University of Minnesota Twin Cities Support for Community Engaged Scholarship in Tenure and Promotion

ACLS Research University Consortium member the University of Minnesota Twin Cities (UMN) is the only Carnegie-classified public research university in the state of Minnesota. As such, it has many different identities: a land grant university, a research university, and the state’s main public university. In the early 2000s, when university leadership began thinking about how to promote what the university has termed “public engagement,” they had to consider what it would mean across all aspects of the institution’s identity and all aspects of its mission. The question was how to move UMN away from being an institution with many community engagement projects to an institution that sees itself as a publicly engaged university. 

In 2006, the university established the Office for Public Engagement. Andrew Furco was hired in 2008 to be UMN’s first Associate Vice President for Public Engagement and tasked with advancing public engagement at the university. In addition to his research on service learning and his experience as the director of the Service-Learning Research and Development Center at the University of California, Berkeley, Furco had previously served on the National Review Board of the Scholarship of Engagement, which had provided external reviews of community engaged scholarship for faculty members going up for promotion and tenure. 

Upon his arrival at UMN, Furco launched a ten-point plan for institutionalizing public engagement. One of the ten points was to look at faculty support and reward systems for community engaged scholarship, including promotion and tenure. His arrival coincided with an effort at UNM to revise tenure and promotion guidelines, and that provided an opportunity for discussion about the role that public engagement should play in that process. Furco established a task force centered on faculty scholarship to figure out what faculty members needed, resulting in a report that called out the need for stronger support in promotion and tenure for public and community engaged scholars. This helped Furco make the case to deans and central administration that departments needed to attend to this more closely. This was timely, given that the university-wide promotion and tenure revision effort that was then underway required every department to issue a statement about how they would consider public engagement in promotion and tenure decisions.  

While these statements from departments provided some clarity, there was still significant disparity with regard to how (and how well) department personnel committees––which at UNM are the most important arbiters of whether a particular promotion or tenure case is successful–– understood community engaged scholarship. Furco notes that departments spoke about public or community engaged scholarship very differently; one study of how public education was described in UMN departments’ promotion and tenure guidelines found 38 proxy terms for public engagement. This highlighted the challenge of both speaking about public engagement across disciplinary lines and creating campus-wide standards and guidelines.

As it happened, the Office for Public Engagement was located in the same physical space as the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, which was then led by Arlene Carney. Together, Furco and Carney decided to offer workshops for faculty members on how to apply for promotion with community engaged scholarship as part of the portfolio. This initial workshop series was broken down into three parts:

1. Carney discussed the university-wide tenure and promotion guidelines, while Furco talked about public and community engaged scholarship, including the difference between doing community engagement and producing community engaged scholarship. 
2. Carney and Furco drew on the work of Cathy Jordan, a UMN professor of Pediatrics and well-known national expert on engaged scholarship, and invited engaged scholars from various departments at the university whose promotion and tenure cases had been successful to share their experiences. 
3. Faculty members attending the workshop brought in their portfolios for peer review. 

These workshops helped Furco and Carney understand that one of the biggest hurdles was that scholars were doing community engagement but not necessarily community engaged scholarship, and that across the disciplines, community engaged scholarly products appeared in many different forms. A central theme of the workshop was that while there are universal aspects of high quality community-engaged scholarship that apply to all cases, ultimately, faculty members need to be attentive to the particular expectations and standards of their department and how those are demonstrated through community engaged work. 

Faculty members who had gone through the workshops continued to report that department-level personnel committees didn’t understand how to evaluate their community engaged work. In many cases, such work continued to be seen as service (rather than research or teaching) and its rigor was questioned. In response, the Office for Public Engagement created a matrix that demonstrated that in order to do community engaged scholarship, you have to meet the rigors of traditional scholarship and demonstrate impact. A version of this matrix utilized by Brown University is available here.

