In the promotion and tenure policy chapter of the Guidebook, we also talk about how faculty can better communicate their commitment to engagement through their review materials by adding narratives to their numerical CVs that elevate the way that engagement either informed the research questions they asked, the research process itself or the potential outcomes of the research. That way, engagement isn’t a fourth responsibility, but integrated into your existing research, teaching and service. Some of the best practices we uncover in the Guidebook are strategies for aligning research, teaching, service and engagement so that you’re doing engaged teaching, you’re doing engaged service, you’re doing engaged research. You don’t have time for it all – we all have to make tradeoffs in terms of how we allocate our effort. Leaning into that positionality is an important part of being an engaged scholar and being an effective community partner. Our values and life experiences motivate the problems that we decide to work on. Many researchers – and certainly many students – are very motivated to pursue higher education because they seek to engage in the problems they care about the most.
However: We in the Network push back on the narrative that there is some objective form of science or research that is not enmeshed in our individual values and beliefs about how the world ought to be. And certainly, many community partners work with universities in part because we offer credibility, legitimacy and expertise. Universities have a commitment to research, teaching, and service that distinguishes them from advocacy organizations and foundations. It’s your decision as an individual researcher how you engage in problems, what your role is in analyzing and studying those problems, how you might shift the way that you do your work to be attentive to societal problems, and the degree to which you advocate for specific solutions.
Academics will always have to navigate the continuum of scholarship and advocacy.
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