A Vision of Community Engagement for Higher Education

Motivated by the imminence of our centennial anniversary, when DePaul Universityⁱ launched its community-based service-learning program in 1998, it was a result of a two-year institutional strategic planning process. This milestone prompted us to turn to our mission and history in an effort to answer the question of what kind of institution we wanted to be in the future. This institutional self-reflection yielded Vision 2006, a plan that called for an investment in a few bold strategies that could position DePaul as a leader in higher education, especially among institutions that are urban, private, and highly tuition dependent. While not the only Vision 2006 strategy, establishing the community-based service-learning program was an important one — one that ultimately bridged all three of the plan's strategic goalsⁱⁱ, knit together the institution's Vincentian and academic missionsⁱⁱⁱ, and in 2001 yielded one of the largest individual gifts that DePaul has received. Eight years later the Steans Center for Community-based Service-Learning has garnered for DePaul U.S. News and World Report's recognition as one of the most outstanding service-learning programs in the country and inclusion in the publication, Colleges with a Conscience.^iv In fairness, DePaul's "new strategy" was more of a heightening of a long-standing practice. DePaul had already earned a local reputation for community involvement. For decades, individual faculty members have placed students at community organizations throughout the city, conducted research for communities, and held classes in community settings. Until Vision 2006, however, much of DePaul's community involvement tended to be individually motivated and episodic. With the introduction of centers such as the Msgr. John J. Egan Urban Center, the Latino Research Center, and the Steans Center for Community-based Service-Learning, DePaul began to develop a more systematic and consistent commitment to community involvement. The funding and launching of these centers represented the institution's calculated risk to implement Ernest Boyer's vision of the New American College at a comprehensive urban university — a vision that views American higher education as integral to the social fabric of local, national, and global society. It is Boyer's vision and St. Vincent DePaul's legacy of service to those at the margins of society that form the context for our programming. For us, a university's authentic commitment to community engagement emerges from a continual and institutional examination of mission and a desire to develop in students a commitment to contribute to society. The relationships that comprise the partnerships that lead to institutionalized community engagement become one important mechanism for fulfilling higher education's mission and educating our students about the fundamentals of civic engagement. DePaul's experience also indicates that community engagement develops incrementally — brick upon brick laid upon a strong foundation.

