutionary Social Science".
I was struck by how the beginning of the speech mirrored the sentiments of the Scientists & Engineers for America effort, albeit in quite a different context. I'm taking the liberty of quoting the first few lines, which in turn quote a poem by Rabindranath Tagore.
"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,Where knowledge is free,
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls,
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit,
Where the mind is led forward through ever-widening thought and action into that heaven of freedom,
Let my country awake.�All of us in this room are exploring the “country� that Rabindranath Tagore describes in his poem “Where the Mind is Without Fear�, and we know how difficult and demanding that journey can be. This is especially true today, though here I can be accused of being overly influenced by the context in which I live and work – the US – where facts, objectivity, proof, accumulated wisdom, public debate, accountability, the careful calculation of risks and benefits, and the other pillars of effective policy-making we have been gradually piecing together since the Enlightenment are increasingly up for grabs. Let decisions be driven by ideology, faith, speculation, greed, graft and revenge. Let truths be revealed rather than negotiated. In modern politics, or at least in this form of modern politics, facts are for losers.
The country "where the mind is without fear" is the only country in which true scholarship can engage with the great issues of society. Are we losing that country?
The Michigan State University Office of University Outreach and Engagement, headed by Associate Provost Hi Fitzgerald, has just published Vol. 1, Number 1 of The Engaged Scholar, a handsome and meaty 24-page booklet describing some of the many engaged scholarly activities at MSU. Many of us can tell similar stories about the engaged scholarly work of our faculty, staff, and students, but MSU has produced a particularly nice package.
Among other things, I liked a table that neatly describes the differences between traditional and engaged teaching, research, and service:
Traditional Academic Activity
Scholarly Engagement Activity
The University of Minnesota Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships are a citizen-driven program of the University that strives to create a more vibrant relationship between the citizens and their University, address issues according to sustainable development principles, and promote active citizenship through local citizen participation in designing and implementing projects in the region. The following excerpt from an article in the West Central Regional Sustainable Development Partnership Newsletter for 2006 describes a joint exercise that will attempt to look ahead to the state of the regions in 2050.
Looking towards the future, learning from the pastIn 2050, what will our landscapes look like? Where will our food, fiber, and energy come from? What will our communities and neighborhood look like?
In the next few months, the Regional Partnerships will partner with the University's Ecosystem Science and Sustainability Initiative to conduct community-based scenario analysis exercises. Each regional board and its partners will serve as the community voice in grounding the scenario analysis in the realities faced in the various regions of the state.
The exercise will involve envisioning the future and then backcasting to see what steps are needed to arrive at our preferred future, providing the Regions with some ideas of how an investment or series of investments in our communities can help achieve our goals of sustainable development.
Involvement with the Sustainability Initiative has the potential to help orient our work to our preferred future in a thoughtful way, bring new University resources to our Regions (in terms of new faculty interest and funding) and improve the Sustainability Initiatives outcome because it includes citizen expertise.
On September 27 a large and growing group of scientists, led by an advisory board that includes 13 Nobel Laureates, announced the formation of Scientists & Engineers for America. SEA is "dedicated to electing public officials who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy."
The Bill of Rights for Scientists and Engineers endorsed by SEA is worth reproducing in full.
Effective government depends on accurate, honest and timely advice from scientists and engineers. Science demands an open, transparent process of review and access to the best scholars from around the nation and the world. Mistakes dangerous to the nation’s welfare and security have been made when governments prevent scientists from presenting the best evidence and analysis. Americans should demand that all candidates support the following Bill of Rights:
- Federal policy shall be made using the best available science and analysis both from within the government and from the rest of society.
- The federal government shall never intentionally publish false or misleading scientific information nor post such material on federal websites.
- Scientists conducting research or analysis with federal funding shall be free to discuss and publish the results of unclassified research after a reasonable period of review without fear of intimidation or adverse personnel action. Â
- Federal employees reporting what they believe to be manipulation of federal research and analysis for political or ideological reasons should be free to bring this information to the attention of the public and shall be protected from intimidation, retribution or adverse personnel action by effective enforcement of Whistle Blower laws.
- No scientists should fear reprisals or intimidation because of the results of their research. Â
- Appointments to federal scientific advisory committees shall be based on the candidate’s scientific qualifications, not political affiliation or ideology.
