Returning to our Roots: the Engaged Institution (Kellog Commission)

THIRD REPORT

Returning to
Our Roots

THE ENGAGED INSTITUTION

K

ellogg Commission

on the Future of State
and Land-Grant Universities

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Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

Returning to Our Roots

The Engaged Institution

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An Open Letter to the Presidents and Chancellors
of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges

Returning to Our Roots
THE ENGAGED INSTITUTION

I

n the end, the clear evidence is that, with the resources and superbly

qualified professors and staff on our campuses, we can organize our
institutions to serve both local and national needs in a more coherent and
effective way. We can and must do better.

KELLOGG COMMISSION ON THE
FUTURE OF STATE AND LAND-GRANT UNIVERSITIES
FEBRUARY 1999

National Association
of State Universities and
Land-Grant Colleges

Returning to Our Roots

4

Kellogg Commission on the
Future of State and Land-Grant Universities
Graham Spanier (Chair)
Dolores R. Spikes (Vice Chair)
John V. Byrne (Executive Director)
C. Peter Magrath
Daniel O. Bernstine
Ray M. Bowen
Lattie F. Coor
Constantine W. Curris
Peter S. Hoff
Martin C. Jischke
William E. Kirwan
Francis L. Lawrence
John V. Lombardi
Joseph McDonald
M. Peter McPherson
James Moeser
Gregory M. St. L. O’Brien
Benjamin F. Payton
Judith A. Ramaley
W. Ann Reynolds
Paul Risser
Samuel H. Smith
James J. Stukel
Larry Vanderhoef
David Ward
Mark Yudof

President, The Pennsylvania State University
President, University of Maryland, Eastern Shore
Executive Director, Kellogg Commission
President, NASULGC
President, Portland State University
President, Texas A&M University
President, Arizona State University
President, Clemson University
President, University of Maine
President, Iowa State University
President, The Ohio State University
President, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
President, University of Florida
President, Salish Kootenai College
President, Michigan State University
Chancellor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Chancellor, University of New Orleans
President, Tuskegee University
President, University of Vermont
President, University of Alabama at Birmingham
President, Oregon State University
President, Washington State University
President, University of Illinois
Chancellor, University of California, Davis
Chancellor, University of Wisconsin-Madison
President, University of Minnesota

Commissioners Emeriti
E. Gordon Gee
Nils Hasselmo
Frederick E. Hutchinson

President, Brown University
(Former President, The Ohio State University)
Former President, University of Minnesota
Former President, University of Maine

National Advisory Committee
Rogert R. Blunt, Sr. (Chair)
Paula C. Butterfield
Wenda Weekes Moore
Donald E. Petersen
Walter Scott, Jr.
Mike Thorne
Edwin S. Turner

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

Chairman & CEO, Blunt Enterprises, Maryland
Superintendent, Bozeman Public Schools, Montana
Trustee, W. K. Kellogg Foundation, Michigan
Former President, Ford Motor Company, Michigan
President, Level 3 Communications Inc., Nebraska
Executive Director, Port of Portland, Oregon
President, EST Enterprises, Missouri

The Engaged Institution

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G RAHAM S PANIER

M. P ETER M C P HERSON

D OLORES R. S PIKES

J AMES M OESER

D ANIEL O. B ERNSTINE

G REGORY M. S T . L. O’B RIEN

R AY M. B OWEN

B ENJAMIN F. P AYTON

J OHN V. B YRNE

J UDITH A. R AMALEY

L ATTIE F. C OOR

W. A NN R EYNOLDS

C ONSTANTINE W. C URRIS

P AUL R ISSER

P ETER S. H OFF

S AMUEL H. S MITH

M ARTIN C. J ISCHKE

J AMES J. S TUKEL

W ILLIAM E. K IRWAN

L ARRY V ANDERHOEF

F RANCIS L. L AWRENCE

D AVID W ARD

J OHN V. LOMBARDI

M ARK Y UDOF

C. P ETER MAGRATH

J OSEPH M C D ONALD

National Association
of State Universities and
Land-Grant Colleges

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Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

Returning to Our Roots

The Engaged Institution

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CONTENTS

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities ........................................... 4
Executive Summary ............................................................................................................ 9
Preface ..................................................................................................................... 15
C H AP TER 1:

The Imperative for Engagement ............................................................... 17

C H AP TER 2:

The Engaged University ............................................................................. 27

From Theory to Action:
Reflections on Institutional Portraits .................................................................... 39

C H AP TER 3:

Appendices
Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................. 53
Meetings, Guests, & Speakers ............................................................................................. 55
Holland’s Matrix: Levels of Commitment to Service .......................................................... 56
Gelmon Assessment Instruments ........................................................................................ 57

National Association
of State Universities and
Land-Grant Colleges

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Kellogg Commission
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

W E WRITE BOTH to celebrate the contributions our institutions have made to
our society and to call on ourselves to
do more, and to do it better.
Ours is a rich heritage of service to
the nation. More than a century and a
quarter after Justin Morrill and
Abraham Lincoln brought the concept
into being, the land-grant ideal of
public university service to community
and nation has spread across the
United States and its territories. Our
public institutions have provided access
to higher education at a level unparalleled in the world. They have created a
prodigious research engine. They have
brought the benefit of new knowledge
to millions of people.
Why, then, the need for change?
Who says we need to do more? And
what exactly is it that we need to do
better?

Nature of the Challenges
One challenge we face is growing
public frustration with what is seen to
be our unresponsiveness. At the root of
the criticism is a perception that we are
out of touch and out of date. Another
part of the issue is that although
society has problems, our institutions
have “disciplines.” In the end, what
these complaints add up to is a perception that, despite the resources and
expertise available on our campuses,
our institutions are not well organized
to bring them to bear on local problems in a coherent way.
Meanwhile, a number of other
issues present themselves. They include
enrollment pressures in many Western

and Southwestern states; long-term
financial constraints and demands for
affordability and cost containment; a
growing emphasis on accountability
and productivity from trustees, legislators, and donors; and urgent requests
from policymakers for solutions to
national and international problems of
all kinds.
Against that backdrop, this Commission concludes that it is time to go
beyond outreach and service to what
the Kellogg Commission defines as
“engagement.” By engagement, we
refer to institutions that have redesigned their teaching, research, and
extension and service functions to
become even more sympathetically and
productively involved with their
communities, however community
may be defined.
Engagement goes well beyond
extension, conventional outreach, and
even most conceptions of public
service. Inherited concepts emphasize a
one-way process in which the university transfers its expertise to key
constituents. Embedded in the engagement ideal is a commitment to sharing
and reciprocity. By engagement the
Commission envisions partnerships,
two-way streets defined by mutual
respect among the partners for what
each brings to the table. An institution
that responds to these imperatives can
properly be called what the Kellogg
Commission has come to think of as an
“engaged institution.”
We believe an engaged university
can enrich the student experience and
help change the campus culture. It can
do so by enlarging opportunities for

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faculty and students to gain access to
research and new knowledge and by
broadening access to internships and
various kinds of off-campus learning
opportunities. The engaged institution
must accomplish at least three things:
1. It must be organized to respond to
the needs of today’s students and
tomorrow’s, not yesterday’s.
2. It must enrich students’ experiences
by bringing research and engagement into the curriculum and
offering practical opportunities for
students to prepare for the world
they will enter.
3. It must put its critical resources
(knowledge and expertise) to work
on the problems the communities it
serves face.
Students. The data are clear. Part-time
students are the fastest growing population in higher education, and most of
them seek a degree; white males will
be a smaller and smaller proportion of
the U.S. workforce; our student body is
gradually becoming older; most
master’s degree candidates attend part
time; and enrollment in independent
study programs is increasing.
Preparation for Life. The Commission believes one of the best ways to
prepare students for the challenges life
will place before them lies in integrating the community with their academic
experiences. Students are one of the
principal engagement resources available to every university. Servicelearning opportunities undoubtedly
help everyone involved—student,
community, and institution. Nor
should we overlook the opportunities

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

to improve students’ exposure to
research in this service endeavor. There
should be little distinction between the
benefits of students participating in
research and in public service.
Putting Knowledge to Work.
Finally, the application of knowledge is
a unique contribution our institutions
can make to contemporary society.
Because we perform the lion’s share of
the basic research in this country, new
knowledge is one distinctive thing we
can provide.
Here, the list of potential areas for
engagement is endless. Hardly any of
our institutions could commit themselves to the entire array.
The panoply of problems and
opportunities incorporated in the
phrase education and the economy
requires attention. The traditional
mainstays of extension on our campuses, agriculture and food, need to
be renewed. In the most important
way imaginable, our universities need
to return to their roots in rural
America with new energy for today’s
new problems. Despite the nation’s
massive investment in health care, an
enormous agenda remains before us. It
need hardly be said that we need a
new emphasis on urban revitalization and community renewal
comparable in its own way to our rural
development efforts in the last century.
We need to pay new attention to the
challenges facing children, youth,
and families in the United States.
Finally, we need to redouble our efforts
to improve and conserve our environment and natural resources.
The changing nature of the engagement agenda, in terms of our students,
their preparation, and emerging
problems, presents us with a daunting

The Engaged Institution

challenge. We are under no illusions
about the difficulty of the task we have
set ourselves. In addition, the new
questions before us involve not only
important issues requiring the application of hard data and science, but
challenging, and frequently fuzzy,
problems involving human behavior
and motivation, complex social systems, and personal values that are
controversial simply because they are
important. This engagement agenda
will require the best efforts of us all—
and the courage, conviction, and
commitment to see it through.

Institutional Portraits
Because no established body of
research could be tapped to explore
questions such as those, the Commission encouraged its member institutions
to develop exploratory portraits of their
engagement activities. Eleven institutions provided portraits: Arizona State
University; Iowa State University; The
Ohio State University; The Pennsylvania
State University; Portland State University; Rutgers, The State University of
New Jersey; Salish Kootenai College;
Tuskegee University; the University of
California, Davis; the University of
Illinois at Chicago; and the University
of Vermont.
From these protraits, we conclude
that seven guiding characteristics seem
to define an engaged institution (see
page 12). These characteristics—
responsiveness, respect for partners,
academic neutrality, accessibility,
integrating engagement into institutional mission, coordination, and
resource adequacy—almost represent a
seven-part test of engagement.
In addition, several common themes
or lessons emerged:

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■ A clear commitment to the
basic idea of engagement. Our
portraits reveal a set of institutions
determined to breathe new life into
their historic mission by going
beyond extension to engagement.
■ Strong support for infusing
engagement into curriculum
and teaching mission. These
examples also portray institutions
wrestling with broader concepts of
outreach and service and struggling to infuse engagement into
the life of the institution and its
curriculum.
■ Remarkable diversity in
approaches and efforts. In the
end, designing engagement is a
local activity. It cannot be handed
down from on high. But viewed
from the ground level of the
institution and its partners, the
scope and diversity of efforts are
impressive.
■ The importance of defining
“community.” Each of these 11
institutions is working with several
different communities in many
different ways. Community has
many different definitions extending from the neighborhood in
which the campus is located to the
world.
■

Leadership is critical. Leadership to create an engagement
agenda is crucial. Engagement will
not develop by itself, and it will
not be led by the faint of heart.