Back to Our Roots, Creating Our Future

The conversation that Vision 2006 started is continued in our new strategic plan, Vision Twenty12. As at many institutions, the process of designing civic engagement and service-learning programming, offers our institutions the opportunity to align institutional practices with our intellectual and social mission. Similar to artists who ground their artwork on a foundational model, DePaul has found it helpful to model its civic engagement initiatives with a consistent eye on our mission statement. The development and nurturing of community partnerships provides a concrete mechanism for fulfilling and integrating the fundamental aspects of our mission. As with most universities, DePaul's mission focuses on teaching, scholarship, and public service. Most often these three aspects of our missions manifest themselves in the individual work of our faculty members. Successful faculty applications for tenure and promotion at all of our institutions ride primarily on the quality of teaching and scholarship. Secondarily (if at all), faculty may be reviewed on their public service, but such a review is rarely based upon how a faculty member's expertise has been applied to resolve a community problem. Only recently have accreditation and professional organizations begun to include in their assessments of our institutions and academic units the extent to which they engage and apply knowledge to external local, national, and global problems. Certainly it is rare for administrators' performance to be measured by the extent to which they help to integrate the three defining features of our institutional missions. Yet it is administrators' support and the attending allocation of resources that signals the authenticity of an institution's commitment to engage its local community. The beauty of an honest institutional commitment to community engagement is that it provides a mechanism for the integration of teaching, scholarship, and service. The extent to which mission statements are fulfilled depends upon an institution's willingness to juxtapose the meaning of the words against actual practice. This is not easy work. A collective examination of a mission statement will surface diametrically opposing interpretations of language as well as practice. The process, however, can bring a diverse and even dispersed institution to an experience of community internally and connection to community externally that could never occur without the struggle to understand and assess how mission is practiced. A re-examination of our missions with an eye toward how we meet our obligations to our society can bring a renewed sense of purpose. And our institutions do have obligations to the larger society. After all, the foundation of our tax exempt status comes with the quid pro quo to strengthen the social fabric of our increasingly global society. Throughout our history this has always meant more than merely graduating students who are prepared to work. Our graduates should understand the complexities of creating and maintaining a multi-cultural, pluralistic society from their own experiences not only from the extrapolation of experience that is neatly edited into a bound volume. Mission-driven community partnerships help expand our understanding of what education and scholarship are and how educated citizens should behave. Honoring the public service aspect to our missions is hard and messy work. For faculty, it means sacrificing some of the organized control of a rational learning environment to venture out into the chaos of the world and test whether what we teach and research can be applied in a manner that benefits real people living in deplorable circumstances. Yet there is also real benefit. A strong community partnership provides a locus for involving students, staff, administrators, and alumni, as well as individual faculty members, in rewarding and meaningful work. Some of the most powerful teaching and learning experiences for both faculty and students that the DePaul's Steans Center has supported have occurred through research methods and project development courses that have focused on answering a research question or project challenge that a community partner organization has posed. These courses provide a mechanism for faculty to apply their expertise in defining problems, for students to learn how to answer real questions that will address real problems, and for community organizations to obtain information and products that are often out of their reach financially. Along the way new knowledge is produced, students experience a level of academic mentoring that is often absent in traditional lecture courses, and faculty can build upon their academic reputations. The fact that many students discover the challenges and rewards of working in community organizations on issues that matter deeply to them is the reward that should motivate our institutions toward greater community engagement, not less. Authentic community partnerships emerge from a sense of purpose that is grounded in an understanding of mission on both sides that ultimately results in mutual benefit. On-going community partnerships also provide ideal opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching, learning, and problem-solving. For higher education, practical opportunities that intentionally integrate all aspects of our missions and simultaneously support interdisciplinary teaching and learning ultimately have a positive impact on the reputation of the university in the local community — and regardless of national stature, we all have reputations in our local communities. In DePaul's case, Steans Center community partners view the institution as one that is attentive to community concerns, willing to hear and respond to criticism as well as praise, and woven into the social fabric of the city. This is a result of hard work, consistent attention to relationships, creatively connecting the expertise of specific disciplines to community problem-solving, a willingness to acknowledge responsibility when things go wrong, and a desire to correct what is wrong and replicate what is right. In a city where higher education has an historical reputation that many communities characterize as duplicitous, hostile, or distant, DePaul is beginning to be seen as an institution that stands behind its mission, listens before it responds, and does what it says it is going to do.

Our Students, Our Future

Perhaps higher education's most important stakeholders are the students who arrive in our classroom seeking an education. Our students come to us with preconceived notions about what they need to learn and what that learning will do for them after they graduate. In many ways we have responded to our students by giving them what they want within the context of the narrowly defined disciplines in which our faculty members ground their expertise. However, our students often arrive on our campuses with narrowly defined notions of educational credentialing as a means toward private gain. For those who come to us as adolescents, few believe that our institutions have any obligation to attend to their maturation process; yet in fact, our institutions are most often the last organization that gathers adults, young and old, for the express purpose of learning to think, question, and discover. Community partnerships provide the opportunity to ask students — and faculty and staff — to engage in learning that they might not initially acknowledge as important or necessary, especially if it makes them feel uncomfortable. Students learn that education is ultimately for the larger community as they actively go through the motions of contributing to society with their newfound knowledge. This symbolic and substantive action becomes not only educative but formative. In the process, they learn more about the society in which they are citizens, understanding the breadth and depth of experiences of living in our culture — the challenges and inequities as well as the opportunities and rewards. The majority of DePaul service-learners say that they value their community-based service-learning courses for the opportunity that they provide to apply theoretical learning to practical situations. However, these students often approach their community experiences with trepidation if not downright fear. But fear of what? Most often it is fear of what they think they know about "inner city neighborhoods" and the people who live in them. This fear comes from media images that convey highly negative images people of color, urban dwellers, immigrants, and people living in poverty. Engaging in community partnerships enables higher education to provide more than theoretical opportunities to encounter people who confront very different life challenges than many of our students. For those of us in majority white institutions, community partners that we have cultivated as educational partners offer us the opportunity to help our majority students confront enduring societal problems, such as inadequate access to quality education, healthcare, and economic opportunities, that are produced by historical and contemporary racism and structural inequalities produced by our economic system. Many Steans Center community partners have become educational partners. As well as benefiting from faculty expertise and students time and talents, they see themselves as providing the physical space for DePaul students to experience substantive interactions with those who are different from them — different socio-economically, racially, ethnically, and culturally. Slowly these experiences have begun to have an impact on faculty, as well, as they visit community organizations, invite community partners to their classes, and engage in project development with people who are from very different life circumstances. Many report that they come to view their own disciplines in a different, more expansive way. Recent research on community perceptions of higher education indicates that our society as a whole yearns for our institutions to teach the public relevance of disciplines, model interdisciplinary learning and problem-solving, and encourage students and faculty to take some risks (Thomas, 2000). Educational experiences built around civic engagement and service-learning provide all of this and more. Ultimately, sustained university-community partnerships that have cultivated trust and respect on both sides provide the opportunity for higher education to develop new, interesting, and meaningful learning opportunities for students and faculty. Through these partnerships, our institutions are asked to rethink the education process as one from disciplinary to broadly interdisciplinary. Educating our students from the context of applied learning and problem-solving prepares them to face the complex challenges and opportunities that our world faces today. Applied interdisciplinary learning within the context of mutually beneficial university-community partnerships exposes our students — in fact the university community — to the messiness and hard work of problem identification and solution seeking and the reward of a learning process that yields tangible results. Both sides of successful partnerships must learn listening skills, diplomacy, humility, ethical behavior, and the art of compromise. These are all qualities that community members, whether they are non-profit civic organizations or for-profit business, articulate as valuable and desirable in our graduates (Liederman, 2003; Thomas, 2000).