- The federal government shall not support any science education program that includes instruction in concepts that are derived from ideology and not science.Â
- While scientists may elect to withhold methods or studies that might be misused there shall be no federal prohibition on publication of basic research results. Decisions made about blocking the release of information about specific applied research and technologies for reasons of national security shall be the result of a transparent process. Classification decisions shall be made by trained professionals using a clear set of published criteria and there shall be a clear process for challenging decisions and a process for remedying mistakes and abuses of the classification system.
If these principles are in danger, as indeed they seem to be, then our democratic society is in danger.
The University of Minnesota's Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment, & the Life Sciences sponsors a Lecture Series on Law, Health, & the Life Sciences. The lecturer today was Mark Blumenthal, PhD, of the American Botanical Council. Dr. Blumenthal talked on “Nutraceuticals: Dietary Supplements, Botanical Drugs, and Natural Products—Science, Safety, and Efficacy.�
A major emphasis of the lecture was on the discrepancy between FDA regulatory treatment of drugs and herbal supplements, and press coverage of the results of safety and efficacy studies. The emphasis with drugs is on safety, with adverse reactions after FDA approval getting much negative publicity (see Vioxx). With herbal supplements, most of which have been used safely for decades if not centuries (though ephedra is a notable recent exception), the news media focus mainly on studies that seem to demonstrate lack of efficacy. Blumenthal -- who is clearly an advocate of herbal supplements and phytomedicines -- argues that many such studies are vitiated by inadequate, unstandardized analytical methods.
The lecture raised a number of questions in my mind regarding the way we should think about "public" or "traditional" as opposed to "expert" knowledge in the pharmaceutical domain:
I just finished watching the first episode in the new season of Nova ScienceNow, hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The program was a splendidly entertaining mix of stories -- on asteroid collisions, transuranium elements, obesity, and an MIT mechanical engineer who is also a successful fiction writer. My wife and I, both scientists, were charmed and engrossed, but I think that the program tries to appeal mainly to bright high schoolers and middle schoolers.
Nova ScienceNow is funded by Google, NSF, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, all of which have strong interests and good track records in presenting science to young audiences. Tyson is a very stylish and articulate African-American, which surely won't hurt in appealing to the students of color whom we so badly need to attract to our university science and engineering programs. (According to his web site, he was voted "Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive" by People Magazine in 2000, but he's an active and distinguished scientist as well.)
More often than not, when we talk of public engagement the vector of partnership is predominantly from university to public. Here's a great example of the other way round: private and government foundations, and a charismatic scientist who works outside of traditional academia, doing things that will be of great benefit to universities.
Links:
Nova ScienceNow: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/
Neil deGrasse Tyson web site: http://research.amnh.org/~tyson/
This afternoon I led a discussion of public engagement with students and faculty of the graduate program in Water Resources Science at the University of Minnesota. I began with the UM/CIC definition of engagement:
"Engagement is defined as the partnership of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to
I also wrote down a list of Dos and Don'ts in Public Engagement:
Particularly notable, I thought, was the concern with the political aspects of work in an area with such a strong public impact as water resources. These are big issues, affecting many people with strongly held interests, and it's clear that skills in politics, debate, and communication are just as necessary as scientific and technical knowledge if rational choices are to be made. The emphasis must be kept on the data and evidence, however good the political and communication skills, if credibility is to be maintained. If that can be done, then vigorous debate over water resource issues can be a good exemplar of how to "strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility".
Today is an important day at the University of Minnesota: the dedication of the Scholars Walk and the unveiling of the Wall of Discovery. Scholars Walk features monuments, along an attractively landscaped 2400 foot walkway, that acknowledge the work of our most distinguished scholars, teachers, and students.
The Wall of Discovery recognizes not so much individual scholars, but rather the process of creation by our students, staff, faculty, and alumni. To quote from a story by Norman Draper in today's StarTribune:
The operating-room log of heart surgery pioneer F. John Lewis came from his widow in Iowa. The original drawing of Reynold Johnson's Number 2 pencil test-scoring technology came from his son's garage in Washington, D.C. Song lyrics from an early "Prairie Home Companion" radio show came straight from Garrison Keillor.Now, they're part of the Wall of Discovery, a 253-foot display featuring the work of 99 distinguished University of Minnesota alumni and professors. It will be unveiled today with the dedication of the Scholars Walk project, a $4.5 million privately funded landscaped walkway featuring monuments to the U's most distinguished scholars.