By 2016, strides had been made in advancing engaged scholarship, but there was still clearly work left to do to help departments more fully understand what community engaged scholarship was and how it should be evaluated. Furco proposed to the newly appointed Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Rebecca Ropers that they replicate internally what the National Review Board for the Scholarship of Engagement had done in reviewing and evaluating the portfolios of community engaged scholars for tenure and promotion. About 20 highly respected, engaged scholars in a range of disciplines were invited to participate in the newly established Review Committee on Community Engaged Scholarship. Furco and Ropers brought in Lorilee Sandmann, a co-creator of the National Review Board, to help facilitate the development of the committee. 

Together, Furco, Ropers, Sandmann, and faculty member David Weerts designed a training for the reviewers and established universal criteria, based on work produced by Boyer and Glassick, which applied to all engaged scholarship regardless of discipline and type. The review board was set up not to evaluate individual pieces of work, but rather to assess the quality of a scholar’s body of work to determine the extent to which it demonstrates the standards and practices set out in the criteria. 

Weerts, who was named associate vice provost for public engagement in 2024, now runs this process. A series of workshops in the fall and spring prepare faculty members for their reviews. In the fall, Weerts’s office offers sessions on what the review process is, the history of why they do it, and for whom it is appropriate. They attempt to dispel the idea that the review is a “rubber stamp” of approval. Rather, it is an additional review process, conducted by UMN peers who understand high quality community engaged scholarship. 

The workshops also clarify that the review might not be suitable for every community engaged scholar––or for every department––and scholars should think carefully before deciding to have the review done. Departments that have very limited community engagement are not likely to have scholars participate in the review, while departments that have very high community engagement likely already have a good understanding of how to evaluate community engaged scholarship. But in departments that are interested but not yet fluent in what community engaged scholarship means, the review process can be very helpful to a scholar seeking promotion or tenure. 

In the spring workshops, Cathy Jordan and Weerts provide guidance on how to put together the best possible portfolio as a community engaged scholar. They emphasize that this work should not be presented exclusively as service, and that both the impact and the scholarly value of the work––that is, how it contributes to not only the community and public but also the field and discipline––should be foregrounded. The scholar’s materials should answer the question of how the work moves the field forward with new theories or methodologies that contribute to the field or discipline. 

Since its inception, the Review Committee has conducted 11 reviews, which includes promotion and/or tenure cases from assistant to associate professor (six cases) and from associate to full professor (five cases). Candidates have come from a variety of fields, including science and engineering, medicine, education, pharmacy, social sciences/liberal arts, and design. According to Weerts, every faculty member who has gone through this process has been successful, but one of the current challenges is that it is hard to know how important the letters were to committees in making their decisions. An effort is also currently being made to understand the barriers and unique timelines for candidates who may want to participate in this process. Weerts notes that workshop attendees include a range of faculty members who are in various stages of their tenure clock, as well as departmental chairs and heads of mentoring committees who seek to learn more about the opportunity. Understanding the full demand for this process is ongoing.  

Much progress has been made since 2008. Furco stepped down from his position leading the Office for Public Engagement in 2022, and the office is now led by Laurie Van Egeren. Furco believes that the next horizon in this work is training promotion and tenure committees to understand what community scholarship is and why it is important, so that the burden does not fall completely on individual scholars. However, this will need to be nuanced work that allows for significant differences between departments. There are, Furco says, “a panoply of possibilities” when it comes to approaches for conducting community engaged scholarship, all of which need to be embraced. The standards for tenure and promotion will need to be calibrated as they pertain to these different approaches and the disciplines in which they are situated. 

Furco and Weerts agree that it is critical to have senior leadership positions that are dedicated to community engaged and public scholarship. When Furco became associate vice president in 2008, there were only two or three such positions in the country. Now they are far more common. That’s an encouraging trend, Furco says, because change requires infrastructure and someone with the authority to help develop institutional policies that can remove barriers. Weerts concurs and also emphasizes the importance of shared leadership between offices––in this case, the Office for Public Engagement and the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs. It is difficult, if not impossible, to make such changes in isolation, Weerts says. Rather, such changes need to be seen as a strategic priority for the university, across all aspects of its identity and mission.