By: Ken O’Donnell, Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Policy for the Office of the Chancellor of the California State University

Sherrill B. Gelmon won this year’s Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award, conferred by Campus Compac ^[1]t. She’s a professor of public health at Portland State University, teaching in PSU’s College of Urban & Public Affairs ^[2]. She began by pointing out how well that positions her for community engagement work: she and her colleagues are at the heart of downtown Portland, in a university whose motto is “Let Knowledge Serve the City.”

She used both survey data and personal anecdotes to identify faculty motives for engagement, but the real reward kept coming back to joy. Her colleagues report that community engagement makes their work more satisfying, deepens student learning, and adds dimension and relevance to their own teaching and scholarship. For each personal story, Sherrill projected an image that the respondent felt represented joy, some of them really whimsical. Of the comparisons she made, I think my favorite came from her PhD student Katrina, who said the pressures of faculty work reminded her of professional skaters, bringing their arms in and twirling faster and faster. Connections to the community pull the arms back out.

Devorah Leiberman, formerly of PSU and now president of the University of La Verne ^[3], added an administrator’s perspective to the value of community engagement–and curiously, her motivation began when she was a faculty member. Like Sherrill, she candidly characterized it as a source of joy; she’d once pitched for a promotion in faculty rank by expanding her scholarship to include local research, and her dean discouraged it, saying he’d only support research that stuck to her dissertation topic–a phenomenon she later dubbed “publishing without passion for promotion.” She vowed not to perpetuate the cycle when she got into positions of authority.

Julie Plaut, executive director of the Minnesota Campus Compact ^[4], confessed that she loves her work but wouldn’t have called it “joyful.” In her experience, it’s valuable for faculty but often elicits anxiety over the unknown, fear of a weakened case for RTP, even unease over the challenges of reconciling off-campus service with the quirks of the academic calendar. She said all of these can and should be overcome, but every day she feels first-hand the need expressed in the recently published Crucible Moment ^[5]– that we take work like this beyond the episodic and sporadic, and make it pervasive and purposeful.

At the end of this engaging and well-prepared panel, it was hard not to agree. The work is clearly rewarding, but too many of the benefits are apparent only in hindsight, recognized by participants more than by the institution. The educational benefits also appear substantial, but until we have more presidents like La Verne’s, may be marginalized for a while to come.

We’ll know we got there when the title of a session like this doesn’t imply people have to be talked into engaging with communities.