Designed to look like a long chalkboard, the Wall of Discovery runs along the north wall of the U's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building and brightens up an alleyway once considered one of the bleakest stretches of U's Minneapolis campus. It cost upwards of $300,000 in donated funds.
It took designer Drew Sternal more than 1 1/2 years to find the documents, which he calls "moments in time from genius at work."
Though inventors and academic researchers are widely represented, the display is leavened with others: writers, musicians and more.
"The breadth of the disciplines at the U are well covered," Sternal said. Hockey coach Herb Brooks is there, represented by a page from his journal representing thoughts about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team's "Miracle on Ice."This transcends sports in my eyes," Sternal said.
Others include novelist Saul Bellow (a letter), Gore-Tex fabric inventor Robert Gore (notebook entry), astronaut Donald (Deke) Slayton (notebook entry listing the names of astronauts chosen for Apollo missions), poet John Berryman (draft of the poem "Snow Line"), Bob Dylan (song lyrics) and Hubert Humphrey (notes for a speech on the death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.).
Public engagement is the partnership of university and public expertise to produce things that enrich our civilization and collective life. The Wall of Discovery is an emblem of engagement. I am privileged to have been part of the team that brought it into being.
Lead poisoning has been identified as a major public health problem that disproportionately affects poor children. High lead levels in children's blood are associated with serious declines in IQ, but several investigators have reported a puzzling observation: IQ appears to decrease faster at low blood lead levels (less than 10 micrograms/dl) than at high levels. This is called a supra-linear dose-response curve. It is hard to understand the biological basis for such an effect, but it has led to strenuous and costly efforts to remove even trace amounts of lead from children's environments.
Two researchers [1] have now shown that that the effect is likely a statistical artifact. It arises from the fact that IQ is distributed according to a symmetrical bell-shaped curve, while lead burden is distributed in a log-normal fashion, with a peak at low values and a long tail to high lead concentrations. If the assumption is made that the 50th percentile of IQ is associated with the 50th percentile of lead concentration, the 5th percentile of IQ with the 95th percentile of lead concentration, and so forth, the supra-linear dose-response relationship is the inexorable result. It shows that the apparent strong effect of low lead levels on IQ is simply a consequence of the two statistical distributions, and probably has no biological or public health significance.
I've written about this paper not because I'm a statistics aficionado, or a skeptic about the deleterious effects of high lead levels in children's blood. Rather, I feel the paper is important because it shows how careful we must be to examine experimental data and its statistical treatment when it is used as the basis for expensive public policy. The money spent to remediate low-level lead exposures could very likely have been spent more productively on other public health measures for poor children.
[1] "What is the meaning of non-linear dose-response relationships between blood lead concentrations and IQ?", T.S. Bowers and B.D. Beck, NeuroToxicology 27 (2006) 520-524.
The University of Minnesota is undergoing a discussion of how to bring its tenure and promotion guidelines up to date. Our Tenure Code has a Section 7.11 that sets the institution-wide standards for achieving tenure, and it has a Section 7.12 that begins "7.12 Departmental Statement. Each academic unit must have a document that articulates with reasonable specificity the indices and standards which will be used to evaluate whether candidates meet the criteria of subsection 7.11. The document must comply with those standards, but should make their application more specific." People understand that "the rubber hits the road" in the departmental 7.12 statements, but revison of 7.11 will influence what departments do.
The U's Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee has begun to discuss Section 7.11. The current statement (with relevant footnotes) reads
7.11 General Criteria. The basis for awarding indefinite tenure is the determination that the achievements of an individual have demonstrated the individual's potential to continue to contribute significantly to the mission of the University and to its programs of teaching, research, and service over the course of the faculty member's academic career. The primary criteria for demonstrating this potential are effectiveness in teaching[6] and professional distinction in research,[7] outstanding discipline-related service contributions[8] will also be taken into account where they are an integral part of the mission of the academic unit. The relative importance of the criteria may vary in different academic units, but each of the criteria must be considered in every decision.[9]
[6] "Teaching" is not limited to credit-producing classroom instruction. It encompasses other forms of communication of knowledge (both to students registered in the University and to other persons in the community) as well as the supervision or advising of individual graduate or undergraduate students.
[7] "Research" is not limited to the publication of scholarly works. It includes activities which lead to the public availability of products or practices which have a significance to society, such as artistic production or the development of new technology or scientific procedures.
