UCSC Community Engaged Scholarship Guidelines for Tenure and Promotion

The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) has a long and deep history of community engaged scholarship. For over 50 years, the university, a member of the ACLS Research University Consortium, boasted the only department of community studies in the United States. Beyond that department, scholars across disciplines have worked closely with community partners and organizations to create transformative scholarship, often involving students. However, it is only since 2023 that UCSC has offered official recognition of that scholarship through tenure and promotion guidelines that support faculty members who do community engaged research and teaching. 

Steve McKay, a scholar of work and labor movements and the Director of the Center for Labor and Community, is one such faculty member. Over the past decade, McKay and others at UCSC have developed a research framework called Community Initiated Student Engaged Research (CISER) that lets the community partner set the agenda. McKay began engaging students in his undergraduate courses, training them to connect with community organizations and carry out a research project. These community initiated projects, ranging from labor history to low-wage work to affordable housing, necessarily combine research, teaching, and service––the three traditional buckets for promotion and tenure, also used by the University of California (UC) system to determine rank and step increases––without falling neatly into any of them. This made it challenging for him to seek institutional recognition for his work; indeed, he stayed at the rank of associate professor for 11 years, in part because he was committed to that form of scholarship despite knowing that it would be difficult to make sense of what he had done within the strict framework of research, teaching, and service.

McKay’s situation is not at all unusual for community engaged scholars. But the situation at UCSC began changing in 2020, when several things happened at the same time. The first was that public historian Jasmine Alinder F’97, F’09 was hired to serve as dean of the humanities. Upon her arrival on campus, Alinder was impressed by how many of her colleagues across the humanities and social sciences were doing rigorous public scholarship and community engaged work. However, she also saw that faculty members were not moving forward in their careers and being promoted on the strength of that work. Shortly after her arrival, Alinder participated in the Luce Design Workshop for a New Academy, an ACLS initiative to design and circulate blueprints for action on positive change in higher education. One of the central questions for the team from UCSC was how to change institutional culture––including incentive structures––to support a more expansive vision of an R1 institution. 

Alinder began looking at policies affecting tenure and promotion, both at UCSC and in the UC system writ large, and realized that the policies themselves, while not explicitly supportive of community engaged work, were also not obstructive. The UC system has both high standards for faculty promotion and a capacious understanding of research that anticipates that it cannot know what future research will look like. Furthermore, a 2017 memo had clarified that overlap or synergies between the research, teaching, and service buckets were permissible within the promotion process. Alinder concluded that the barriers to recognizing community engaged work at UCSC were more about campus culture and practice than official policy.

The second development in 2020 was that faculty members Rebecca London (sociology) and Regina Langhout (psychology) won a three year, $650,000 William T. Grant Foundation Institutional Challenge Grant to embed community engagement into research and to embed research into community work. The institutional change goals of the grant were three-fold: 

1. Start Campus + Community, a resource hub for engaged scholars and their community partners
2. Update tenure and promotion guidelines to recognize community engaged scholars; 
3. Update IRB standards to reflect current best practices in community engaged teaching and research. 

The proposal process required that London and Langhout gather letters of support from campus leadership expressing their commitment to working on these issues. By the time the grant was awarded, the groundwork had already been laid, with Alinder in the humanities and her counterparts in the social sciences and the arts all expressing support for changes to tenure and promotion guidelines. UCSC’s Committee on Academic Personnel (CAP), co-chaired by Literature Professor Susan Gillman, had also expressed support for campus-wide guidelines and worked with campus partners, both faculty and administration, in fleshing out the specifics. There was a sense that while momentum was building across all ten UC campuses––indeed, UC Los Angeles had issued a new strategic plan with community engagement as its first goal––UCSC had the advantage of a tradition of community engaged scholarship among its faculty. However, it was also clear that departments would need their own guidelines, because individual disciplines vary significantly on their approaches to public and community engaged scholarship. London and McKay wrote guidelines for sociology as a model of what this might look like at the level of the department. 

