INSTITUTIONAL PORTFOLIO.

Strengths and Challenges

In Colleges and Universities as Citizens (Bringle, Games, & Malloy, 1999), prominent scholars critically analyzed Ernest Boyer's ideas about the scholarship of engagement. These scholars examined key areas of the work of the academy and probed the possibilities and risks of community engagement by providing "guidance for paradigmatic change, [raising] aspirations for excellence in higher education, and [provoking] institutional change in how higher education conceptualizes its purpose and evaluates its accomplishments" (p. x). On the basis of this analysis, Bringle et al. extracted a set of principles for civic engagement (p. 201-202) that provide a framework for campuses to examine their strengths and challenges in civic engagement. The following discussion of strengths and challenges for IUPUI is based on an adaptation of these principles for civic engagement.

Principle 1. The engaged campus will develop an understanding for how civic engagement is consistent with its mission.

Strengths

• Civic engagement, community partnerships, service in the community, and collaboration are clearly stated as central to IUPUI's campus mission.
• Campus administrators have a record of clearly and regularly articulating the importance of civic engagement in publicity and formal speeches and providing campus and community leadership in forging new partnerships.
• Civic engagement is evident in campus annual reporting and planning process. Each school reports progress and accomplishments in civic engagement and civic engagement is viewed as the responsibility of each unit. The majority of responding schools aspire to increasing civic engagement in their academic units.

Challenges

• Civic engagement is a valued aspect of campus identity; however, it is not necessarily a valued aspect of faculty work.
• Long-term commitment to sustained community partnerships is dependent, primarily, on the individual work of faculty who choose to incorporate civic issues in their teaching, research, and professional service. Too often, if a faculty member leaves, the civic engagement ends because there is not a wider commitment to sustainability by the home unit.

Principle 2. The engaged campus will involve communities in a continuous, authentic, and meaningful manner and will be flexible, responsive, and accountable to external constituencies.

Strengths

• The campus is well positioned to articulate principles of good practice that can become a guide to improve civic engagement work. Many units on campus (e.g., Polis, Center on Philanthropy, Center for Urban Policy, Office of Neighborhood Resources) provide a strong basis for exemplifying these standards and their good work needs to be better understood by the rest of the campus.
• The central administration seeks community input in a number of ways (e.g., IUPUI Board of Advisors, IUPUI Dialogue Group, IUPUI Diversity Cabinet, IUPUI Athletics Committee, Chancellor's Circle) and schools have established mechanisms to involve external constituencies in decisions (e.g., Community Advisory Boards, Program Review, Search and Screen).
• The Civic Engagement Inventory asks for evidence of community collaboration and community impact of civic engagement programs.

Challenges

• Principles of good practice for community partnerships will need to be clearly communicated and models for evaluating good work widely disseminated in order to influence practice.
• At the central level, developing a means to accomplish community input into a civic agenda to guide future work in Indianapolis and central Indiana is a challenge.
• The formation of, charge to, and funding of the Civic Advisory Committee will be crucial in determining to what extent a civic agenda is identified for the campus and for Indianapolis and central Indiana.

Principle 3. The engaged campus will value community-based learning experiences for students and faculty.

Strengths

• With the strong presence of professional schools, community-based instruction (e.g., internships, fieldwork, clinicals, practicum, student teaching, applied programs) is central to most units.
• Service learning is a uniquely important educational intervention because it involves students, faculty, and curricular revision that can have an enduring presence on the campus and in the community.
• Through the Center for Service and Learning, the executive leadership of IUPUI has made commitments to service learning since 1993 that have resulted in an (a) increased number of service learning classes, (b) staff expertise and resources for service learning, (c) campus awareness of service learning, (d) connections of service learning to other campus initiatives (e.g., Learning Communities, retention, first-year experience, Student Life and Diversity, student employment, reorganization of scholarships), (e) research and scholarship on service learning, and (f) regional, national, and international recognition for its good work.
• Emphasizing curricular-based interventions to increase student involvement in the community is well suited to a commuter campus where the classroom is the key point of contact with students.
• Research conducted by the Center for Service and Learning indicates that service learning contributes to student progress towards the Principles of Undergraduate Learning and that students enrolled in service learning during their first semester persist at a higher rate than students not enrolled in a service learning course.