[8] "Service" means performance within the faculty member's academic expertise and the mission of the academic unit. It does not include performance of quasi-administrative functions such as membership on faculty or senate committees or other similar activities; those activities are relevant only to the limited extent set forth in the following paragraph of the text.
A proposed revision (again with relevant footnotes) reads
7.11 General Criteria. The basis for awarding indefinite tenure is the determination that the candidate has demonstrated and will continue to develop a distinguished record of academic accomplishment that is the foundation for a national and/or international reputation. This determination will be reached through a qualitative evaluation of the candidate’s record of research,[4] teaching,[5] and discipline-based service[6]. The relative importance of the criteria may vary in different academic units, but the primary emphasis must be on research and teaching. The contributions of the candidate to interdisciplinary activities, to public engagement, and to internationalization of the University may be taken into consideration in evaluating the candidate’s satisfaction of criteria. The candidate’s record also must evidence strong promise of achieving promotion in rank within the University.
[4] “Research� is not limited to the publication of scholarly works. It includes innovative activities that lead to the public availability of products or practices that have significance to society, such as artistic production or the development of new technology or scientific procedures.
[5] “Teaching� is not limited to credit-producing classroom instruction. It encompasses other forms of communication of knowledge (both to students registered in the University and to other persons in the community) as well as the supervision or advising of individual graduate or undergraduate students.
[6] “Discipline-based service� means outreach to the local, state, national, or international community based upon the faculty member’s academic expertise. Where service is not an integral part of the mission of the unit, a faculty member’s outreach activities may be considered but are not a prerequisite to the awarding of tenure. Service standing alone without a distinguished record of research and teaching is an insufficient basis to award tenure. “Discipline-based service� does not include the performance of administrative or quasi-administrative functions, such as committee service, service on Senate committees, or performance of administrative tasks.
The enhanced recognition of public engagement in the proposed revision, while subtle, is real and important. The bigger challenge will be for departments to incorporate appropriate definitions and examples of engaged research and teaching in their 7.12 statements.
The July-August 2006 issue of Minnesota, the magazine of the University of Minnesota Alumni Association, has an article entitled "Political Movement", about the life and work of UM faculty member and dancer Carl Flink. It's a powerful portrait, and the article, by Camille LeFevre, is worth a full reading. Here I'd just like to quote a few paragraphs that speak cogently of the special role that dance—and by implication the work of university artists in general—can play in public life.
'Black Label Movement [Flink's dance company] is the means by which Flink merges his theories and research in dance with real-world practice. "It's a holistic model that has the specific benefit of breaking down institutional walls between the university and the larger Twin Cities community," Flink explains. "And it gives people who aren't necessarily going to respond to an article, a book, a lecture, or a panel a whole new way of accessing those ideas."According to Steve Rosenstone, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Black Label Movement demonstrates that faculty contributions to the broader community are "not just about technology transfer, not just about jobs, not just about serving as consultants to cities when they're designing highways and buildings," he says. Rather, artistic ventures like Black Label Movement contribute to "the cultural fabric of our community."
The company also brings a powerful and unique choreographic voice to the local dance community. "A lot of people in academia and beyond think of the arts as simply descriptive of knowledge," Flink says. "Someone does a piece about apartheid so the audience will think and learn something deeper about it." Instead of making his dances "about" something, Flink says, in his work "artistic expression comes out of the body through movement." This "embodied art," as he calls his work, conveys "a way of knowing, not a description. It's a way of communicating in and of itself. I don't need to layer it with a paragraph of description."'
The September 4 issue of The New Yorker is designated the Education Issue. It has articles on
* The lacrosse controversy at Duke University
* Experimental education at Deep Springs College
* Improving school lunches in Berkeley
* Music education in schools
* Intrinsic capabilities of infant brains
* Bringing a New England boarding school to the Middle East
* A sketchbook by the inimitable Roz Chast, "What I Learned"
There's much in each of these articles about the intersections of higher education, teaching and discovery, and broader social issues - all of the components of public engagement. To give just one example: In Learning the Score: Why Brahms belongs in the classroom by Alex Ross (pp. 82-88) there's an eloquent passage (p. 88) about the role of the arts in a democracy. It cites a book by Maxine Greene, author of Releasing the Imagination:
"She believes that children can gain deeper understanding of the surrounding world by looking at it from the peculiar vantage point of a work of art. She writes, 'To tap into imagination is to become able to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real.' Children learn to notice surprising details that undermine a popular stereotype; they grow tolerant of difference, attuned to idiosyncrasy. They also can experience a shock of perception that shows them alternative possibilities within their own lives..."