It was extremely helpful, Alinder says, that around this time the Modern Language Association (MLA) released disciplinary guidelines on community engaged scholarship in literary studies. Around the same time, the American Historical Association (AHA) released new guidelines. These built on a previous 2010 report that had been issued from the AHA in collaboration with the National Council of Public Historians (NCPH) and the Organization for American Historians (OAH), as well as 2008 guidelines from Imagining America. The new disciplinary guidelines were used internally at UCSC to create frameworks for faculty and departments to think about how they would approach evaluating community engaged scholarship and teaching. London also noted the importance of the MLA’s guidelines for the process, as well as work that has already been done in disciplines such as public health, education, and urban studies, to legitimize and affirm community engaged scholarship. “Each campus should harness what the disciplines are already doing to catalyze this work,” London says. 

With guidelines drafted, the next step was to apply them in several test cases. Among these early cases was McKay’s own. He had applied for a merit review rather than promotion; at the time there were no community engaged research guidelines, and he didn’t believe that work would count. CAP sent his case back and requested that McKay resubmit as an application for a promotion to full professor.

McKay’s promotion case––and those of other faculty members who applied under the emerging guidelines––raised new issues. Specifically, they revealed problems with soliciting research support letters, which were sometimes misfiled as service letters. It is crucial that community engaged scholarship be counted as research in order to fully demonstrate its impact and to avoid penalizing faculty members who do such work. There was also the question of who should be asked to supply support letters. The dominant thinking in academia is that the only way to assess research is through peer review, and that the only peers that matter are other academics. Initially, London says, she was told that letters from community partners would not count as much as a letter from an academic peer at a UC campus. But this goes against the ethos of community engaged research. “Steve and I have really sought to question that assumption,” London says, “by asking who are the peers who should be reviewing our research so that the findings are actionable and reflect what the community partner brings to the project.” Ultimately, CAP issued additional guidelines on how to solicit support letters for community engaged scholarship so that it will be counted as research.

By 2023, the campus-wide guidelines were fully drafted and had been refined through a series of test cases. In the spring of that year, Alinder, Gillman, London, and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Herbie Lee held an online workshop where they spoke with UCSC faculty about the new guidelines. They then produced an official memo, which Gillman signed in her capacity as CAP co-chair at the end of the summer. 2023–24 was the first year that the guidelines were officially in place. A number of faculty, including London, have had their tenure and promotion files reviewed under the new guidelines using the UC system’s Career Equity Review (CER) process. The CER process allows faculty who do community engaged research and teaching, and who might not have had that work fully recognized previously, to achieve parity under the new system. 

Despite these considerable gains for community engaged scholars at UCSC, challenges remain. The division of the personnel process in the UC system into research, teaching, and service, while not as strict as it once was, still poses a challenge for community engaged scholars, as it does for other scholars who do work that incorporates elements of all three areas (such as DEI work). What academic achievement looks like is changing, Gillman notes, and this conversation is part of a “larger nexus of ways” that evaluation of research, teaching, and service may evolve into something “slightly more holistic.” Another major challenge is that each discipline does community engagement differently, and it’s important to be aware of how the research process and the forms it takes can vary significantly. Part of why the MLA guidelines were so helpful, according to Alinder, is that they were flexible. 

Finally, the challenge of faculty members, especially early-career faculty members, feeling as though they have to do double the work by producing both a traditional scholarly book and community engaged scholarship persists. While the guidelines pertain to all tenure and promotion cases, as of August 2024, there has not yet been a faculty member in the humanities who has applied for promotion from assistant to associate professor under the new system, perhaps because it still seems like too much of a risk. Alinder hopes that that will change in the future.

McKay and London emphasize the importance of universities not only celebrating their faculty who do community engaged research and teaching but also rewarding them in tangible ways. Although there is often a lot of rhetoric about community engagement, and university leadership is eager to talk about the community engaged work faculty members are doing, many are reluctant to put the necessary resources behind it. UCSC’s story demonstrates that a faculty-led process that garners the support of key administrators can succeed in changing the culture and practices of a campus in ways that not only celebrate different forms of scholarship but reward it.