GLOBAL: How governments can support civic universities

Government policies can have a substantial impact on university civic engagement - through mandates, and through incentives and exhortation. The positive experience to date of several countries should encourage other nations to consider adopting policies such as requiring all university students to complete a specified amount of volunteer service and making civic engagement a positive criterion in decision-making processes with respect to governmental funding for research and other programmes.

A dilemma that arises is the disconnection between governments' desires for some or all of 'their' universities to be 'world-class' and the priorities they set for them in other fields. What counts in the tables (such as research citations and self-evaluation by members of academic fields) is the opposite of most of the features that governments say they want from 'their' institutions (such as high teaching quality, contributions to social justice, and entrepreneurialism).

Another major governmental influence is the extent and terms of financial support. This is a particularly important factor, since so many institutions of higher education around the world are public institutions, ones that are funded primarily by public monies. Public sector support is a story of painful cross-pressures - on the one hand, of massive pressures to expand enrolment and of growing societal expectations that the higher education sector directly address pressing societal problems; yet on the other hand, these expectations are rarely accompanied by proportionate increases in public investment. The global engaged universities movement has a shared opportunity to build and communicate more persuasively the case for sustained and increased public investment.

Financial resources are a positive, and essential, ingredient for successful university civic engagement and social responsibility programming. All the institutions that participated in our study have invested in and/or attracted significant funding to develop and to maintain their work. While a near-universal refrain is that financial constraints are a serious limiting factor, the level of financial support with which they operate varies dramatically. Several of the participating institutions have built and maintain impressive programmes and impacts with comparatively low budgets.

These universities draw on a considerable variety of sources of financial support - including student fees; core institutional budget allocations; grants and contracts from public agencies, private foundations, and individuals; and international agency grants and contracts. It is in the common interest of proponents of the engaged university to deal directly with the factors and determine the future levels of support from these various sources. This is a consideration for individual colleges and universities, and also is one that collective action has the special potential to address.

A challenge that accompanies the question of source of financial support is 'accountability'. What do these funders expect in return for their investment? In what ways does their support either reinforce or deflect university policies and programmes?

University civic engagement activities can amplify and reinforce the work of other sectors - governmental, philanthropic, non-governmental and private business. The willingness of these diverse sources to invest indicates that they believe this to be the case. The overall level of financial support for university civic and social responsibility seems modest in relation to its impressive impacts on student learning outcomes, knowledge development and community conditions.

The growing success of university civic engagement programmes provides a solid rationale for greater investment.

At many of the institutions, their civic and social responsibility work is well established and there is every reason to predict that it will be sustained, but this is not always the case. In some instances, budgetary cutbacks have caused institutions to reduce their civic programming. These experiences are a reminder that the civic and social responsibility dimensions are comparatively young and they are vulnerable to changing economic realities. In other words, sustainability is the key challenge - one that cannot be taken for granted.

At the same time, there are contending goals at work in relation to the influence and impact of institutions on their environment on the one hand, and on the learning and personal development of their students on the other. These can be made to align, but will often require specific interventions to make them do so.

A related problem concerns benchmarking and measurement. The search for truly effective, generalisable metrics for civic and community engagement activity and impact goes on. At present, a lot of effort is going into classifying and counting, but not much into the hardest institutional research (or self-study) question: not "How good are we, compared with the rest? But "How good could, or should we be?"

Our research shows the power of individual and collective leadership. It reveals how individuals and small groups - of heads of institutions, professors, students, and community partners - can make a decisive difference in university civic engagement. The implication of this finding is that the leaders and potential leaders are out there; they just need concerted support in order to be fully successful.

Leadership elements and strategies that are effective in this realm include vision, coalition-building and collaboration. Leaders also have to ensure the continuity and sustainability of their ideas.

Another finding is the importance of having a structure which supports a high-level position and office to lead and coordinate the institution's civic engagement and social responsibility and of developing strong partnerships with other institutions.

A key conclusion that emerges from our study is that low or non-existent rewards and incentives for faculty to do civic engagement and social responsibility work are a major break on this area of university activity around the world. This is a problem for several reasons.

First, it obviously holds back the civic work of higher education. But second, it is important to come to terms with other implications as well. There is growing evidence that university civic engagement enhances the quality of education, improves community conditions and elevates public support for higher education. Each of these consequences directly affects the well-being and self-interests of universities. Therefore, faculty rewards and incentives should be a priority for innovation.

On the brighter side, some of the institutions we studied have begun to assess and provide credit for professors' civic activities, even though the incentives that are provided in those institutions are modest in comparison to those related to research and teaching. Therefore, one area of opportunity may be to learn from and build upon the experience of these pioneering institutions.

We recommend documenting how these policies operate and what impacts they have in those institutions. In addition, these institutions could be encouraged to exert leadership by elevating the extent to which civic engagement performance is weighted in their reviews of faculty members' performance.

There are potential steps that government agencies and public and private funders of higher education can consider to address this challenge. When funders increase their support for professors' community and public service projects, they powerfully reinforce that work and can indirectly advance the prospects for changing institutional rewards systems as well. In addition, funders and regulators could consider requiring or encouraging greater civic engagement activity and results, as a condition for the provision of core operating support and/or scholarship aid to university students.

Another approach that holds promise is to integrate civic engagement work with research and teaching, so it can be rewarded as part of professors' performance in research and teaching rather than only as a separate category of endeavour. A related strategy can be to grow and to publicise examples of professors whose civic and social responsibility work has been a route to exceptionally strong teaching and to significant advances in the development of knowledge.

At each of the institutions in this study, there are faculty members who are recognised leaders in community work and who also are highly respected for their scholarship and teaching. Expanding the number of these teacher-scholar-civic leaders, and supporting and publicising their leadership, can, over time, change the culture of the academy.

* David Watson, Elizabeth Babcock, Robert M Hollister and Susan E Stroud are authors of The Engaged University, which was launched at the Talloires Network conference in Madrid in early June. This is an edited version of the chapter on 'Implications for Policy and Practice'.