The theme was lofty: True Stories of Engagement: Higher Education for Democracy. But bringing those words to life has not been easy, as became clear when more than 500 university staff and faculty gathered at Campus Compact’s biennial conference in Indianapolis last month to discuss the state of the field of community engagement in higher education.
For the uninitiated, Campus Compact is a national organization dedicated to promoting community engagement by universities. The organization enjoys the support of over 1,000 university presidents. Founded in the mid-1980s, Campus Compact has helped foster a wave of campus activity that increasingly links universities with nonprofits and community groups.
Historically, Campus Compact has heavily promoted service-learning, a form of pedagogy that fuses community work with student learning. In service-learning, faculty organize classes that enable students to work on community-service projects and then write about the work they have done. This work is typically done in partnership with a local sponsoring nonprofit, which hosts the participating student. The partnerships have often been effective both for student learning and community partners.
The organization’s response, formally unveiled at Campus Compact’s 30th anniversary conference two years ago, was to issue a formal call for university campus members to develop Civic Action plans that would shift community engagement from being a program or center to becoming the central purpose of the university. This marked a profound shift in strategic direction, but the statement, developed in concert with its members, has enjoyed broad support. To date, 464 university presidents—nearly half of the organization’s members—have signed on and made five commitments.
The five central commitments made by signatories were as follows:
We empower our students, faculty, staff, and community partners to co-create mutually respectful partnerships in pursuit of a just, equitable, and sustainable future for communities beyond the campus—nearby and around the world.
We prepare our students for lives of engaged citizenship, with the motivation and capacity to deliberate, act, and lead in pursuit of the public good.
We embrace our responsibilities as place-based institutions, contributing to the health and strength of our communities—economically, socially, environmentally, educationally, and politically.
We harness the capacity of our institutions—through research, teaching, partnerships, and institutional practice—to challenge the prevailing social and economic inequalities that threaten our democratic future.
We foster an environment that consistently affirms the centrality of the public purposes of higher education by setting high expectations for members of the campus community to contribute to their achievement.
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