Purdue University College of Liberal Arts
Information for
The College of Liberal Arts, Engagement, and Research
The objective of the three programs supported by PLACE is to provide support for colleagues who are committed to engaging in public scholarship in its various forms. The nature of the funding is designed to provide research support for colleagues who channel energies into community work. But the kinds of projects envisioned should also be regarded, in some cases, as forms of scholarship in their own right. That is, working on large-scale engagement projects can lead to publications in such venues as the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, the Higher Education Exchange, and the Kettering Review. Many significant university presses publish books on outreach scholarship. Annual conferences sponsored by Imagining America and Outreach Scholarship provide forums for the presentation of engagement projects and their outcomes. Should the Building Community develop into a model program, which garners external support, participants might consider editing a volume of essays that report research findings and that reflect theoretically on service-learning pedagogy from both faculty and student perspectives. Such a publication would be another valuable resource to walk other institutions through the process of developing engagement programs.
The College’s support of Engagement encourages excellent and meaningful research by undergraduate and graduate students as well as by members of the faculty. The amount of the stipend for those involved in Building Community and as coordinators of the Public Square Forum is large enough to hire a research assistant in the Summer, which would allow departments and programs in the College to accept more graduate fellowships, knowing that the subsequent years of summer support could be supplied with research assistantship opportunities instead of more limited teaching assistantships. With the aid of a research assistant, faculty members who commit themselves during the academic year to involvement in PLACE can return with full speed to their ongoing research agendas or they can devise new research projects as outgrowths from the engagement endeavor. In short, the hope is that this kind of support will allow research, teaching, and engagement to reinforce one another.
At a recent meeting of the Outreach Scholarship Conference, hosted by The Ohio State University, numerous speakers expressed concern about the limited participation of colleagues in the liberal arts in outreach programs. This reluctance does not stem from a lack of interest in public engagement—indeed, many liberal arts conferees confessed to engaging in community work surreptitiously and to desiring a climate where such work could be conducted openly and with encouragement from tenure committees, department heads, and deans. What is needed, of course, is a standard by which various forms of engagement can be evaluated—not all public scholarship is the same. Like any other form of scholarship, the scholarship of engagement can be well or not-so-well done; it can have tremendous impact or relatively little effect; and it can advance the field of endeavor or not. I urge the College to review a set of recommendations made by Imagining America to guide our deliberations as we create criteria for assessing the quality of engagement activities.
One final comment is in order. Public scholarship is not for everyone. PLACE is a set of interlocking programs that allows those who are committed to public engagement and to interdisciplinary, collaborative work to carry out their projects with the support of the College of Liberal Arts and with the encouragement to strive for excellence in these, as in other research/teaching, endeavors. It also represents an opportunity to showcase our engaged faculty in ways similar to our showcasing of superior scholars and outstanding teachers and mentors in the College of Liberal Arts.