Recognizing and Rewarding Community Engaged Social Science in Higher Education

Background and Purpose: For university-based researchers, the protection of tenure can free scholars to engage in meaningful, community-based research and advocacy. Such activities, however, tend to be discouraged by the academy, especially at the pre-tenure stage; promotion and tenure committees tend to undervalue research that involves community stakeholders from disadvantaged communities, an activity that can be time-consuming and fall outside of traditional notions of rigor and scientific inquiry. While university leaders may laud efforts to invite subjects to participate in guiding inquiry, interpreting results, and advocating for change, these efforts receive scant credit—relative to scholarship that yields high counts of peer-reviewed publications—in the promotion process.

Acknowledging the power dynamic inherent in extracting data and brokering knowledge obliges universities to reexamine how we recognize, reward, and promote faculty. Traditional scholarship increasingly belies principles of the scientific enterprise: Peer reviewed journals are generally inaccessible to the public and, increasingly, to faculty whose institutions find subscriptions costs unaffordable. The proliferation of important subfields, the emergence of predatory publications, expansion permitted by abandoning print, and the decline of forums (such as letters to the editor) for challenging findings have weakened the justification for the monopoly that high-impact peer-reviewed publications effectively have on measuring scholarly production for purposes of academic promotion. However, while quantifying “engagement” and identifying alternatives to measure the impact of non-traditional research is challenging, it is hardly justification for a problematic reward system.

Methods and results: A review of literature from wide variety of fields indicated broad support for integrating community engagement in the research process. Evidence suggests that faculty believe that such efforts serve important principles of equity and inclusion, and university administrators, including department/school leaders, report that they value community-engagement scholarship when making promotion and tenure decisions. However, the degree to which such activities are valued is far from clear. We identified scant sources to help guide reform, including (and surprisingly) from fields such as agroforestry, physiology, and marine biology; these fields wrestle with “parachute research” that fails to acknowledge contributions of local stakeholders and does not adequately share research that can benefit these communities. Federal agencies are also beginning to recognize the value of engaged research and qualitative scholarship, which require community partnership that has typically been undervalued in the promotion and tenure process.

Implications: Universities operate in a tradition-bound context, governed by leaders who tend to hew to those longstanding norms and mirror the demographic composition of academic leaders of earlier generations. As the academy diversifies and expands how scholarship is defined, the promotion and tenure process needs to adjust as well. It is imperative that faculty scholars work with foundations, federal agencies, and professional and higher education organizations to provide a blueprint for developing a comprehensive plan, as change will be limited if scholars target only their own academic units. After all, tenure decisions involve administrators and faculty colleagues from many disciplines and colleagues—as external reviewers—from other institutions. This session offers a framework for change.