Challenges

• Activities need to be planned within each school/department to identify ways that community-based learning is in alignment with unit mission and to come to consensus on unit goals and/or requirements for community-based learning.
• Concerted efforts must be put in place to support the integration of service learning into capstone courses, Honors, integrator courses, gateway courses, and within the major. Currently, only the School of Business requires service learning for all freshmen and only Communications Studies is considering making service learning a common experience for all majors.
• A system of documentation of community-based learning experiences needs to be improved so that the campus can gather information on the number of students involved in and the outcomes resulting from such learning experiences.
• Further campus assessment needs to take place to determine the added benefit of community-based experiences to student learning and future employment.

Principle 4. The engaged campus will reflect its commitment to civic engagement in strategic planning, program evaluation, allocation of resources, and administrative decisions.

Strengths

• Civic engagement is now an integral part of annual campus reporting and planning.
• The funding of the Center for Service and Learning, with its vision to make service a distinctive aspect of the educational culture at IUPUI, is a clear indication of campus commitment to civic engagement.
• Selecting civic engagement as an area of self-study demonstrates the seriousness with which the executive leadership of the campus seeks to improve this area of work through assessment of the work, analysis of the successes, and planning to improve future work.

Challenges

• The future work and role of the Civic Engagement Task Force is currently unclear. Will this committee enlarge to become a Civic Advisory Committee? Will there be a need for the CETF to monitor civic engagement in a similar way that PRAC monitors teaching and learning?
• Currently, there are no designated campus funds to support faculty engagement in community-based projects.
• Faculty need to have improved support for securing project funds on an ongoing basis. There needs to be a concerted effort within Research and Sponsored Programs to identify external funding sources for this type of work and a concerted effort with the IU Foundation to identify community funds for project support.

Principle 5. The engaged campus will value civic engagement in faculty roles and rewards.

Strengths

• Faculty roles and rewards have demonstrated the flexibility to recognize civic engagement when it is scholarly. The Promotion and Tenure guidelines have been revised to clarify the nature of professional service and how it can be documented as a scholarly activity.
• Faculty Annual Summary Report forms ask about the development of service learning classes and service learning is mentioned in the Promotion and Tenure guidelines.
• Participation in the Kellogg Peer Review of Professional Service project provides a campus resource of examples for documenting civic engagement.
• Members of the all-university promotion and tenure committee receive Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff's (1997) criteria for scholarly work on their working form and the guidebook, Service at Indiana University: Defining, Documenting, and Evaluating, is distributed to its members each year.
• A Professional Development Planner and Resource Guide was recently created by the Center for Teaching and Learning, Research and Sponsored Programs, and the Center for Service and Learning. This resource documents campus resources to support civic engagement and the documentation of professional activities in the community.
• There are some examples of faculty positions being created for public scholars who have joint responsibilities to the university and a sector or agency within the community.

Challenges

• Each academic unit has a distinct culture regarding criteria and expectations for promotion and tenure. Although IUPUI as a campus has demonstrated the capacity to honor civic engagement activities, there is not pervasive acceptance of civic engagement as potentially scholarly activity.
• Interventions must be sustained by campus leadership, in part, because the audience changes (e.g., turnover in administrative positions, turnover on committees) and because multiple presentations are necessary to inform and remind key individuals about the manner in which civic engagement can be the basis for scholarly work and how it aligns with institutional mission.
• The potential to develop public scholars needs to be developed and supported.

Principle 6. The engaged campus will develop infrastructure that supports the complex nature of civic engagement.

Strengths

• The Center for Service and Learning, which parallels the Center for Teaching and Learning and a Center for Research and Learning that is under development, is well positioned to provide campus leadership for several aspects of civic engagement. The CSL has established itself as a campus asset that has contributed to the civic culture of the campus and has garnered significant national respect for its work.
• Having the CSL under Academic Affairs affirms the desire to promote the academic integrity of this work for students and faculty.
• A number of campus and university Centers are focused on civic engagement and are doing excellent scholarly and community work. Directors of these Centers have begun meeting on a regular basis to strengthen understanding, promote collaboration, and improve work.