The University of Minnesota is pleased with the results of a recent study by the Milken Institute, "Mind to Market: A Global Analysis of University Biotechnology Transfer and Commercialization", which showed that the U ranks sixth among North American universities in its success in "turn[ing] knowledge into commercially viable products and companies."
Many in academia worry that emphasis on commercialization of university discoveries distorts our fundamental mission, but I disagree. I feel that technology transfer is an important aspect of public engagement by higher education institutions. Some reasons:
* A university serves many publics, and the commercial sector is one of them. This was clear (though not always articulated) when land grant universities did research, teaching, and extension mainly for the agricultural sector. Now that other economic sectors rival and exceed agriculture, it should be no less clear.
* High-tech companies confront many interesting and significant scientific and engineering problems, which can provide real world experience to faculty and students through consultantships and internships.
* Industrial scientists have expertise that usually complements that of university scientists. They can be good partners, a key component of public engagement.
* Although it can be overstated, research universities _are_ among the most important "economic engines" of their states. Job creation and generation of tax revenues to support public purposes contribute to civic well-being.
* University inventions in biomedicine and biotechnology can, if carried to fruition, make major contributions to public health and welfare.
* Revenues from commercialization of technology feed back to the broader university community. In the most prominent case at the University of Minnesota, returns from an anti-HIV drug have been used for a graduate fellowship matching program, open to all fields, that has thus far generated an endowment of more than $100 million.
Of course, care must be taken that the drive to commercialize university discoveries does not distort other priorities. So far, there is very little evidence that it has.
Everyone seems to agree that higher education needs to work with schools, all levels of government, and the private sector to increase the fraction of students who are prepared to succeed in college and university. Without increased and successful participation in post-secondary education by students from groups that have not traditionally gone to college and that make up a rapidly growing proportion of the population, we will not have the educated workforce needed to maintain our prosperity, and we will have a growing number of people who need help from, rather than contributing to, the broader society.
The case is often made in terms of STEM: we need more students of color to get college-level training in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics disciplines. Indeed we do, because there aren't enough now, these are enjoyable and rewarding careers, and we'll need more domestic students in STEM to replace the foreign students (mainly from China, India, and Korea) who are likely to stay home in future years as their countries' educational systems improve and economic opportunities increase.
Yet we need to be realistic. Not every kid wants to be a scientist or engineer, or a doctor or nurse, nor should they be. We need businesspeople, writers, artists, designers, teachers, lawyers (yes, even lawyers), and many other professions for a modern society. We also need people who have good craft skills: mechanics, electricians, chefs, carpenters, etc. We depend on these skills, the jobs pay well, and they can't be outsourced the way computer programming and scientific research can.
Those of us in research universities tend to forget the important role played by community colleges and technical schools. Interactions among our post-secondary institutions are too laden with status distinctions. We need a better balance if we're to develop a healthy, prosperous, and inclusive society.
We take the existence of electricity for granted, but without it (as 40% of Nicaraguans are), you must rely on kerosene lanterns or wood fires—which can lead to respiratory diseases and accidents— to do anything after dark.
Yesterday's (Sept 19) issue of the Minnesota Daily had a story about a University of Minnesota electrical engineering student, Patrick Delaney, who is implementing an idea to provide light to rural Nicaraguans without electricity. Delaney originally thought to provide electricity through hydroelectric power, but instead found a family that had figured out a way to charge a car battery with a solar panel. He returned to Minnesota, enlisted a business school senior and several others, developed a business plan, and formed a nonprofit organization called "Bright New Ideas" to find a manufacturer and distribute 500 solar-powered lanterns to Nicaraguans by December.
The combination of technical knowledge—both engineering and business—with community-driven needs and ideas and student passion is a great example of the sort of engagement that we hope our students will develop.
A visitor asked the question the other day: Why is interest in public engagement increasing so markedly in higher education? Here, in no particular order, are some of the reasons we came up with:
The National Center on Citizenship released, at its annual conference, the first Civic Health Index. The Index, available from an on-line report entitled "America's Civic Health Index: Broken Engagement", is described as "a rigorous tool to measure civic progress over time. The Civic Health Index is comprised of 40 key civic indicators measuring levels of political activity, civic knowledge, volunteering, trust, philanthropy, and much more."