■

Funding is always an issue.
Despite the existence of the
remarkable variety of funding

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Land-Grant Colleges

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A Seven-Part Test
Seven guiding characteristics seem to define an
engaged institution. They constitute almost a seven-part
test of engagement.
1. Responsiveness. We need to ask ourselves
periodically if we are listening to the communities,
regions, and states we serve. Are we asking the right
questions? Do we offer our services in the right way at
the right time? Are our communications clear? Do we
provide space and, if need be, resources for preliminary
community-university discussions of the public problem to
be addressed. Above all, do we really understand that in
reaching out, we are also obtaining valuable information
for our own purposes?
2. Respect for partners. Throughout this report we
have tried to emphasize that the purpose of engagement
is not to provide the university’s superior expertise to the
community but to encourage joint academic-community
definitions of problems, solutions, and definitions of
success. Here we need to ask ourselves if our institutions
genuinely respect the skills and capacities of our partners
in collaborative projects. In a sense we are asking that we
recognize fully that we have almost as much to learn in
these efforts as we have to offer.
3. Academic neutrality. Of necessity, some of our
engagement activities will involve contentious issues—
whether they draw on our science and technology, social
science expertise, or strengths in the visual and performing arts. Do pesticides contribute to fish kills? If so, how?
How does access to high quality public schools relate to
economic development in minority communities? Is
student “guerrilla theater” justified in local landlordtenant disputes. These questions often have profound
social, economic, and political consequences. The
question we need to ask ourselves here is whether
outreach maintains the university in the role of neutral
facilitator and source of information when public policy
issues, particularly contentious ones, are at stake.
4. Accessibility. Our institutions are confusing to
outsiders. We need to find ways to help inexperienced
potential partners negotiate this complex structure so that
what we have to offer is more readily available. Do we
properly publicize our activities and resources? Have we
made a concentrated effort to increase community
awareness of the resources and programs available from
us that might be useful? Above all, can we honestly say

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and
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that our expertise is equally accessible to all the constituencies of concern within our states and communities,
including minority constituents?
5. Integration. Our institutions need to find way to
integrate their service mission with their responsibilities
for developing intellectual capital and trained intelligence. Engagement offers new opportunities for integrating institutional scholarship with the service and
teaching missions of the university. Here we need to
worry about whether the institutional climate fosters
outreach, service, and engagement. A commitment to
interdisciplinary work is probably indispensable to an
integrated approach. In particular we need to examine
what kinds of incentives are useful in encouraging faculty
and student commitment to engagement. Will respected
faculty and student leaders not only participate but also
serve as advocates for the program?
6. Coordination. A corollary to integration, the
coordination issue involves making sure the left hand
knows what the right hand is doing. The task of coordinating service activities—whether through a senior
advisor to the president, faculty councils, or thematic
structures such as the Great Cities Project or “capstone”
courses—clearly requires a lot of attention. Are academic
units dealing with each other productively? Do the
communications and government relations offices
understand the engagement agenda? Do faculty, staff,
and students need help in developing the skills of
translating expert knowledge into something the public
can appreciate.
7. Resource partnerships. The final test asks
whether the resources committed to the task are
sufficient. Engagement is not free; it costs. The most
obvious costs are those associated with the time and
effort of staff, faculty, and students. But they also include
curriculum and program costs, and possible limitations
on institutional choices. All of these have to be considered. Where will these funds be found? In special state
allocations? Corporate sponsorship and investment?
Alliances and strategic partnerships of various kinds with
government and industry? Or from new fee structures
for services delivered? The most successful engagement
efforts appear to be those associated with strong and
healthy relationships with partners in government,
business, and the non-profit world.

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approaches, the lack of stable funding
for engagement remains a critical
problem.

■

institutional leaders develop incentives
to encourage faculty invovlement in the
engagement effort; and

■

■

academic leaders secure stable funding
to support engagement, through reallocation of existing funds or the
establishment of a new Federal-statelocal-private matching fund;

Accountability needs to be
lodged in the right place. Of all
the challenges facing the engagement
effort, none is more difficult than
ensuring accountability for the effort.
Practically every one of the 11
portraits cites the need to examine
faculty promotion and tenure
guidelines closely to make sure
they recognize and reward faculty
contributions toward engagement.

Recommendations
The engaged institution—one that is
responsive, respectful of its partners’
needs, accessible and relatively neutral,
while successfully integrating institutional service into research and teaching and finding sufficient resources for
the effort—does not create itself.
Bringing it into being requires leadership and focus.
We believe that five key strategies
need to be put in place to advance
engagement. We recommend that:
■

our institutions transform their thinking
about service so that engagement
becomes a priority on every campus, a
central part of institutional mission;

■

each institution develop an engagement
plan measured against the seven-part
template incorporated into this
document;

■

institutions encourage interdisciplinary
scholarship and research, including
interdisciplinary teaching and learning
opportunities;

Among the significant problems
facing society today are challenges of
creating genuine learning communities, encouraging lifelong learning,
finding effective ways to overcome
barriers to change, and building greater
social and human capital in our communities.
Engagement in the form of servicelearning, outreach, and universitycommunity partnerships can help
address these problems. And it can also
put the university to work on the
practical problems of the day. In this
endeavor everyone benefits, and
students stand to gain the most. Close
partnerships with the surrounding
community help demonstrate that
higher education is about important
values such as informed citizenship and
a sense of responsibility. The newer
forms of public scholarship and community-based learning help produce
civic-minded graduates who are as well
prepared to take up the complex
problems of our society as they are to
succeed in their careers.
All of this is a lot to ask. But it is
hardly a more ambitious vision for the
21st century than Justin Morrill’s 19thcentury vision of the land-grant
university. Today, we are called on to
re-shape Morrill’s conception anew. If
we succeed, historians of the future
will continue to celebrate our contributions because we insisted that we could
do more—and we could do it better.

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of State Universities and
Land-Grant Colleges

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Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

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PREFACE
I N 1995, CONVINCED that the United States and its state and land-grant institutions
were facing structural changes as deep and significant as any in history, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges sought the support of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation for an effort to examine the future of public
higher education.
The Foundation, already funding several major institutional change initiatives,
responded to this request promptly and generously. It agreed to support a multiyear national commission to rethink the role of public higher education in the
United States and to lend its name to the effort. The first meeting of the Kellogg
Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities was held in
January 1996. The Commission’s first report, Returning to Our Roots: The Student
Experience, was issued in April of the following year; its second, Returning to Our
Roots: Student Access, was released in April 1998.
This report, Returning to Our Roots: The Engaged Institution, is the third of six
reports the Commission plans to issue during its existence. It addresses the historic
land-grant mission of outreach and argues that our institutions must redefine their
public service responsibilities as a new century dawns. Between now and the year
2000, we plan to issue three more open letters, one on the learning society, one
on campus culture, and a final summative report examining American public
higher education in the new century.
We want to thank our colleagues on the Commission for their commitment to
this assignment and the many thoughtful ways in which they shaped this letter.
Although each of the members of our Commission might individually have written
a slightly different document, all are unanimous in supporting the broad themes
and directions outlined here.

GRAHAM SPANIER (Chairman)
President
The Pennsylvania State University

DOLORES R. SPIKES (Vice-Chair)
President
University of Maryland, Eastern Shore

JOHN V. BYRNE (Executive Director)
President-Emeritus
Oregon State University

C. PETER MAGRATH
President
NASULGC

National Association
of State Universities and
Land-Grant Colleges

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Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

Returning to Our Roots

The
Engaged 1Institution
CHAPTER

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The Imperative for Engagement
W ITH A NEW century less than a year
away as this letter is released, we write
both to celebrate the contributions our
institutions have made to our society
and to call on ourselves to do more,
and to do it better.
Ours is a rich heritage of service to
the nation. More than a century and a
quarter after Justin Morrill and
Abraham Lincoln brought the concept
into being, the land-grant ideal of
public university service to community
and nation has spread across the
United States and its territories. Together, state colleges and universities
and land-grant institutions have
educated hundreds of millions of
Americans at very affordable prices.
As William C. Richardson, president
of W. K. Kellogg Foundation, acknowledged when addressing this Commission, “The land-grant ethic, which
embodies equal access to education
and service to communities, remains
one of the noble, worthy ideas in
American society.” For this discussion,
we extend the concept of the landgrant ethic beyond land-grant institutions proper—the “1862” institutions
and the historically black colleges and
universities and tribal institutions
brought into the fold in 1890 and
1994, respectively. We include every
public institution intent on meeting
community needs through teaching,
research, and service.
In pursuit of that two-fold ideal, our
institutions have provided access to
higher education at a level unparalleled in the world. They have created a
prodigious research engine that daily

pushes back the boundaries of human
knowledge. And, building on a foundation of agricultural experiment stations,
cooperative extension service, and
applied research and outreach, they
have brought the benefit of that new
knowledge to thousands of towns and
neighborhoods and millions of people
in the United States and around the
world.

A Great Tradition of
Outreach and Service
Like you, we take pride in these
accomplishments. Public institutions
have educated the lion’s share of all
four-year college degree holders in the
United States. Nearly two-thirds of all
bachelor’s degrees and nearly threequarters of all doctoral degrees are
awarded by public institutions. We
award seventy percent of the nation’s
engineering and technical degrees. We
have provided the cutting-edge skills
and highly educated workforce that
have again made the American
economy the envy of the world in
recent years. This is a remarkable
record.
We also have special bonds with our
communities, states, and regions that
are, for the most part, taken for
granted. We provide the professionals
on which our communities rely. We
train the doctors and nurses, the
teachers and administrators, the
engineers and architects, the business
leaders and public figures to whom
citizens turn in times of private and
public need. There is scarcely a sector

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Evolution of Engagement: Iowa State University
Iowa, with one-fifth of the world’s most productive
land, is one of the most agriculturally dominated states
in the nation. Its strong agrarian roots also led Iowa, in
1864, to become the first state in the nation to accept
the terms of the Morrill Act, which established the
nation’s system of land-grant universities, the first largescale effort in the world to engage higher education
with the general population.
[U]ntil the past decade, agriculture completely
dominated the state’s economy. That became painfully
clear in the middle of the 1980s, when the nation
suffered a serious recession in the agricultural sector and
Iowa’s entire economy suffered.
The ag crisis served as a catalyst for change in Iowa.
Iowa’s political leadership quickly developed a plan to
rebuild and diversify Iowa’s economy. An important part
of this plan was to use the research capacities of its
three state universities as economic development
engines. It was at this juncture that Iowa State University, in particular, as Iowa’s land-grant university, began a
more rapid move from outreach to engagement [involving economic, agricultural and rural, and academic
engagement].
Economic Engagement. The most visible evidence
of the university’s evolution from outreach to engagement is its involvement in the economic development of
Iowa.
As a result of the ag crisis of the mid-1980s, Iowa
State developed an economic development plan and

launched several new technology development and
technology transfer initiatives to support this plan, and
a significant number of these initiatives were in
non-agricultural areas. . .
Agricultural and Rural Engagement. Even with a
stronger and more diversified industrial sector, the
foundation of Iowa’s economy will continue to be
agriculture. That’s why two of the three goals of Iowa
State’s economic development plan focus on strengthening production agriculture and developing new products
and markets for Iowa’s ag commodities, which has
resulted in an increased engagement with Iowa’s agricultural sector. . .
Academic Engagement. As Iowa State University
moved from outreach to engagement in research and
outreach areas, a similar evolution of Iowa State’s
undergraduate education programs started. . . The result
has been a rapid growth in the number of undergraduate
programs and courses that engage students in real-world
activities. For example, the College of Engineering
requires all bachelor’s degree graduates to have a co-op
or internship experience. Several corporate partnerships
provide undergraduate business students with real-world
business experience. “Project Opportunity” provides
education students with partnerships with 13 area public
schools. In addition, engagement with the Iowa business
community and business people wanting to improve their
opportunities for advancement were the primary reasons
Iowa State launched its Saturday MBA program in 1992.

of society where our influence is not
felt. In health care, education, public
administration, science, agriculture, the
arts, humanities, and technological
innovation, our graduates lead the
way—and our research defines the
future. Our institutions’ commitment
to their public purpose has helped lead
the United States from an agrarian past
through the Industrial Revolution, the
Space Age, the Information Age, and
into today’s emerging Age of Telecommunications. We are the stewards of a
great tradition.

