University Times

The Graduate School of Public Health’s recent efforts to stem diabetes and hypertension in black neighborhoods in Pittsburgh’s East End is just one example of Pitt’s academic expertise helping the local community.

The University senate’s fall plenary session, “The Scholarship of Community Service,” held Nov. 3, promoted community projects and questioned how best to proceed with community scholarship and its relation to faculty promotion and tenure.

Recognizing and rewarding community service and scholarship within the University is an issue that needs to be addressed, according to previous Senate reports. To that end, the recent plenary session presented ways for faculty to think about their scholarship and ways that Pitt as an institution can incorporate public service scholarship into tenure and promotion processes.

Provost James Maher stressed that community service scholarship is more easily accomplished in the University’s professional schools. And he gave a sobering take on advancing community service scholarship generally at Pitt during the plenary session’s panel discussion.

Another panelist emphasized that community service scholarship isn’t for everyone.

Evan Stoddard, associate dean of liberal arts at Duquesne University and Pitt alumnus, presented some questions faculty members should ask themselves before they commit to community-based research:

– Will my students learn better what I want them to learn if I engage them in community research or service?

– Do I have expertise and interest to take on community problems in my research? Will I love it? Will I do it well?

– Will I ensure that the community receives value back for value given? Will I ensure there is mutual benefit from this relationship? Senate President Nicholas Bircher and Chancellor Mark Nordenberg provided opening remarks stressing the importance of public service work and touted a variety of Pitt initiatives including COPC (Community Outreach Partnership Center), which links University expertise to community outreach issues such as economic development, education, housing and job training.

Keynote speaker, Lorilee R. Sandmann called for “scholarship of engagement,” which she described as a community and an institution such as Pitt working together for mutual benefit.

In her discussion, Sandmann, an associate professor of education at the University of Georgia, argues that community service scholarship is starting to take hold. “What I’m seeing is that some universities are redoing their promotion and tenure guidelines,” she said. Sandmann is also co-director of the National Clearinghouse and National Review Board for the Scholarship of Engagement, which provides external peer review of scholarly research in community issues.

Sandmann presented a practical guide to advance community service scholarship at Pitt. Some of her suggestions include:

-Develop a learning community with a common understanding of what is meant by scholarship of community service;

-Engage the support of the academic community including deans, department chairs and others;

-Put systems in place that are rigorous, reliable and understandable for interpreting guidelines for tenure and promotion;

-Build capacity within the faculty on how to frame partnerships as scholarship so the expectations from the university are understood; -Align parts of the institution along with its culture to embrace, support and celebrate community engagement;

-Document and assess the quality of outreach at the student, faculty and institutional level.

Following Sandmann’s presentation, Maher kicked off a panel discussion and described community service scholarship as “remarkably important” to the University. But he began his discussion with a warning:

“Somebody has to play the role of raising the difficult issue that can sound hostile and I hope it doesn’t because I’m not hostile. In fact, I’m dedicated to the success of this kind of project and I think if we don’t face the barriers very clearly, we won’t solve the problem.

“A lot of the very best faculty of the University are not in the room because they do not think that this is a worthy enterprise. And until that issue is addressed, we’re not going to be able to advance this agenda.”

According to Maher, a meaningful discussion is needed among the country’s top faculty on “how to do this in such a high-quality way that they will enthusiastically join the effort. And until that succeeds, this will not succeed.”

Maher also gave a disclaimer about the public service issue and his role of provost: “I’m prepared to wait a long time to get this working. I don’t have any intention of acting with any disrespect toward the role in governance played by the faculties at the schools. So nothing I say today should ever be taken as grounds upon which one should bring a tenure case that runs counter to the collective opinion of the faculty of the school as to the appropriateness of the activity. And I do think if I were to take any different stance, I would be dooming this enterprise to failure.”

Maher stressed that the region can draw on Pitt’s role as a learning community and then discussed the perceived dichotomies between research and service. “I don’t understand why those two need to be regarded as two separate enterprises,” he said. “We cannot possibly serve all the people we would like to in our professional schools. We are few in number and the problems of this society are enormous. So whenever we do service, our service will be of enormously more value. And if we evaluate and document whether or not we succeed, and communicate that to the rest of the world so that others just don’t repeat the mistakes that we’ve made — that is research.” Maher added: “There is nothing in the tenure guidelines in this University that would stop one from using that as research in supporting promotions or tenure as long as the faculty of that school have put into place the mechanisms for evaluating that research and have endorsed that kind of activity as being within the scope of the mission of the school and in the interest of the development of the school.”

Maher also pointed to the importance of service learning and the need to find more ways to help students learn by experience. “A societal analogue of what the faculty and the sciences have always done is the teaching laboratories. It is essential that that be done right and in a way that garners respect from the rest of the faculty. To my mind, it also is essential that it be done. It’s a wonderful way for people to learn.”

-Mary Ann Thomas