Purdue University College of Liberal Arts
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PLEASE NOTE: Funds for the 2007-2008 year have been allocated. Dean Contreni and Associate Dean Miller are working on funding policies for the 2008-2009 year.Check back soon for Fall 2008 events!
PLACE: Purdue Liberal Arts Community Engagement
Across the United States, institutions of higher education at the dawn of the twenty-first century have responded energetically and enthusiastically to calls from faculty members and from the wider community to renew the land-grant commitment to serving the citizens who support them. Indeed, the very term "Engagement," only recently accepted as central to the College and University lexicon, captures the impulse to bring the fruits of discovery and the talents of educators to the publics they serve and to forge partnerships between campus and off-campus groups for the co-creation and dissemination of knowledge.
Engagement programs include work with K-12 educators, efforts to generate economic growth, service-learning projects, ethnographic and autobiographical projects in diverse communities to foster cultural and historical understanding, and community-based agricultural extension activities. At a time when the need for intelligent and informed public discussion of the major social, political, cultural, and environmental challenges facing the United States has never been more urgent, the need for involvement in the public sphere— especially by those of us in the social and health sciences, humanities, and arts —becomes self-evident.
Faculty members, students, departments, and interdisciplinary studies programs in the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University have for years sought ways to engage the University's publics through service, service-learning, public presentations and performances, and voluntary involvement in programs designed to improve the quality of life in our community, state, nation, and world. Most of these efforts, however, have been unconnected from one another and have not always been "counted" toward tenure and/or promotion.
In the spirit of building on this record of engagement, the College of Liberal Arts is establishing a PLACE for faculty, students and the wider public to focus our energy on issues of importance and concern to us all. I envision PLACE as a site for collaborative knowledge-production necessary to attend to the collective challenges intelligently and responsibly. It will provide a venue for interdisciplinary collaboration among people committed to research, learning, and policy-making intended to harness talent, inquiry, and creativity to the service of a vital public life.
Susan Curtis
January 2007
PURE: Purdue University Research Expertise database
Search for Purdue faculty members and their research activities by keyword search or by browsing different fields of study. Now online!