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

Land-grant institutions, designed
more than a century ago to provide a
new kind of education to suit the
needs of agricultural workers and
industrial labor, have developed that
mandate into an impressive combination of on-campus instruction, worldclass research, and off-campus outreach and service. We have remained
constant to our mandate while developing it into an instrument of national
purpose. That accomplishment remains
our signature contribution to American
life.

The Engaged Institution

Why, then, the need for change?
Who says we need to do more? And
what exactly is it that we need to do
better? The answers to these questions
lie in the many forces, internal and
external, bearing down on us. The
nature of the service required of us is
under revision, with profound implications for how we do our work and
what we consider important.

19

Rising Frustration:
A Bill of Particulars
Among the significant issues we face
is growing public frustration with what
is seen to be our unresponsiveness.
Despite our accomplishments, the
attitude is very much “What have you
done for me, lately?” In some ways,
this development is simply the latest

The Ohio State University: From Outreach to Engagement
If universities ever really existed as “ivory towers” the
drawbridges were lowered a long time ago. Even in its
inception during the 1870s and the industrial and
agrarian revolutions in middle America, Ohio State
already bore a deep responsibility to serve the people of
Ohio. A legacy of more than 300,000 living alumni
testifies to the education we have provided and the
impact our graduates are making on their communities.
And the work of our faculty and staff in our hospitals,
clinics, regional campuses, extension offices, and
industrial research programs weaves a tapestry of
partnership across our state. . .
[In the early 1990s] Ohio State, like other institutions
of higher education, needed to demonstrate that it
continued to deserve public support. Restructuring
was a part of that effort, as were improving the
student experience and focusing on quality. But we
were compelled to move the university forward by
much more than that. We needed to create a culture
shift that looked beyond our boundaries and outside
of our traditions. We needed to transform ourselves
from a land-grant university with strong outreach units
to an engaged 21st century institution—one with
living and lively collaboration with our partners in
education, business, industry, and the community. . .
Through the efforts of The President’s Council for
Outreach and Engagement, and its partners OSU CARES
and Campus Collaborative, several exciting projects and
programs have emerged including:

Campus Partners, an urban revitalization program
that unites business leaders, city officials, schools,
neighborhood residents, students, faculty, and staff in
efforts that improve the qualify of life in the university
area. . .
Outreach and Engagement Leadership
Symposium provides a campus-wide forum for
examining the role of outreach and engagement in the
21st century university. . .
Outreach and Engagement Database, now under
development, will catalog the university’s statewide,
national, and international outreach/engagement efforts
and provide institutional access to our many activities
and partnerships.
Ohio Partners and “Making a Difference” Map
are new publications highlighting the university’s
engagement activities. Distributed regularly to faculty,
staff, state officials, and the general public, they help
create awareness of the university’s many outreach and
engagement efforts.
Roads Scholars Tours give Ohio State faculty a
firsthand look at the ways the university is forging
partnerships with business, industry, and the
community. . .
These and many other initiatives are helping Ohio
State move from an institution that merely reaches out
to one that is actively and continuously involved in the
life of our communities [and] provide a structure. . . to
identify community needs and evaluate the impact of
our efforts.

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of State Universities and
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Returning to Our Roots

20

manifestation of the old complaint
about the “ivory tower,” but we think
it a mistake to dismiss it as nothing
more than that. At the root of the
criticism is a perception, fair or unfair,
that we are aloof and out of touch,
arrogant and out of date.
A wide variety of studies, reviews,
focus groups, and “visioning” activities
in recent years provide a coherent and
consistent picture of public perceptions
of the academy. This picture represents,
if you will, a “bill of particulars” to
which institutional leaders must
attend. According to these views, our
institutions are slow and unwieldy, so
intent on studying things to death that
it is impossible to get timely decisions
or responses out of them.
Part of the problem is the decentralized nature of academic governance. To
the non-academic, the university is a
near-inscrutable entity governed by its
own mysterious sense of itself. It’s
difficult to get a grip on this institution,
understand its points of leverage, and
find a way through the academic maze.
Even when we, as leaders of these
institutions, understand clearly what
we want to accomplish, we are sometimes not entirely clear on how to
proceed.
Another part of the problem is that
although society has “problems,” our
institutions have “disciplines.” According to the bill of particulars, we are so
inflexibly driven by disciplinary needs
and concepts of excellence grounded in
peer review, that we have lost sight of
our institutional mission to address the
contemporary multidisciplinary problems of the real world. Our departments, the allegation holds, are selfcontained silos, frequently bearing little
relationship to the challenges facing

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

our society. We hear complaints that
even the action-research agendas of
faculty members are so narrowly
focused, theoretical, and long-range
that they are little more than fingers in
the dike behind which are building up
vast, complex economic and social
pressures requiring immediate attention of the most practical kind.
It needs to be said that these studies
also indicate that most Americans
actually know very little about American higher education. They don’t
understand its structure or purpose,
even less how it functions or how it is
financed. But that is almost beside the
point; in today’s environment, perceptions quickly define reality. The fact is
that the public, while thinking highly
of us in many ways, has a lot of
complaints to make.
And some of the complaints have a
reasonable foundation. Without conceding the general indictment, we note
that almost all of the problems of
contemporary America require interdisciplinary solutions. They cannot be
attacked solely from the perspective of
a single discipline. And, all of us
understand that our outreach activities
are not always what they could be. In
some schools, colleges, and programs,
we often find too many disconnected
“outreach” activities. In other areas, we
have rested on our laurels. Tacitly
excusing our inattention to the problems of urban America, for example,
we point to our work in rural communities as evidence of our commitment
to outreach, overlooking indications
that many of our traditional approaches in rural areas are tired and
behind the times.
In the end, what the bill of particulars adds up to is a perception that,

The Engaged Institution

despite the resources and expertise
available on our campuses, our institutions could be better organized to bring
them to bear on local problems in a
coherent way.

Other Pressures
Meanwhile, a number of other
pressures present themselves. They
include enrollment pressures; longterm financial constraints and demands
for affordability and cost containment;
a growing emphasis on accountability
and productivity from trustees, legislators, and donors; and urgent requests
from policymakers for solutions to
national and international problems of
all kinds, the resolution of which
depends heavily on data and research
that we are in the best position to
provide.
In a seminal paper presented at a
United States Agricultural Information
Network National Conference early in
this decade, G. Edward Schuh, then
Dean of the Humphrey Institute of
Public Affairs at the University of
Minnesota, identified a number of
mega-trends affecting the public
mission of land-grant universities.1 He
cited in particular, economic change,
new developments in higher education, the changing nature of the
constituents we are called on to serve,
and the value of our basic product,
intellectual capital.
Openness of National Economies.
The new openness of national economies in an era of burgeoning international trade is one of the trends Schuh
identified. National and international
economic developments have had
profound effects on the relative

21

economic position of the United States
and on its scientific and technological
leadership, he pointed out. At the end
of World War II, America accounted for
50 percent of global GNP, and pretty
much dominated the world’s science
and technology. As the century draws
to a close, we account for about 25
percent of global GNP and our share of
global R&D continues to decline.
Should this decline in share continue,
our ability to engage productively with
our communities, states, and the
nation and the world, will doubtless
become an issue.
The Shape and Nature of Higher
Education. At the same time, the very
nature of American higher education,
its public shape, and its support mechanisms have changed radically. And
they promise to change more.
In just the last generation public
four-year higher education in the
United States has grown enormously.
The number of four-year public institutions increased dramatically and
enrollment mushroomed. Since 1965,
in fact, Americans have created an
entirely new set of public institutions
in the form of a nationwide network of
two-year community colleges.
Community colleges represent new
ventures in the outreach business.
Meanwhile, federal and state financial support is delivered increasingly
through student aid instead of institutional support. Since Schuh offered his
observations, a new factor has arrived
on the scene: Many public leaders are
expressing growing interest in alternate
forms of educational delivery, some
grounded in the profit-making sector,
others heavily reliant on the Internet
and emerging telecommunications. It is

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22

not too much to say that much of
public higher education today operates
under the shadow of privatization.
Accompanied by a steady erosion of
state funding, we have witnessed
growing public anxiety about rising
college costs. In some of our institutions, state support for our campuses
has fallen from about 80 percent of the
budget 20 years ago to 30 percent or
less today. Little wonder that a former
president of the University of Michigan, James Duderstadt, liked to joke

that he had changed his description of
his university over the years. Once,
Duderstadt said, he had described
Michigan as a state university. Then it
became a state-assisted university. Next
it was transformed into a state-related
university. Near the end of his tenure,
he quipped, he found himself describing the University of Michigan as a
state-located university.
Changes in state backing and the
new shape and nature of public higher
education itself are issues with

The Pennsylvania State University:
An Engaged Institution
Penn State, like all land-grant institutions, was created
on a foundation of active partnerships between higher
education and the agricultural community, government,
industry, and the public... Every aspect of the University’s
long-term strategic planning and budget reallocation is
informed by the valuable input received from these
constituencies. A recent statewide survey indicated that
one in every four Pennsylvanians had participated in a
Penn State program within the previous year—a
testament to the level of interaction between the
institution and its public. . .
Engagement with Business. Penn State’s history of
involvement with business and industry across the
state—through faculty connections, student internships,
trustee appointments, technology- transfer programs,
and more—has resulted in a tremendous economic
impact. Penn State research generates nearly 14,000
Pennsylvania jobs annually. The latest comparative data
rank Penn State first among public universities nationally
in industry-sponsored research. Including investments
from 379 Pennsylvania companies supporting more than
800 projects, Penn State conducted $58.3 million in such
research in fiscal 1997. . .
Engagement with Students. Penn State in recent
years has devoted considerable resources to reorganizing
its administrative structure and campus-specific program
to better serve the modern needs of students with fast-

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

track career goals, family and location constraints, and
interests in new technologies. One example of Penn
State’s concentration on the academic needs of the
communities where its campuses are based is the recent
reorganization of the Commonwealth campuses to allow
more degree programs at more locations, making it easier
for place-bound students to earn their degrees. . .
Engagement with Communities and Others. To
stress the importance of engagement with the public,
Penn State’s Faculty Senate has incorporated a measure
of faculty outreach activities in its promotion and tenure
review process. . . Penn State outreach programs serve
more than five million people. These efforts are seen by
many faculty as a logical extension of their instructional
responsibilities—part and parcel of what it means to be a
teacher. . .
Engagement with the Future. A new initiative, The
World Campus, launched this year with support from the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, reflects ambitious distance
education goals that bring instruction in some of Penn
State’s signature courses to users wherever they may be
through the Internet and other technologies for undergraduate and graduate degree work, professional
certificates, and continuing education credits.
The World Campus is just the latest initiative that
harkens back to Penn State’s historic land-grant university
status.