Challenges

• There is still no obvious "front door" to the campus for community members to knock on in order to explore campus partnerships. The Civic Engagement Inventory will provide web-based access to campus projects, and yet, this may not be nearly as helpful to a community organization as having a phone number to call for campus referrals.
• There is insufficient structure, funding, and leadership for promoting coordination of the various civic projects that are taking place.
• There is no mechanism for the campus to engage in discussions with the central Indiana communities and for the campus and community to forge a civic agenda.

Principle 7. The engaged campus will support interdisciplinary work on community issues.

Strengths

• Many Masters degree programs (e.g., Public Health and Law, Public Health and Nursing, Biomedical Engineering, New Media, Masters of Business and Law) demonstrate a commitment among schools to work together to prepare graduates for new fields of interdisciplinary study.
• There are some excellent examples of interdisciplinary work at IUPUI such as the "Better Together" project in the United North West Association neighborhood and the Community Development and Urban Education Certificate, sponsored by Social Work, Education, and Nursing and the cross-disciplinary work through the Center for Earth and Environmental Sciences and Center on Philanthropy.
• The Center on Philanthropy and the School of New Media collaborate with many schools to secure joint faculty appointments to contribute their disciplinary expertise within the interdisciplinary fields of study.

Challenges

• Most of the pressing issues in communities are interdisciplinary by nature; for the campus to be responsive, there must be mechanisms for interdisciplinary work to thrive. Currently, annual reviews of faculty occur primarily at their home unit and interdisciplinary work is often undervalued by colleagues in the unit. There are good institutional models for professional development and faculty roles and rewards when faculty undertake interdisciplinary work.
• A campus-wide task force on Interdisciplinary work should be convened so that its findings and recommendations can facilitate the success of interdisciplinary community-based projects.
• The campus, in structured dialogue with the community, could identify interdisciplinary themes (e.g., homeless, health care, youth, education) and provide resources to develop community projects that address the themes. However, it is currently unclear how such a dialogue would occur and how the work would be funded.

Principle 8. The engaged campus will develop a culture of service as a distinctive aspect of campus life.

Strengths

• Campus-wide days of service (i.e., United Way Day of Caring, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day-On, Into the Parks Spring Clean-Up) and annual events (e.g., Jam the Bus Food Drive, Spring House Calls, Holiday Family Sponsorship, Chili for Charity, Race for the Cure) have created new campus traditions of community service for IUPUI students, faculty, and staff.
• The Coordinator for Community Service, a shared position bridging Student Life and Diversity Programs and the Center for Service and Learning, has been the catalyst for the formation and support of a number of service-based student groups (e.g., College Mentors for Kids, Habitat for Humanity, Alpha Phi Omega, American Humanics). Increasing numbers of students are participating in co-curricular service.
• The Community Service Scholars program is one of the largest service-based scholarship programs in the nation and recognizes community service as a basis of merit for students.
• This fall, U.S. News and World Report recognized IUPUI as having an exemplary program for service learning (ranked 8th nationally under a new domain of "Programs that Really Matter").
• "Service learning", "civic engagement", "community-based learning", and "community partnerships" have become a part of the language of the campus.

Challenges

• The complex diversity of the campus and the demographics of our commuter students make developing a culture of service on campus quite challenging.
• The design and development of the template for student portfolios could include ways to document civic engagement activities. The degree to which students will use portfolios is uncertain.

Questions for Review Team

1. How might we disseminate information about our own models of good practice in civic engagement to the campus, and to the community, in order to improve cross-disciplinary collaboration and commitment to civic engagement?

2. How can our campus strength in institutional assessment improve our work in civic engagement? (It is easy to conceptualize how individual projects can be assessed, but more challenging to conceptualize this on a campus-wide level. How will we know that our work is making a difference within the community?)

3. What recommendations do you have for the future campus work of the Civic Engagement Task Force upon completion of the NCA review?

4. What recommendations do you have on setting priorities for campus civic engagement (e.g., topical focus such as education, health, and youth)? What role should the proposed Civic Advisory Committee assume in this process?

5. How can our work in this self-study inform others in higher education to advance the work of civic engagement?