The overall conclusion is that the civic health of the nation has declined fairly dramatically over the past several decades. However, there are some encouraging results for those of us who believe that higher education makes a positive difference. To quote from the Executive Summary,
"The Index combines data for all adult Americans (age 18 and older). However, if we disaggregate this data..., we see the civic health of young adults (18-25) improving, at least relative to older generations. That is a hopeful sign, because “as the twig is bent, so grows the tree.�One of the most dramatic divides in civic health is dependent upon levels of education. Individuals with college degrees are 9-17 points ahead civically of individuals with no college experience. The divide between college graduates and high school dropouts has been as great as 24 percentage points and was 15 points in 2004."
The measures graphed to arrive at these conclusions are voting, volunteering, club meetings, and trust in government. None of these relates directly to a college education, but all relate to the unspoken curriculum that we think is such an important part of what we do.
Paul Wellstone's "Conscience of a Liberal" has been sitting on my bookshelf for a while. I stared at the title recently and wondered: Why has "liberal" become a dirty word in political discourse? According to Dictionary.com, "liberal" as an adjective has the following meanings:
1. favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.
2. (often initial capital letter) noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform.
3. of, pertaining to, based on, or advocating liberalism.
4. favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, esp. as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.
5. favoring or permitting freedom of action, esp. with respect to matters of personal belief or expression: a liberal policy toward dissident artists and writers.
6. of or pertaining to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies.
7. free from prejudice or bigotry; tolerant: a liberal attitude toward foreigners.
8. open-minded or tolerant, esp. free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc.
9. characterized by generosity and willingness to give in large amounts: a liberal donor.
10. given freely or abundantly; generous: a liberal donation.
11. not strict or rigorous; free; not literal: a liberal interpretation of a rule.
12. of, pertaining to, or based on the liberal arts.
13. of, pertaining to, or befitting a freeman.
Are these characteristics that Republicans think are bad, or that Democrats feel they have to run away from? What do we teach our students about the meanings of words with sensitive connotations?
The Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences puts on many interesting lectures and conferences on issues that connect academic studies on law and science with pressing public issues. Coming up next week in the Lunch Series on the Societal Implications of the Life Sciences is a lecture by Kurt Gottfried, Ph.D. (Emeritus Professor of Physics, Cornell University; Co-Founder and Chair, Union of Concerned Scientists) on
“Science and Politics: Problems and Solutions.�
Abstract: Prof. Gottfried will discuss the long and largely harmonious relation between science and government in America, while highlighting the unprecedented friction of today, which Prof. Gottfried believe stems from deep currents in our culture and politics. Prof. Gottfrield will suggest short- and long-term policies that would help re-establish the science-government relationship that existed in prior administrations of both parties.
The lecture will be held on Tuesday, September 19, 2006 at the Coffman Memorial Union Theater from 12:15-1:30 PM. Prof. Gottfried is also scheduled to appear on Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning Show at 9:00 AM on Tuesday, September 19.   Tune to FM 91.1 to hear his interview in the Twin Cities or go to http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/ to listen online.
In December, 2001 Dr. Harold Varmus (a Nobel laureate and former Director of NIH) gave a lecture at the Nobel Prize Centennial in which he proposed the establishment of a Global Science Corps. In the lecture, he asserted
"It seems unlikely that the current disparities in health status between the rich and the poor will diminish any time soon. By the end of the 21st century, there will be many more people on this planet; current estimates predict that the world's current population, six billion, will grow to at least nine billion by mid-century. With this growth, many more people are likely to be old (both rich and poor), poor (in the rich countries too), hungry, at high risk of infectious diseases, crowded, exposed to environmental pollution, and resentful of those without complaints (other than age)."
Varmus argued that scientific research, which has contributed so much to improve health in the rich countries, could do the same in the poor parts of the world. But, he noted, "formulas and recommendations for advancing science throughout the world will have little effect if they are not accompanied by missionary zeal---and by means to exercise such convictions. For that reason, I propose establishing an International Corps for Global Science to allow science missionaries, young and old, to help build a global culture of science by working in those parts of the world that are underserved by science now."
Five years later, the Global Science Corp is becoming a reality. On its web site, it stat