The Engaged Institution

23

Portland State University
Portland State University (PSU) has moved beyond
outreach and service to a campus-wide commitment to
engagement. . . [T]he institution has redesigned its
teaching, research, extension and service functions to
become more sympathetically and productively involved
with the Portland metropolitan community. . . The
engagement agenda that characterizes PSU today
emerged from. . . a confusing. . . external image and
from a series of long-term reductions in state support for
higher education. . .
There is a history in higher education and a tendency
of academics to “serve” the community by offering
resources—student help, faculty expertise, training and
classes, and so on. During recent years, that thinking has
been adjusted to a mentality of collaboration and a
vision of engagement with community. The engagement
has taken multiple forms with different loci across the
PSU campus. Those forms include community-based
teaching and learning activities; research and development efforts; program and curriculum planning; and
program implementation and offerings...
Community-based Teaching and Learning. Since
1995, the number of community-based learning courses
increased from 8. . . to 150. . . in 23 departments. . .
Those courses originated as traditional disciplinary
courses, but have been transformed by integration of
community work with a direct relation to the academic
content. . . Another form of community-based learning
takes place in senior capstone courses. The capstones
are designed as team experiences to address a significant

profound implications for our ability to
carry out our public mission. However
we measure state financial support—
adjusted for inflation, per-student
funding, or as a proportion of total
state budgets—it has declined practically everywhere in recent decades.
New Kinds of Constituents. Simultaneously, our basic constituency, our
students, is undergoing its own metamorphosis. Created to serve an agrar-

community issue or need. Faculty, students, and community partners work together to design the capstones, to
implement them and to assess them. In 1997, four pilot
capstones were initiated for development and study. In
1997–98, 1,000 seniors participated with faculty and
community partners in 50 capstones, and 70 are planned
for 1998–99. . .
Research and Development. A traditional approach
for faculty research has been to use communities as
research samples or contexts for study. Currently a
significant number of PSU faculty collaborate with
community partners in the planning and design of
research projects. Instead of research questions derived
from a disciplinary knowledge base, their questions
emerge from community issues and needs and are
supported by the knowledge base. . . From 1995 to 1998,
more than 45 such research projects were documented.
Program Offerings. Development. . . of a number of
undergraduate and graduate programs has recently been
planned and carried out in partnerships with the School
of Extended Studies. . . A striking example. . . is the
statewide Masters in Business Administration, with
campus courses distributed to 15 sites throughout
Oregon. . . Similarly, a master’s degree in curriculum and
instruction has been offered in Lincoln City, Salem, and
Hood River in cooperation with local school districts. . .
Currently, PSU’s innovative Freshmen Inquiry courses are
offered collaboratively by teaching teams with participation from neighboring school districts and community
colleges.

ian society, we exist today in an
urbanized one. Indeed, the 1990
Census indicates that a profound,
practically unnoticed, human migration occurred within the United States,
every bit as significant as the rapid
urbanization of America in the first
decades of this century. By 1990, for
the first time in our history, more
Americans lived in suburbs than in
cities. As this migration has matured,
many inner-city communities have all

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Returning to Our Roots

24

but collapsed and many rural areas
have struggled to preserve their economic and social vitality.
At the same time, the minority
proportion of the nation’s population
has grown and diversified rapidly,
women have entered the workforce in
record numbers, and the aging of the
American population has transformed
our campuses. In the face of these
developments, the relative political
importance of rural issues for campus
support has changed, the intensity of
arguments about the relevance of the
traditional liberal arts has accelerated
sharply, and the utility of a traditional
calendar, offered for the convenience
of traditional students, increasingly has
been called into question.
Intellectual Capital as an Asset.
Today, notes Schuh, the importance of
intellectual capital as an engine of
economic growth, and the consequent
need to protect it, is increasingly
recognized nationally and internationally. So in the 1990s, for the first time,
we began to see bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations begin to hang
on issues of intellectual property, while
rights to patents and the other economic fruits of the research process
begin to become an important potential
revenue stream for major research
universities.
Implications. Several implications for
our institutions and for the preparation
of our students flow out of all of this.
Schuh identified several of them.
First, there is growing pressure on
our universities for internationalization. In the face of open markets and
open economies—and the global
nature of many of the issues our

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

research addresses—it is time we faced
openly what we have always acknowledged among ourselves. Our research
needs to be global, not insular, and our
students need to be equipped to
compete in an increasingly internationalized economy.
Second, the drive for greater academic economy, for greater efficiency
and effectiveness, will continue unabated. Undoubtedly, we will be called
on to pare down further, shed a few
more pounds, and become a bit more
efficient. As financial support increasingly depends on student aid, we will
also have to become more aggressive,
both in recruiting students and in
raising funds. Most of us are already in
the midst of dealing with these new
realities.
Third, we need to do a better job of
serving our educational constituents.
We know that we have already served
them very well. We will have to do
better in the future. By constituents,
we mean our students and we mean
the various publics that support them
and us. With a more diverse and older
student population, we need a more
diversified set of educational offerings.
As people mature and move through
successive careers, we need to be there
to help them retool and retread, with
special courses and offerings available
at their convenience. Above all, we
need to reach out to our communities
with the special resources we can bring
to bear on their problems—knowledge,
technique, scholarship, and science.
New knowledge is the value we add as
the nation approaches a new century.
Research is the well from which we
draw, and the quality of that research
will determine the quality of the
contribution we can make.

The Engaged Institution

Against that backdrop, this Commission concludes that our institutions
must offer first-rate undergraduate and
graduate programs that prepare students to respond effectively to the
complex issues of the society they will
enter while promoting social responsibility and creating good citizens.
Moreover, we must directly respond to
the social and economic concerns of
the communities we serve. An
institution that responds to these

25

imperatives will be involved with its
students and community in such
meaningful ways that the students can
advance local interests while the
community relationships simultaneously improve the institution’s
educational and research missions.
Such a university may properly be
called what the Kellogg Commission
has come to think of as an “engaged
institution.”

National Association
of State Universities and
Land-Grant Colleges

26

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

Returning to Our Roots

The Engaged2Institution
CHAPTER

27

The Engaged University

I T IS TIME to go beyond outreach
and service to what the Kellogg Commission now defines as “engagement.”
By engagement, we refer to redesigned
teaching, research, and extension and
service functions that are sympathetically and productively involved with
the communities universities serve,
however community is defined.
This Commission defines engagement as something that goes well
beyond Cooperative Extension and
conventional outreach. It even goes
beyond most conceptions of public
service. Our inherited ideas emphasize
a one-way process of transferring
knowledge and technology from the
university (as the source of expertise)
to its key constituents. The engagement ideal is profoundly different;
embedded in it is a commitment to
sharing and reciprocity. By engagement
the Commission envisions partnerships, two-way streets defined by
mutual respect among the partners for
what each brings to the table.
Such partnerships are likely to be
characterized by problems defined
together, goals and agendas that are
shared in common, definitions of
success that are meaningful to both
university and community and developed together, and some pooling or
leveraging of university and public and
private funds. The collaboration arising
out of this process is likely to be
mutually beneficial and to build the
capacity and competence of all parties.
One member of our Commission got
to the heart of the matter in describing

a community needs-assessment with
which his research-intensive institution
was involved: “Our attitude is: ‘If it’s
part of the community’s agenda, we
want to think about how we can make
it part of ours.’”
Universities can make the
community’s agenda part of their own
in a number of ways. Some are administrative and managerial—perhaps
providing a single point of contact for
entering the complex modern university. Others are academic and scholarly—providing specialized technical
assistance of one kind or another to a
local community group. And most are
likely to be time-bound in some
fashion, with some issues requiring
emergency rapid responses, others
susceptible to a one-year or multi-year
commitment, others requiring longterm research agendas—with the most
complex and difficult challenges often
requiring all three.
It hardly needs to be said that
partnerships of various kinds are
uniquely embedded in our land-grant
mission and tradition. They are derived
indeed from the public purpose of our
institutions. The land-grant movement
was motivated, in part, by a recognition that public higher education
needed to attend to the problems of
the community supporting it and direct
its teaching, research, and service
toward the issues of the day. In the last
century, the problems demanding
attention were found in agriculture,
rural development, mining, engineering, and the need for military officers.

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Returning to Our Roots

28

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Established by royal charter in 1766 as Queen’s
College and the eighth oldest institution of higher
learning in the nation, Rutgers, the State University of
New Jersey, is unique in American higher education as
the only colonial college that went on to become both a
land-grant institution and a state university. . .
Rutgers is engaged with all levels of society: state and
local governments, NGOs, corporations, municipalities,
and individuals. Rutgers faculty are policy-makers,
planners, investigators, pollsters, advisers, and
communitarians tackling the challenges and problems
that shape New Jersey’s future: health care, education,
the environment, workforce, technological innovation,
lifelong learning, diversity, and economic development.
In turn, theses activities are funded from a variety of
sources including all levels of government, corporate
contracts, partnerships, private donations, university
funds, and volunteered services. . .
Organizational Issues. Like other land-grant
universities, Rutgers has grappled with organizational
issues that have an impact upon fruitful engagement.
These include the delivery of service, faculty rewards,
and resources: human, physical, and financial. While

centers, bureaus, institutes, and academic departments
have traditionally provided the essential locus or origin of
outreach activities, our experience leads us believe that
rapidly emerging societal needs may better be addressed
by alternative structures such as...flexible-team
approach[es], especially as interdisciplinary approaches to
the solution of societal challenges are becoming more
the norm.
Faculty Incentives. Faculty reward structures are also
critical to successful engagement. At Rutgers, this is
being addressed by dedicating a growing amount of
faculty compensation through the allocation of merit
awards. The awards are determined largely by the faculty
themselves with sufficient flexibility to allow academic
units to determine their own balance of teaching,
research, and service that is most appropriate to the
mission of their unit and the individual strengths of the
faculty. Although scholarship continues to be heavily
weighted in tenure decisions, Rutgers has moved in
recent years to allow increasing flexibility for other
criteria to be considered in promotions subsequent to
tenure, and for their assessment during periodic posttenure reviews.

Today the problems have changed,
but the animating impulse remains the
same: we must direct teaching, research, and service toward the challenges of contemporary society.

Changing Nature of
Engagement
We believe an engaged university
can enrich the student experience and
help change the campus culture. It can
do so by enlarging opportunities for
faculty and students to gain access to
research and new knowledge and by
broadening access to internships and
various kinds of off-campus learning

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

opportunities. The engaged institution
must accomplish at least three things:
■

It must be organized to respond to
the needs of today’s students and
tomorrow’s, not yesterday’s.

■

It must enrich students’ experiences by bringing research and
engagement into the curriculum
and offering practical opportunities
for students to prepare for the
world they will enter.

■

It must put its critical resources
(knowledge and expertise) to work
on the problems its community
faces.

The Engaged Institution

Potential Students. It is hard to find
anyone who disagrees with the proposition that lifelong learning is a
prerequisite as the United States enters
a new century and that we need to
create the conditions for maintaining a
“learning society.” The data are incontrovertible:2 part-time students are the
fastest growing population in higher
education, and most of them seek a
degree; white males will be a smaller
and smaller proportion of the U.S.
workforce; our student body is gradually becoming older; most master’s

29

degree candidates attend part-time;
and enrollment in independent study
programs is increasing. Indeed, the
data indicate that executive and
professional personnel are the largest
population group seeking job skills, in
part because the rapid development of
an economy grounded in information
and telecommunications means that
they have to struggle to stay abreast of
the latest developments.
The future looks like more of the
same: we have to be prepared to deal
with an older, more diverse, often

Engagement: A Portrait of Tuskegee University
Founded in 1881 only 16 years after the Civil War
ended, and only 40 miles from the original capital of the
Confederacy, Tuskegee University’s very establishment
was an act of engagement, which included the local
community, the State of Alabama, and private
philanthropy.
Tuskegee University is a national, independent, coeducational institution of higher learning that has an
historically unique relationship with the state of Alabama
and performs a land-grant function as a member of the
“1890 institutions.” With distinctive strengths in the
sciences, engineering and other professions, the
University’s basic mission is to provide educational
programs of exceptional quality. . .
[After the Civil War], Lew Adams, a former slave and a
local community leader, wanted a school for black
people. Col. W.F. Foster, publisher of the Macon Mail,
needed the support of black voters to win election to the
Alabama legislature. Adams promised to deliver the black
vote if Foster would [support a school].
Foster won election [and] introduced
legislation. . . authorizing $2,000 for salaries in support
of the proposed school to “train colored teachers.”
A local church provided the building, 30 adults were
recruited, and Booker T. Washington was recruited
from Hampton Institute to be the first principal.
“Engagement” was a reality. . .
When the Southern economy of the post-Civil War
era faltered, it was the genius of Dr. George Washington

Carver, who introduced crop rotation and other
scientific inventions, which revolutionized Southern
agriculture.
Thus the concept of Tuskegee as an engaged
university is indeed as old as the University itself. The
founder was particularly determined to minimize any
barriers. . . which would prevent the collective competencies of Tuskegee from being shared with the external
community. “If the people can’t come to Tuskegee, then
Tuskegee will go to the people,” Washington insisted. In
1899, Dr. George Washington Carver developed plans
for a mule-draw wagon to carry farm implements, dairy
equipment, seeds, and other items into surrounding
rural communities to demonstrate improved agricultural
methods of farming. . .
[Today], Tuskegee University continues to engage
[and] to champion the special needs of the nation’s
under-served with a focus on the challenges that face
African Americans. [K]ey recent developments
are. . . construction of the Kellogg Conference Center;
designating an associate provost to manage engagement and outreach; participation in the Southern Food
Systems Education Consortium; assisting nine Alabama
communities apply for designation as federal Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Communities; helping Macon
County establish a Community Development Corporation; and a variety of partnerships to encourage minority
students in public schools consider research and
engineering careers.