Conclusion

Higher education institutions have an ethical obligation to continually examine the extent to which they honestly fulfill their mission statements. Our mission statements signal our public purpose, and serve as the foundational reasons for public and philanthropic investment. The extent to which we deserve our status as "charitable organizations" is grounded in the extent to which we honestly strive to meet our missions. In the past higher education has relied upon the education and graduation of its students into the larger society as the fulfillment of its public purpose. Presently, public and many private donors look for more. Our institutions are accused of isolating ourselves from societal concerns, and graduating too many students who are under prepared for the local, national, and global contexts in which they will work. Educational experiences rooted in civic engagement and service-learning offer a powerful and effective method by which to address these concerns. What might our school systems look like in five years if each discipline and institution committed to focusing our significant intellectual resources and human capital to finding solutions to problems that exist? How might our disinvested urban neighborhoods look if our schools of business committed to teaching entrepreneurship strategies and practices designed to give residents the opportunity to strengthen their neighborhood economies? Might we find a solution other than gentrifying real estate practices to revive local economies? What would our students learn from their involvement with the practical learning opportunities these community partnerships would provide? American higher education is in a unique position to influence the future health and well-being of our world. It is also at a critical juncture. We can rise to the intellectual and practical challenges that our society poses, or we can wait for others to define our solutions for us. Weaving an ethos of community engagement into the fabric of our institutions is one way we can more confidently and proudly prepare a new generation to assume leadership and responsibility for our human society.

ⁱ DePaul University is located in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1898, it is now the nation's largest Catholic institution of higher education and is the tenth largest private, not-for-profit university in the nation. Of the 10 largest private universities, all except DePaul are classified as "research extensive" universities, making DePaul the nation's largest university with a primary mission of teaching and service. back

ⁱⁱ Three goals of Vision 2006 were: 1) Provide all full time students a holistic education..., 2) Provide the highest quality professional education for adult, part-time learners..., and 3) Research, develop, deliver, and transfer innovative, educationally-related programs and services that have a significant social impact and give concrete expression to the university's Vincentian mission. back

ⁱⁱⁱ The central purposes DePaul's mission statement include the following: "Research is supported both for its intrinsic merit and for the practical benefits it offers to faculty, students, and society. Broadly conceived, research at the university entails not only the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge but also the ... application of expertise to enduring societal issues...In meeting its public service responsibility, the university encourages faculty, staff and students to apply specialized expertise in ways that contribute to the societal, economic, cultural and ethical quality of life in the metropolitan area and beyond. When appropriate, DePaul develops service partnerships with other institutions and agencies..." back

^iv In 2005-06 the Center developed and supported 169 community-based service-learning courses that placed over 2551 DePaul undergraduate, graduate, and non-traditional students in over 125 community-based organizations. Service-learning experience included work on technical and research projects, as well as in traditional community service activities. The Center employs approximately 100 DePaul students through its community-based Federal Work Study program and direct employment as part-time employees of the Center. back

References

Leiderman, S., Furco, A., Zapf, J., & Goss, M. (2003). Building Partnerships with College Campuses: Community Perspectives, a Monograph. Washington, DC: Council of Independent Colleges/Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education.

Thomas, N. L. (2000). Community Perceptions: What Higher Education Can Learn by Listening to Communities. Washington, DC: American Council on Education.