Q&A: Community Engagement Expert Andrew Furco to Present at UK Thursday

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Oct. 7, 2014) — The next speaker in the "see tomorrow." Speaker Series, Andrew Furco will address issues related to community engagement at 9 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 9, in the Lexmark Public Room. 

As associate vice president for public engagement, Furco works with units across the University of Minnesota to advance the institutionalization of various forms of public and community engagement into the university’s research, teaching, and outreach activities.

He sat down with UKNow to discuss the importance of public engagement and its relationship with a university mission:

Q: How would you define university engagement?

A: Today's university engagement is distinct from higher education's traditional outreach work.  Typically, a university's partnership with external entities has been seen as primarily fulfilling the institution's public service and outreach mission  However, today's public engagement effort focuses more centrally on the work that students, faculty, and academic units do in partnership with community-based entities.  In particular, today's public engagement efforts are designed specifically to advance the institution's research and teaching missions.  In this regard, today's public engagement agenda honors and values the knowledge, expertise, and experience of members of the community as universities work to produce new knowledge that benefits society and prepare students for their future lives as active citizens.  This contemporary approach to university public engagement has created an epistemological shift in how knowledge is created, in who has the knowledge and expertise, and in the ways we share, disseminate, and use knowledge.

Q: Why is this an important topic for universities? Does it have particular relevance for flagships and land-grant institutions?

A: The public's "favorability" attitudes toward higher education continue to decline as more students graduate with high debt loads, as employers complain that college graduates do not have the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in the workforce, and as more taxpayers question why public funds are diverted to fund seemingly extraneous research when there are many societal challenges that communities are confronting (e.g., poverty, health disparities, youth disenfranchisement, environmental hazards, etc.).  Flagship, public research universities, in particular, seem to receive the brunt of this criticism, mainly because they are supposedly publicly funded to serve the needs of the state.  Some see the quest for national and international prestige (to be a top research university) that undergirds the priorities of many state-funded, flagship institutions as being antithetical to meeting and serving the needs the of the state.  It is no coincidence that as state funded flagships and land-grant institutions have strengthened their prestige, rankings, and national/international reputations, the proportion of their budget that comes from the state has diminished precipitously.  For flagship and land-grant institutions, the contemporary approach to public engagement is especially important because the engagement agenda is not about fulfilling the institution's land-grant mission, but rather it is about fulfilling the other core aspects (e.g., research, teaching) of the institution's mission.  For land-grant universities, this means that public and community engagement is not only for those who work in Extension or who are Clinical Professors or Professors of the Practice, but rather, community-engaged work is something that can promote the academic and scholarly work of all faculty and students across academic units.

 
Q: How do you see this concept evolving — how is engagement different today than in the past?

A: In addition to focusing not just on fulfilling higher education's outreach mission, but also advancing universities' research and teaching missions, today's public and community engagement is different and distinct from traditional outreach efforts in several other ways.  Firstly, today's community-engaged work is integrated more fully into the academic curriculum.  Indeed, according to the National Study of Student Engagement survey, 50 percent of all students participate in some form of community-engaged learning experience (e.g., service-learning, internship, etc.).  Secondly, the focus of the work is not on time-limited community-based projects, but rather on building multi-faceted and multi-unit, interdisciplinary, sustainable campus-community partnerships with a set of related projects operating as part of a larger effort to address a complex societal issue over an extended period of time.  Thirdly, today's higher education public engagement work sees community partners not as research participants or field sites, but rather as co-educators, co-investigators, and co-producers of knowledge.  In this regard, the knowledge and experience of the community are greatly valued and honored

Q: What does the future look like … as funding pressures continue … is engagement more important? Will it be constrained?

A: The future seems to point to a deepening of public and community engagement in higher education. This is evidenced by the growing emphasis on community-engaged practices in higher education systems across the globe, in the growing number of professional associations devoted to advancing research and practice on various aspects of community-engaged research and teaching, in the rise of peer-reviewed publication venues that publish community-engaged scholarly work, in changes in promotion and tenure guidelines at various universities as an effort to more fully support the faculty who conduct community-based work, and the increased attention to community-engaged scholarship from federal agencies that fund research (e.g., NIH, NSF, etc.).  The boards that accredit universities are also focusing more intentionally on the ways in which institutions of higher education are integrating community-engaged experiences into their research, teaching, and outreach initiatives.  Lastly, student demand for doing community-engaged work is on the rise, and there is evidence to suggest that more students are selecting institutions based on opportunities to conduct academically linked community-based work that engage them in authentic work that address important societal issues.

MEDIA CONTACT: Sarah Geegan, (859) 257-5365; sarah.geegan@uky.edu