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Land-Grant Colleges

Returning to Our Roots

30

more highly educated, group of students, many of them interested in
polishing their skills through part-time
study in undergraduate, graduate, and
professional programs of study.
We simply must respond to those
demands while recognizing that the
society in which they are made has
changed dramatically. Single women
head many more American families
than they ever have before; America
became “urbanized” in the first half of
this century and “suburbanized” as it
draws to a close; job growth is fastest
in occupational groups requiring more
education; knowledge is becoming a
more important factor in work life at
the very time our labor force is aging;
job security for all workers appears to
be a thing of the past; and the older
population is working longer and
retiring later.
The implications for our institutions
are clear. Public colleges and universities, created to respond to the needs of
very young, rural white males working
in stable industries and communities,
can look to a future in which their
mission will require them to respond to
the needs of considerably older men
and women, many of them minorities,
and most of them from urban and
suburban communities in which the
outlook for employment security is
often bleak, and social civility is sometimes hard to find. These new conditions present us with a formidable new
agenda.
Preparation for Life. One of the
major premises of this report is the
conviction that an increasing proportion of our population “must constantly integrate new knowledge into
their everyday activities” in the words

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

of Mary Walshok, in Knowledge Without
Boundaries.3 She argued that in the
near future all Americans will need a
“knowledgeable base” from which to
make informed, considered judgments
in their varied roles as professionals,
citizens, and members of their families
and communities. The Commission
believes that promising ways of creating that knowledgeable base include
integrating the community into the
academic experiences of our students
and engaging our students in meaningful research.
As NASULGC’s Council on Academic
Affairs suggested to the Commission,
students are one of the principal
engagement resources every university
possesses. Developing student talents
represents one of the major contributions we make to our communities. At
the same time, our institutions need to
work harder to create and maintain
internships, practicums, and servicelearning opportunities of many kinds,
particularly for undergraduates. Such
opportunities undoubtedly help everyone involved—student, community,
and institution. Students acquire a
sense of citizenship and community
responsibility and stewardship; they
develop valuable employment skills;
and they broaden their horizons and
experiences. Community leaders, for
their part, are able to become better
informed about the institution; they
often obtain a sense of satisfaction
from helping a student develop; and
they clearly gain the benefit of the
students’ skills and expertise. For its
part, the institution is able to diversify
its repertoire of instructional approaches, improve instructional quality,
and enhance the community’s sense of
goodwill. Engagement as part of the

The Engaged Institution

student experience makes winners of
us all.
Nor should we overlook the opportunities to improve students’ exposure
to research in this service endeavor.
Problem-solving, critical thinking,
working with others, and clear communication through improved speaking, writing, and listening are all skills
polished by participating in research
activities. There should be little distinction in our minds between the benefits

31

of students participating in research
and in public service.
Putting Knowledge to Work.
Finally, the application of knowledge
is the unique contribution our
institutions can make to contemporary
society. Because we perform the lion’s
share of the basic research in this
country, new knowledge is a distinctive
thing we bring to the table.

Salish Kootenai College and the Flathead Indian
Reservation
The principal characteristics of Indian life in Bicentennial America were poverty, brevity, and illiteracy. Indian
tribes ranked last in every government measure of
employment, income, health, life expectancy, and
educational attainment. The data were shocking:

associate degrees; 55 bachelor’s degrees; 2 master’s
degrees; 0 doctoral and first-professional degrees)
■ Two research studies reported that only 40 Indians

from the Flathead Reservation earned college degrees
between 1935 and 1976.

■ Indian unemployment on reservations averaged 50

percent, with some reservations reporting 80 percent.
■ The average Indian income of $1,500 was about 25

percent of the national average.
■ Indians led the nation in health problems: hepatitis,

tuberculosis, alcoholism, suicide, accidental death, ear
disease and respiratory infections.
■ The Indian infant mortality rate was 50 percent higher

than the national average.
■ Indians had an average life span of 44 years

compared to 65 years for all Americans.
■ Less than 20 percent of all Indian adults completed

high school.
■ Only 3 percent of Indians who enrolled in college

received a degree.
■ Only 1 percent of Indian college graduates earned a

graduate degree.
■ In 1976, Montana colleges and universities conferred

degrees on 5,232 graduates; 80 were Indian (23

New tribal educational leaders and new business
leaders believe that both the Indian people on the
Flathead Reservation and the tribe as a whole would be
better served, their lives improved, and the tribe
strengthened if a tribal college were created. . .
Salish Kootenai College was established by the Tribal
Council in 1976. It appointed a Board of Directors with a
full charter of powers to carry out the development and
operation of the College. . . The College began with no
land, no budget, no classrooms, no faculty, and no
library. However, it had an advantage over existing public
and private colleges and universities: it promised to serve
the needs, and develop the talents of, Indian people on
the reservation. That promise made all the difference.
The College began to gather resources to create
instructional and support programs. It had the simple
idea that Indian people and Indian organizations knew
the degree and certificate programs that they wanted. In
addition, it decided to ask them. In the first ten years, it
completed three educational need assessments and the
data from those surveys became the degrees and
certificates that the College offered.

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Returning to Our Roots

32

In her book, Walshok discussed the
nation’s research universities and what
research can mean in such areas as
economic and community development, professional practice, workplace
improvement, and civic life and democracy in the United States. As she
points out, all fields of knowledge—
from the arts, humanities, and social
sciences to the biological and physical
sciences and professions—have undergone major transformations and
paradigm shifts as a result of new
research findings. Such developments
in new knowledge and theory continuously transform how we understand
our world and how we shape our
physical, economic, and social systems.
Here, the list of potential areas for
our engagement is endless. Hardly any
of our institutions could commit
themselves to the entire array. But
each of us can commit ourselves to
many of them, and the whole of our
efforts will far exceed the sum of the
parts. Among the issues calling for
thoughtful engagement by university
leaders we find:
The entire panoply of problems
incorporated in the phrase education
and the economy—require attention.
These issues include maintaining the
nation’s competitive edge; improving
the skills of unskilled labor and creating career ladders for entry-level
workers; developing the manufacturing
abilities of small- and medium-sized
American firms which are creating
most new jobs; improving basic educational skills; addressing the shortage of
scientists and engineers in the United
States; and improving schooling in
urban America and low-income rural
areas. Perhaps our greatest opportunity

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

to make a contribution in this whole
arena lies in improving teacher preparation on our own campuses.
The traditional mainstays of extension on our campuses, agriculture
and food, require renewed attention.
The Green Revolution sparked by our
research has helped feed the world by
hiking farm productivity to levels that
once seemed unattainable. We need a
similar Food Safety Revolution. Our
farms and food-production industries
are this nation’s greatest source of
ever-renewable wealth, but serious
problems persist on the land. The use
of fertilizers and pesticides has boosted
production but given rise to real and
growing concern about food safety and
toxicity in our soil and waterways.
America’s eating habits are changing,
as new links are discovered between
nutrition and health. Our research
agendas must engage these issues.
Our universities need to return to
their roots in rural America with
renewed energy for the new problems
of a new day. The changing economics
of family farming present new challenges for agricultural innovation and
rural economic development. Corn
prices today, for example, are basically
what they were a generation ago,
although the cost of production (and
prices for practically everything else)
have increased many times over. What
can only be understood as an economic
meltdown in many small farming
communities has been accompanied by
the collapse of social and economic
structures in many rural areas. Rural
schools have been particularly hard hit,
but their situation is but a symbol of
the frayed social fiber holding sparselypopulated areas together. The future

The Engaged Institution

33

The Great Cities Program at the University of Illinois
at Chicago
UIC’s Great Cities program expresses the university’s
commitment to direct its teaching, research, and service
programs to address urban issues in the Chicago metropolitan area. Great Cities refers to the mission of the
university as a whole, and as such encompasses work
done by hundreds of faculty and university departments.
The Great Cities concept combines the older “urban
mission” of the urban campus of the University of Illinois
with the Carnegie Commission Research I designation
that the campus achieved in 1983. The. . . concept rests
on the idea of a close relationship between research and
the issues faced by people and institutions in the metropolitan area. . .
UIC’s engagement includes virtually all aspects of
society. With a university hospital and a full complement

for small farmers is hardly promising.
Can our expertise help cushion the
landing? How can the rural economic
infrastructure be rebuilt? Finding the
will and the way to address such
challenges provides us with fresh
opportunities to deepen and extend
our roots in rural America.
Despite the nation’s massive investment in health care, an enormous
agenda remains before us. Much of it
requires additional basic research; a
great deal of it involves improving the
delivery of services. We have some
promising signs of progress, but cancer
is still not cured, AIDS remains a
frightening epidemic, and Alzheimer’s
Disease continues to rob the elderly of
their memories and their families of
peace of mind. Many other conditions—ranging from heart disease,
stroke, and blindness and deafness to
debilitating spinal cord injuries, emotional illness and depression, and

of health sciences colleges, UIC is engaged with partners
in all aspects of health and healthcare, from individual
patients to neighborhood, city and state health centers
and public agencies, to pharmaceutical corporations and
professional associations. As a partner in the Chicago
Technology Park, UIC works with city and state agencies
and other institutions. . . on issues of technology transfer.
The colleges of business and engineering have multiple
partnerships with companies ranging from Fortune 500
corporations to family- and minority-owned start-up
firms. The college of education has extensive contacts
with individual schools throughout the metropolitan
areas. . . Other colleges work with neighborhood
organizations, civic groups, government departments,
legislators, and other partners throughout the world.

infectious disease—await the cures,
insights, and treatments under development on our campuses.
It need hardly be said that we need
a new emphasis on urban revitalization and community renewal
comparable in its own way to our rural
development efforts in the last century.
Here the list of urgent issues requiring
priority attention is overwhelming:
improving the life chances of lowincome, minority families in violencewracked inner-city communities;
providing the services needed to
maintain family stability as welfare
reform requires the mothers of infants
and children to leave the home for the
workplace; replacing crumbling highways, bridges, and water and sewer
systems; rebuilding housing stock and
providing market structures to encourage minority-owned businesses;
improving public schools while maintaining access to higher education; and

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Returning to Our Roots

34

trying to find ways to make work both
available and attractive as employers
move decent jobs out of town and
many jobs abroad. The needs of urban
America, and of the poor and workingpoor families found there, present us
with a full and complete agenda that is
sobering in its scale and magnitude.
A special word is needed also on the
challenges facing children, youth,
and families in the United States.
Reported incidents of child abuse are
on the rise, and educators note small
children arriving in kindergarten
unprepared for the demands of learning. Adolescent turmoil reaches new
limits, with teenagers precociously
producing off-spring while little more
than children themselves. Youth
alienation from the larger culture can
be tracked in data about teenage use
and abuse of alcohol, cigarettes, and
other drugs. And it’s no secret that the
family itself, society’s shock absorber of
change, is in trouble. Divorce rates
soared in the 1960s and 1970s and
have remained high. Finding time for
parenting in single-parent and twoincome families is often a major cause
of stress, for both adults and children.
Research, experience, and common
sense tell us that anything we can do
to strengthen the family will pay big
dividends in the years ahead.
Finally, we need to redouble our
efforts to improve and conserve our
environment and natural resources. Major portions of the nation’s
(and the world’s) surface are befouled.
Evidence is practically everywhere
around us that our insensitivity to the
natural environment is reaching its
limits—acid rain, contaminated
groundwater, holes in the ozone layer,

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

and fisheries polluted with farm-waste
and the run-off produced by clearcutting timber and abandoning mines.
In some years, recreation and tourist
interests on both coasts have to contend with polluted beaches. The
periodic newspaper dramas about the
difficulties of disposing of nuclear
wastes have given rise to new fears of
a “mobile Chernobyl.” Sooner or later,
it seems, nature strikes back.
Tools at Hand. It must be said that we
come to this work with considerable
experience to draw on. Next to access,
outreach and service have been our
institutions’ distinctive hallmarks. In
pursuit of that service mission, our
institutions have created a remarkable
array of institutional resources and
capabilities designed to extend the
campus’s reach:
■

continuing education through
off-campus and extended degree
and credit programs, including
instructional telecommunications
and distance-education efforts
and specialized programs for
professional continuing education;

■

a number of extension activities
including Cooperative Extension
(with federal, state, and county
partners) and general extension in
the form of non-credit continuing
education and opportunities for
lifelong learning;

■

specialized outreach units of
various kinds including centers,
institutes, special programs and
conferences;

The Engaged Institution

■

agricultural experiment stations;

■

cultural and arts programming and
creating a public forum to address
community issues, including the
maintenance of public radio and
television outlets and university
broadcast services;

■

services to business and industry in
the form of specialized programming for industrial and manufacturing concerns and Small Business
Development Centers;

■

targeted on-campus academic
programs such as elderhostel and
special opportunities for children
and pre-college youth; and

■

major investments in health care
programming, including hospitals,
clinics, emergency care facilities,
and area health education centers.

