To advance and encourage partnerships between institutions and their greater communities, academic reward structures must be designed in ways that support those who choose to leverage their expertise, resources, and time to engage with community in meaningful and mutually beneficial ways. This study investigates how school- and department-level…

Universities and scholars have long wrestled with the types of impact they want their work to have on the world. This narrative explores the challenge of impact from the perspective of a recently tenured professor reflecting on his case for tenure and his struggle to fit his activist scholarship within the genre of the tenure case, which requires…

As a public artist and designer, I construct spaces that connect people and ideas. The social spaces I create challenge our traditional ways of thinking, knowing, and experiencing one another and our cities. This piece presents a resistance to preset disciplinary values and a recognition that exponential rather than incremental change in an…

As an early career professional, I often felt as if I was on the road less traveled as a community-engaged scholar and tenured-track faculty member in academia. Although the work of community-engaged scholarship (CES) may be valued, the mechanisms for advancing CES, such as through faculty reward systems, often are not well-established. In my…

Community-engaged research is a collaboration between academic and community partners to create and disseminate knowledge for both academic and community benefit (Carnegie Foundation, 2018). Partnering with community members in research differs from traditional research at almost every point in the process, including deciding which research…

The university, for tenure-track professors and others, can become an intellectual prison, an environment where you learn to follow the long-established rules in order to survive. This essay is a call to action, aiming to reach and mobilize learners in the academy who might feel alone and trapped in an institution that primarily rewards…

Once an institution has chosen to recognize and reward community-engaged scholarship in its university-wide promotion and tenure policy, what are some strategies for aligning unit and department policies as well? This chapter describes the path followed at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro to align policies across all units and…

This case study describes the campus context and process for successfully including community engagement language into promotion and tenure policies at Virginia Commonwealth University, a high research, urban public university. The paper also describes barriers our campus faced during the promotion and tenure policy revision process, especially…

This article explores what an uneven embrace of community engagement means for faculty as they apply for tenure and promotion. It closely examines how three faculty members (including the author) from different departments framed and discussed their engaged scholarly contributions in the presence or absence of departmental guidelines on engaged…

The higher education context that our CUMU institutions must navigate is complex and begets challenges resulting from the distinct mission our institutions seek to uphold. The implications of these challenges give rise to impacts on everyone within the institution and consequently our constituents within the cities we seek to serve. Bringing…

Although the mission statements of most comprehensive teaching institutions of higher education include serving as a resource for the global and local community, the tenure and promotion process typically does not recognize these community partnerships as research endeavors, even when the nature of the work is firmly grounded in sound empirical…

The concept of community engagement as a primary function of higher education and the roots of this movement can be traced back to the 1980s with the founding of the Campus Compact in 1985 (Glass & Fitzgerald, 2010). The concept has been endorsed by several higher education organizations, including the American Association of State Colleges…

The need for new and revised structures to reward new forms of scholarship is being examined nationally and globally. It is also being examined on campuses that make up the University of Massachusetts system, all which are classified by the Carnegie Foundation for Community Engagement. This paper reports on the collective exploration by the five…

This paper analyzes the processes and outcomes involved with mentoring junior faculty in the reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process at a comprehensive state university and creating a culture supportive of engaged research. Although the university in this case study is governed by a collective bargaining agreement that prohibits the…

Hiring tenure-track faculty is an activity common to all colleges and universities. Most institutions engage in hiring activities each year. Despite the number of searches conducted annually, most available information about faculty hiring consists of guidelines for conducting searches and statistics about searches within disciplines. The purpose…