To note that our universities make
major contributions to the quality of
life in many communities is simply to
acknowledge the obvious. They have
done so locally; they have done so
nationally; and they have done so
globally. Properly led, organized, and
leveraged with new technologies,
organizational structures, and delivery
models, many of these activities can
be incorporated into the building
blocks for the engaged university
of the future. In this regard, it is
important to consider how to reshape
cooperative extension so that it develops into what it has always had the
capability of becoming, a powerful
organizing center for total university
engagement.

35

A Daunting Challenge
The changing nature of the engagement agenda, in terms of our students,
their preparation, and emerging
problems, presents us with a daunting
challenge. We are under no illusions
about the difficulty of the task we have
set ourselves. Simply in terms of the
kinds of problems presented to us—in
education and the economy, agriculture and food, rural economic development, health care, the family, urban
revitalization and community renewal,
and the environment and natural
resources—an engagement agenda
might usefully be developed solely
around the domestic considerations
involved. But each of them, also, is
likely to be most fruitfully approached
if examined from an international
perspective.
In addition, the new questions
before us involve not only important
issues requiring the application of hard
data and science, but challenging, and
frequently fuzzy, problems involving
human behavior and motivation,
complex social systems, and personal
values that are controversial simply
because they are important. That is to
say, our institutions have always been
good in developing responses to
technical questions such as “How can
we help farmers grow more corn?”
But questions such as “How can we
help improve the environment?” or
“How can we improve the climate for
minority Americans?” raise much more
complicated challenges revolving
around both the organization of our
society and its economy and individual
behavior and motivation. Part of the
challenge of improving public

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Land-Grant Colleges

Returning to Our Roots

36

University of California, Davis: A Community Member
in Good Standing
The University of California, Davis, and, indeed, all
land-grant institutions, have an obligation to share
knowledge and expertise with the communities we
serve. The challenge of engagement today is to expand
the philosophy and practice of the land-grant model to
reflect the profound transition of American society from
a rural, agricultural economy to a largely urban population heavily dependent on technology and information.
Our parallel challenge is to move from a knowledge
dissemination mode more common in an earlier time to
one of engaging in mutually beneficial partnerships with
a wide variety of constituents. . .
To be fully engaged is an essential element of the
mission of UC Davis, and we are working in many ways
to live up to this concept. The following are a few
examples, of many that might be cited, of mutually
beneficial partnerships in service to society.
■ Partnership Programs with K–12 Schools. There

are more than a hundred distinct programs, in the
Division of Education as well as many other campus
academic units, which provide resources to address
critical issues in California’s public schools. . .
■ Planning for Regional Economic Development

and Growth. UC Davis is working with partners in
the cities and counties of the Sacramento region in a
variety of ways to create a positive vision of our

regional future. In particular, the University works with
Valley Vision (the Chancellor is a member of its board
of directors), a regional coalition of business, academic, and community groups created to address
issues of regional growth and development. . .
■ Human Corps. This program promotes student

involvement in community service and provides a
liaison between students and agencies needing
assistance. Projects range from short-term to longterm and include. . . teaching adults how to read,
adopting a grandparent, or working in a community
health clinic.
■ UC Davis Medical Center Clinics. UC Davis medical

students and physicians make significant contributions
to the health of under-served populations, particularly
in the Sacramento urban area, through their volunteer
work at community clinics. . .
■ University in the Library. California’s small towns

and rural areas support local public libraries that
represent a significant network of learning opportunities. This network is now being enriched by a new
partnership [involving] the California State Library and
UC Davis. Faculty speakers travel to community
libraries. . . to give presentations on topics. . . of
particular interest in the community.

education, promoting rural economic
development, or encouraging urban
renewal lies in the complexity and
value-laden nature of the issues
involved. These issues raise difficult
questions, and the answers to them are
likely to be even harder to find.
In each of these target areas and
others, our institutions must pay
particular attention to the special and
distinctive needs of low-income urban
and rural communities. It will not be
good enough for us to point to a
success here and there in communities

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

that would have found a way to
succeed anyway. The true measure of
our accomplishment depends on
developing and replicating successful
strategies for communities which have
all but abandoned hope for their
future.
However approached, none of the
agendas outlined above will be carried
to completion by the faint of heart.
They will not be solved with simplistic
slogans from public officials; they will
not yield to the public relations blandishments of the private sector; and

The Engaged Institution

they will not respond to wishful
thinking inside or outside the academic
community. Each of them will require

37

the best efforts of us all—and the
courage, conviction, and commitment
to see them through.

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of State Universities and
Land-Grant Colleges

38

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

Returning to Our Roots

The Engaged3Institution
CHAPTER

39

From Theory to Action
Reflections on Institutional Portraits
M AKING ENGAGEMENT REAL on our
campuses will require broad strategies
to identify community needs, catalogue
community resources, highlight academic strengths and capacities, and
coordinate the work of many individuals and groups, frequently over long
periods of time. There are no quick
fixes or painless solutions for many of
the challenges our states and communities face.
The Commission is convinced that
universities and colleges can no longer
be self-contained. Engagement essentially asks us to learn how to open
ourselves structurally to external
influence while insisting that the world
beyond the campus grounds respect
the imperatives of the university. This
will not be an easy balance to master.
Achieving it will require us to seriously
explore:
■

the role of engagement within the
university mission so that it is seen
both as a central purpose and as a
means of enhancing the student
experience;

■

the organizational dimensions of
engagement so that success does
not have to depend on serendipity,
individual influence, or a
charismatic leader;

■

the reward and benefits structure
for faculty and staff (and students),
and the possibility of incorporating
“engagement” into that structure;
and

■

a variety of tools for financing
engagement in the midst of constraints on resources.

Institutional Portraits
Because no established body of
research could be tapped to explore the
degree to which institutions are engaged on a national basis, the Commission encouraged its member institutions to develop exploratory portraits
of their engagement activities. The
purpose of developing these portraits
was to characterize the varieties of
outreach and engagement that now
exist in order to describe how engagement can evolve and develop. All told,
11 Commission institutions provided us
with portraits, excerpts from which
appear throughout this document. The
portraits, in their entirety, are reproduced in a companion volume to this
report.
We hoped that these descriptions
would not only assess the impact and
scope of involvement with the broader
community but also yield an approach
that any institution might use to
evaluate both the extent of its engagement and how public service is incorporated into its mission and the work
of its faculty, staff, and students.
The complete institutional portraits
are provided in a companion volume.
Here we comment on several lessons
we draw from the portraits and offer a
seven-part test against which state
university and land-grant leaders

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Land-Grant Colleges

Returning to Our Roots

40

can assess their progress toward
engagement.
Institutional leaders who want to
push beyond the seven-part test
outlined below might do well to assess
themselves against Appendices C and
D. Appendix C reproduces the 1997
matrix of “levels of commitment to
service” recently published by Barbara
Holland.4 In addition, to measure the
scope and impact of various aspects of
engagement, we modified another
1997 assessment approach developed
around the health professions by
Sherril Gelmon at Portland State
University.5 This approach (included in
Appendix D) is thought to be unique
for its attention to the impacts of
engagement on all participants,

including students, faculty, academic
units, the institution, and community
participants.

Themes Revealed
Several common themes or lessons
emerge from these portraits. These
include:
■

A clear commitment to the
basic idea of engagement. Our
portraits reveal a set of institutions
determined to breathe new life
into their historic mission by going
beyond extension to engagement.
Whether the situation involves the
Great Cities Program of the University of Illinois at Chicago, rural

Arizona State University
Arizona State University is the only public research
university in metropolitan Phoenix, a city of 2.7 million
people constituting 62 percent of the state’s population,
in one of the fastest growing regions of the country. In
preparation for that growth, ASU is “one university
geographically distributed” with three anchor campuses
and an extended campus designed to respond to local
needs, national trends and opportunities. Enrollment at
ASU’s multiple campuses stood at 49,500 in the fall of
1997, and is expected to increase to 75,000 by 2015. . .
ASU has proceeded on the assumption that “engagement” and “partnerships” mean that we are not guests
or occasional participants in the leading policy arenas of
metropolitan Phoenix, our primary service area. Rather,
we see our role as full-fledged, continuing partners
bringing what we can to the table, fully cognizant that
our contributions must be made in conjunction with the
other major partners from the community. We view our
contributions as those that are unique to the expertise
and mission of the university. . .
Choosing the activities in which the University will
engage on a sustained basis occurs in three ways. First,
we focus on the community-driven agenda, drawing

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

heavily on the issues identified through community
processes. Currently, involvement with K–12. . . , urban
growth management, and environmental quality are at
the top of the list.
Second, we continue to develop a longer-term university/community agenda, but one we seek to sustain over a
longer period of time. A long-term commitment to
strengthening neighborhoods, “building them from the
inside out” as one school of thought described it, is an
example of one of our longer-term university-identified
endeavors.
Finally, we encourage and seek to focus the myriad of
individually initiated research and service projects that
relate to our metropolitan area. We recently identified
300 such projects in one college alone and conservatively
estimate that activities across the entire university double,
if not treble, this number. These activities range from
seven-figure, multi-year projects, run by one of our major
public policy institutes, to small one-faculty, one-group
projects. The nature of the activities in each of these three
general areas involve University contributions of basic
research, application of strategy and techniques, measures
of assessment, technical assistance and formal instruction.

The Engaged Institution

41

The University of Vermont and the Community:
The Path to Engagement
Throughout its history, the University of Vermont
(UVM) has managed a creative and somewhat paradoxical conflict between its original identity as a private
institution (1791) and its land-grant mission (1865). In its
1988 mission statement, UVM describes itself as a small
land-grant comprehensive institution that “blends the
academic heritage of a private university with the service
mission in the land-grant tradition.”. . .
[In the 1990s] Vermont legislators and many campus
faculty and administrators continued to voice their belief
that UVM should remain loyal to its Vermont constituents and insisted that the University needed to attend to
its stated mission of public service. . .
[M]any faculty at UVM still assume that the land-grant
mission is confined to the limited number of academic
programs originally affiliated with the State Agricultural
College. . . A land-grant mission is better described as a
state of mind rather than a definition of particular forms
of interaction or particular areas of disciplinary emphasis.
Drawing upon both the traditions of the land-grant
movement and contemporary criticism of the land-grant
university today, UVM has begun to use the term
“engaged university” to describe the features of an
institution committed to service to society. The principles
[include]:
■ The primary purposes of the 21st century engaged

university are to conduct research on the pressing

economic development efforts
launched by Iowa State University,
or the Southern Food Systems
Education Consortium involving
Tuskegee University, the thread
holding them together is a common commitment to staying in
touch with needs of real communities. There is no sense in these
descriptions of an academic ivory
tower, distant from the needs of
the real world. Quite the contrary,

problems facing society today, to promote the
application of current knowledge. . . , and to prepare
its students to address these problems. . .
■ Scholarly work consists of discovery, integration of

new knowledge into an existing discipline or body of
knowledge, interpretation to a variety of audiences
and application of knowledge to a variety of
contemporary problems. . .
■ The classic tripartite mission of research, instruction,

and service must encompass a broader and richer
definition of scholarship that supports a full range of
inquiry and application both within the. . .
environments created by the university and in field,
community and other applied settings.
■ [T]he engaged university is distinguished by the

comprehensiveness of its academic mission and its
range of graduate and undergraduate programs and
by the effective integration of scholarship and service
within both the curriculum and the research
mission. . .
■ [T]hrough intensive study of a particular discipline at

the undergraduate as well as graduate level, as well
as by participating in research or field experiences and
service-learning opportunities. . . , our students can
learn to discover, interpret, and apply the knowledge
necessary to address the challenges of society today.

what emerges clearly is a portrait
of institutions struggling mightily
with how best to work with their
communities, i.e., how to engage
them.
■

Strong support for infusing
engagement into curriculum
and teaching mission. These
examples also portray institutions
wrestling with broader concepts of
outreach and service and

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42

struggling to infuse engagement
into the life of the institution and
its curriculum. At Ohio State
University, the challenge was to
define a common language so that
engagement could be identified as
part of the teaching, research, and
service mission of the university.
The Great Cities program at
University of Illinois at Chicago
encourages the notion that academic work transcends the artificial barriers implied by categories
such as teaching, research, and
service. Portland State uses its
engagement thrust to support
community-based teaching and
learning, and effort involving some
150 courses in 23 departments as
well as 1,000 seniors participating
in community-based “capstone”
courses on local issues. Practically
every one of the eleven institutions points to interdisciplinary
efforts as an important element in
their engagement agenda.
■

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

Remarkable diversity in
approaches and efforts. We
were doubtless naive to anticipate
we might discern a common
pattern in all these efforts. The
portraits are marked by a diversity
of efforts. The University of California at Davis mounts more than
one hundred education initiatives
from its campus. Salish Kootenai
College explicitly sets out to
address the startling rates of
poverty, illiteracy, mortality and
morbidity among the Salish and
Kootenai Tribes on Montana’s
Flathead Reservation. And institutional engagement has been built
into the strategic planning process

at Rutgers, which uses four criteria
to evaluate strategic planning
initiatives: excellence; centrality to
mission; diversity; and responsiveness
to emerging societal needs. Penn State
thinks of itself as simultaneously
engaged with the business community, students, the state, its alumni,
and even the world, through its
World Campus designed to provide
some of the university’s signature
courses over the Internet.
In the end, designing engagement is a local activity. It cannot
be handed down from on high.
But viewed from the ground level
of the institution and its partners,
the scope and diversity of efforts is
impressive.
■

The importance of defining
“community.” Each of these 11
institutions is working with several
different communities in many
different ways. Engagement at
Portland State is intensely related
to its host city’s vision of what the
local community needs for the
future. What emerges from the
portrait submitted by the University of Vermont is a clear consensus that research and scholarship
need to be put to work on behalf
of the citizens of the state. Penn
State and Tuskegee consciously
extend their concept of “community” to the international stage,
particularly international agriculture. Moreover, as several of the
portraits make clear, different parts
of the local community need to be
understood and engaged on their
own terms. Large structured
systems, such as the local health
care community or municipal

The Engaged Institution

43

the university requires a particular
form of academic leadership calling
on presidents, provosts, deans, and
department chairs who are open to
new ideas, eager to hear new
voices, and comfortable amidst the
often-conflicting demands of
different community partners.
Engagement will not develop by
itself, and it will not be led by the
faint of heart.

government, probably have at least
some clear entry points into the
university; community-based
organizations, on the other hand,
probably require help in negotiating the complex modern university. Community, in brief, has
many different definitions extending from the neighborhood in
which the campus is located to the
world.
■

Leadership is critical. Because
universities are, in the terms of
some organizational theorists,
“organized anarchies,” leadership
to create an engagement agenda is
crucial. Left to their own devices,
most faculty members (and their
departments) will bend their
attention to the daily preoccupations of research and teaching,
satisfying “service” requirements
with a campus or faculty committee of one kind or another. “Engagement” to the extent it is
thought of at all, will be left to the
extension division. Reforming that
entire mind-set requires leadership,
and it can come from many
sources. The University of Illinois’
chancellor initiated the great cities
concept and saw to it that his
management team served as its
champion. Political leaders in Iowa
supported Iowa State in an initiative in agricultural biotechnology
to help diversify the state’s
economy; a similar economic
development role at Arizona State
is played by business and municipal leaders through groups such as
Greater Phoenix Leadership and
the Greater Phoenix Economic
Council. Whether the leadership is
from within or without, engaging

■

Funding is always an issue.
Despite the existence of the remarkable variety of funding
approaches described in Chapter
Two, the lack of stable funding for
engagement activities remains a
problem. Institutions have attacked
the difficulty in several ways.
Some institutions (e.g., Salish
Kootenai) make a strong case that
a major part of their engagement
simply involves financing the
education of low-income, minority
students to address community
problems. Others have sought and
gained special allocations (onetime or recurring) for specific
engagement activities. For example, Iowa State has received
special state support for its
agricultural biotechnology effort;
Portland State has successfully
sought funds from the philanthropic community; Arizona State
funds its engagement endeavors
from a combination of internal
university funds, government
grants of various kinds, and
partnerships with the private
sector where they make sense.
Finding the funds for engagement,
and securing them in a stable way,
remains a difficult problem.

National Association
of State Universities and
Land-Grant Colleges

Returning to Our Roots

44

■

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

Accountability needs to be
lodged in the right place.
Of all the challenges facing the
engagement effort, none is more
difficult than ensuring accountability for the effort. Here again
there are no templates. The department is perhaps the right
place, but just as engagement,
university-wide, should not be the
responsibility solely of extension
agents, so too, in departments, it
cannot be a responsibility
restricted to one or two faculty
members. The effort to encourage

accountability must see to it that
student needs are served, the
quality of community life (however defined) is enhanced, and
that engagement flows out of the
university’s basic mission of teaching and research. In this context,
incentives for motivating faculty
involvement must be put in place.
Practically every one of the 11
portraits cites the need to examine
faculty reward guidelines closely to
make sure they recognize and
reward faculty contributions
toward engagement.

The Engaged Institution

45

A Seven-Part Test
Seven guiding characteristics seem to define an
engaged institution. They constitute almost a seven-part
test of engagement.
1. Responsiveness. We need to ask ourselves
periodically if we are listening to the communities,
regions, and states we serve. Are we asking the right
questions? Do we offer our services in the right way at
the right time? Are our communications clear? Do we
provide space and, if need be, resources for preliminary
community-university discussions of the public problem to
be addressed. Above all, do we really understand that in
reaching out, we are also obtaining valuable information
for our own purposes?
2. Respect for partners. Throughout this report we
have tried to emphasize that the purpose of engagement
is not to provide the university’s superior expertise to the
community but to encourage joint academic-community
definitions of problems, solutions, and definitions of
success. Here we need to ask ourselves if our institutions
genuinely respect the skills and capacities of our partners
in collaborative projects. In a sense we are asking that we
recognize fully that we have almost as much to learn in
these efforts as we have to offer.
3. Academic neutrality. Of necessity, some of our
engagement activities will involve contentious issues—
whether they draw on our science and technology, social
science expertise, or strengths in the visual and performing arts. Do pesticides contribute to fish kills? If so, how?
How does access to high quality public schools relate to
economic development in minority communities? Is
student “guerrilla theater” justified in local landlordtenant disputes. These questions often have profound
social, economic, and political consequences. The
question we need to ask ourselves here is whether
outreach maintains the university in the role of neutral
facilitator and source of information when public policy
issues, particularly contentious ones, are at stake.
4. Accessibility. Our institutions are confusing to
outsiders. We need to find ways to help inexperienced
potential partners negotiate this complex structure so that
what we have to offer is more readily available. Do we
properly publicize our activities and resources? Have we
made a concentrated effort to increase community
awareness of the resources and programs available from
us that might be useful? Above all, can we honestly say

that our expertise is equally accessible to all the constituencies of concern within our states and communities,
including minority constituents?
5. Integration. Our institutions need to find way to
integrate their service mission with their responsibilities
for developing intellectual capital and trained intelligence. Engagement offers new opportunities for integrating institutional scholarship with the service and
teaching missions of the university. Here we need to
worry about whether the institutional climate fosters
outreach, service, and engagement. A commitment to
interdisciplinary work is probably indispensable to an
integrated approach. In particular we need to examine
what kinds of incentives are useful in encouraging faculty
and student commitment to engagement. Will respected
faculty and student leaders not only participate but also
serve as advocates for the program?
6. Coordination. A corollary to integration, the
coordination issue involves making sure the left hand
knows what the right hand is doing. The task of coordinating service activities—whether through a senior
advisor to the president, faculty councils, or thematic
structures such as the Great Cities Project or “capstone”
courses—clearly requires a lot of attention. Are academic
units dealing with each other productively? Do the
communications and government relations offices
understand the engagement agenda? Do faculty, staff,
and students need help in developing the skills of
translating expert knowledge into something the public
can appreciate.
7. Resource partnerships. The final test asks
whether the resources committed to the task are
sufficient. Engagement is not free; it costs. The most
obvious costs are those associated with the time and
effort of staff, faculty, and students. But they also include
curriculum and program costs, and possible limitations
on institutional choices. All of these have to be considered. Where will these funds be found? In special state
allocations? Corporate sponsorship and investment?
Alliances and strategic partnerships of various kinds with
government and industry? Or from new fee structures
for services delivered? The most successful engagement
efforts appear to be those associated with strong and
healthy relationships with partners in government,
business, and the non-profit world.

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of State Universities and
Land-Grant Colleges

Returning to Our Roots

46

RECOMMENDATIONS
Maintaining institutional commitment for engagement strategies that
meet the seven-part test is far from
easy. The engaged institution—one
that is responsive, respectful of its
partners’ needs, accessible and relatively neutral, while successfully
integrating institutional service into
research and teaching and finding
sufficient resources for the effort—does
not create itself. Bringing it into being
requires leadership and focus.
We believe that five key strategies
need to be put in place to advance
engagement:

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

■

Our institutions must transform
their thinking about service so that
engagement becomes a priority on
every campus, a central part of
institutional missions.

■

Each institution should develop an
engagement plan.

■

That plan should encourage
interdisciplinary scholarship and
research, including interdisciplinary
teaching and learning opportunities.

■

It should also provide incentives to
encourage faculty involvement in
the engagement effort.

■

Stable and secure funding must be
found to support the engagement
agenda.

I. Make Engagement a
Priority on Every Campus
WE RECOMMEND that institutional
leaders work to make engagement such a
priority that it becomes part of the core
mission of the university.
As one of the members of this
commission noted during an academic
inauguration, the measure of an
educated person is defined as much by
what that person can do (and has the
will to do) as by what that person
knows and by how much he or she
genuinely notices and cares about the
consequences of his or her actions. This
applies to our students and to our
faculty members. And it applies to our
scholars and to our collective work as a
community of scholars. “Something is
lost when we separate knowledge and
responsibility.”6
What we have in mind is literally
the substitution of the term “engagement” for the word “service.” But the
change we seek is much more than
simply rhetorical. We hope to change
institutional realities as well. Engagement must become part of the core
mission of the university.
In this effort, the Commission
believes that institutions must be held
to very high standards. All existing
service and outreach activities must be
examined to see if they are truly
“engagement” as the Kellogg Commission understands it, i.e., two-way
partnerships, reciprocal relationships
between university and community,
defined by mutual respect for the
strengths of each.
We emphasize that in the past
service and outreach have often been
defined as the manifestation of the
land-grant mission, but that

The Engaged Institution

manifestation has been attached to a
limited number of fields, primarily in
agricultural colleges and through
extension services. This attitude must
change. The land-grant philosophy of
knowledge harnessed to responsibility
can be applied in various ways to
practically every academic unit. And it
can be used to shape and refine undergraduate education and graduate and
professional programs, as well as what
research is conducted and how it is
pursued and disseminated.
Engagement must become part of
the core missions of our institutions.
We will know we have succeeded
when faculty and students at our
institutions understand that the landgrant concept is more a state of mind
than it is a practical definition of
particular forms of interacting with our
communities or special offices responsible for managing the relationships.

47

These plans should be explicitly
designed to assess and monitor each of
the seven areas: responsiveness; our
willingness to collaborate respectfully
with the communities we serve; our
capacity for maintaining our role as
neutral facilitators; access to our
complex institutions; integrating
scholarship with outreach, service, and
engagement; coordination of the
engagement agenda; and the adequacy
of resources committed to the task.
Among the questions we need to
explore in developing this plan:
■

Are we asking the right questions
and offering our services in the
right way and at the right time?

■

Do we understand that we have as
much to learn from our partners
as they do from us?

■

How do we maintain our capacity
to advance the public interest
while maintaining our reputation
for neutral facilitation.

■

Are members of the public able to
negotiate our often-complex
structures relatively easily?

■

Does the institutional climate
foster outreach, service, and
engagement?

■

Does the left hand on campus
know what the right one is doing?

■

How do we plan to fund this
effort? And are the resources
allocated to it sufficient?

II. Develop Plans for
Engagement
WE RECOMMEND that institutional
leaders develop plans for engagement, plans
that recognize engagement is not something
separate and distinct from the university but
part of its core mission.
A transformation of attitudes toward
engagement of the sort sought by the
Commission will not create itself.
Planned, purposeful effort will be
required to bring it into being.
To that end, the Commission recommends that institutional leaders,
including presidents, chancellors,
provosts, and deans develop specific
institutional plans to advance engagement measured against the template
laid out in the seven-part test included
on page 29.

To be sure, developing such a plan
will be challenging. But time and
trouble invested in the effort at the

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48

front end will pay significant dividends
down the line.

III. Encourage
Interdisciplinary Work
WE RECOMMEND that institutional
leaders find new ways of encouraging
interdisciplinary research, teaching and
learning as part of the engagement agenda.
It need hardly be pointed out that
the struggle to develop the engaged
institution will be won or lost in the
motivations of faculty, staff, and
students and the incentives available to
them. Simply put, if we find ways to
evaluate and reward engagement, we
will have it; if we do not, we will not.
Scholarship grounded in individual
disciplines has been one of the signal
contributions our institutions have
made to the world. Disciplinary-bound
scholarship and research, moreover,
will continue to be among our hallmarks. But, as we noted earlier, society
has problems while we, for the most
part, value our disciplines.
It is clear that attacking most of
today’s technical and scientific problems, not to mention the nation’s
serious social challenges, will require
cross-disciplinary collaboration and
scholarship. In fact, research at the
leading edge already acknowledges this
reality in many areas. Biology and
chemistry are hard distinctions to
maintain at the cutting edge of today’s
science. And it’s difficult to know
where to assign many of the researchers examining today’s challenges to
urban and rural America—economics,
sociology, or geography.
But research funding mechanisms
have yet to catch up to this reality. For

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

the most part, research dollars flow
from public agencies constrained by
the same discipline-bound outlook we
find on campus. It is time public and
academic leaders created some seed
capital to encourage more interdisciplinary research.
To that end, we suggest that institutional leaders plan on developing
funding for interdisciplinary research
and that public officials at the national
and state levels place some weight
behind their commitment to interagency collaboration and cooperation
by establishing similar funds.
Academic researchers will pursue
research opportunities wherever they
are found. If funds are not available to
support interdisciplinary research,
researchers will seek funds along the
traditional disciplinary lines. If, on the
other hand, interdisciplinary support
becomes available, they will undoubtedly seek it.

IV. Create New Incentives to
Advance Engagement
WE RECOMMEND that institutional
leaders develop incentives to encourage
faculty and student participation in the
engagement agenda.
Research and scholarship obviously
mean discovering new knowledge. But
we must also find ways to reward the
scholar who steps back from her
investigation or his contributions to a
scholarly audience in his discipline and
looks for ways to put that knowledge
to work. Too often, despite our best
efforts, we think of teaching, research,
and service as separate—and, when
counting what is important in
compensation and tenure reviews, tend

The Engaged Institution

to overemphasize peer judgments
about the importance of research at the
expense of student or community
judgments about the importance of
teaching and engagement.
Two separate and intertwined
challenges confront us here. We need
to find ways to reward individual
faculty members for their contributions
to engagement. We also need to think
about how departments can make
engagement a part of their collective
responsibility and how the institution
can encourage greater collaboration
and involvement across departments
and disciplines.
As Ernest Lynton, Richard Chait,
Ernest Boyer and other academic
leaders have pointed out, thinking
about this dual challenge of providing
individual and collective incentives to
encourage engagement inevitably
brings us to shared governance.7 The
sharing of decision making with faculty
is a distinctive administrative feature of
our institutions. Ideally, faculty participate in decision making in a collaborative way that helps integrate individual
faculty contributions into the collective
purposes of our institutions.
These academics argue that collaborative task-setting must be accompanied by collective accountability, on a
regular basis. Such an approach,
according to Lynton, requires that both
individuals and academic units assume
responsibility for holding up their ends
of the bargain. It calls for a new kind of
institutional flexibility that permits
assigning different profiles of activities
to different faculty members (in the
same department and across departments). It insists that it is time to redefine scholarship to create a parity or
equivalence between teaching,

49

research, and professional service
because each of these is a special form
of scholarship. And it suggests that
engagement as defined in these terms
is not simply a defensive reaction to
external pressures but a highly positive
step toward re-establishing what the
university is intended to be, a
community of scholars.
By the same token, as the portraits
point out, universities committed to
the engagement ethic have found any
number of innovative ways to encourage student participation. Internships,
co-op experiences, team-learning
activities, and capstone courses—all of
these and more offer students the
incentives they need to participate in
service-learning opportunities.
Finally, we point out that providing
greater balance in incentive structures
to encourage engagement not only
requires support from faculties on
individual campuses but also more
encouragement from accrediting
agencies and various disciplinary
bodies. We want to note, moreover,
that an engaged university cannot be
brought into being with a “service”
requirement in tenure and compensation reviews that can be met solely
through service to campus committees
or to disciplinary organizations. Service
to campus and discipline is important.
But if engagement means anything at
all, it reaches beyond the campus and
the disciplines that shape it.

V. Secure Stable and Secure
Funding.
WE RECOMMEND that institutional
leaders and higher education associations
seek secure funding streams to support
engagement activities, perhaps through

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50

internal re-allocation of funds or through
establishment of a federal-state-local-private
matching fund.
Universities across the nation have
been involved with their communities
in various ways for a century or more.
In the course of these efforts they have
developed a number of ways of financing their activities that can be adapted
to the new engagement agenda. These
include:

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

■

Fee-based professional updating,
credentialing, and flexible degree
programs.

■

University-industry partnerships of
various kinds, including industrial
and corporate-affiliate programs.

■

Membership and subscriber-based
programs addressing significant
community needs and diverse
communities of interest, including
technology networks, smallbusiness incubators, information
and distance-learning services, and
a number of affiliate programs in
such things as arts, science, and
cultural programming for the
general public.

■

Contract-based work with public
and private entities for applied
research and for specialized education and training services.

■

Student field studies, community
projects, service-learning activities
and a wide variety of internships.

■

Licensing, patenting, copyrighting,
and commercializing intellectual
property.

Of all of them, the greatest promise
of increased financial support lies in
developing and extending new kinds of
partnerships between universities and
public agencies, and universities and
the private sector.
The Need for Stability. We note that
our institutions’ history of outreach
was encouraged from the outset by
explicit decisions to put public funds
behind the service mission. That
historic commitment by public officials
has eroded in recent years. Three
factors appear to be at work. In the
first place, the sheer political importance of rural issues has diminished as
populations have shifted in the United
States. In consequence, rural issues
often appear to be of less policy
consequence. Finally, the shift to
categorical funding at the expense of
broad institutional support has eroded
our ability to support outreach and
engagement.
Regardless of the causes, what we
find is that as the need and demand for
services has increased, the federal
commitment has either diminished or
been maintained in an on-again, offagain fashion. Sometimes, as with the
Department of Commerce’s manufacturing extension program, the need to
support outreach appears well understood. In other cases we find trivial
amounts of money put into special
funds for academic outreach for rural
and inner-city America. Across the
board, we find extension and
programs in the Department of
Agriculture constrained and squeezed.
There is little consistency and even
less coherence across government in
its willingness to support engagement.

The Engaged Institution

We believe it is time to breathe new
life into the government’s historic
commitment to outreach. One thing is
clear: our institutions cannot long
sustain a broad-based engagement
strategy in the conditions characterizing the current environment.
The place to start is by thinking
about how to re-allocate internal
funds. Many existing sources of funds
for service and outreach can be examined to see if they might serve as
suitable sources of support for the
larger engagement mission defined
here.
Next, we need to think about how
to stabilize public support for engagement. Then our institutions and their
governmental partners need to develop
and stand behind new principles to
guide this institutional/government
partnership. We want to suggest that
one way to move forward would be to
adapt the approach originally used to
finance community college construction, one that required the federal
government, states, and localities each
to provide one-third of the funding.
In similar fashion, instead of relying
solely on federal funds, a financing
mechanism for engagement might be
one in which a modest fund was
created at the national level to encourage state, local, and private support,
which would be matched on a one-forone basis. The truth is that such a
financing mechanism merely recognizes what is already in place in the
cooperative extension system, a significant engagement network. Cooperative
extension embodies a tripartite funding
approach of federal, state, and local
funding, complemented with public
and private grants and fee-for-service
arrangements. This time-tested match-

51

ing fund model can potentially be
expanded to match a broader university mission of engagement that serves
the multiple needs of many communities and their diverse clienteles.

Results We Can Expect
Among the significant problems
facing society today are challenges of
creating genuine learning communities, encouraging lifelong learning,
finding effective ways to overcome
barriers to change, and building greater
social and human capital in our
communities.
Engagement in the form of servicelearning, outreach, and universitycommunity partnerships can help
address these problems. And it can also
put the university to work on the
practical problems of the day. In this
endeavor, everyone benefits.
Our communities benefit through
the development of a highly skilled
workforce, one that is capable of
renewing its “knowledgeable base”
throughout its life. They also obtain
the latest science and scholarship
applied to their very real and very
practical problems. Moreover our
graduates constitute a renewable
resource of young leaders skilled in
analyzing complicated, value-laden
problems, good citizens with a sense
that they need to “give something
back” to their communities.
Our institutions benefit as much, if
not more. An engaged institution is a
learning community, one that encourages effective learning in environments
characterized by close and caring
relationships among faculty, students,
and staff (and community), and
successful alliances with community

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Land-Grant Colleges

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52

organizations. Above all, our institutions daily build a constituency ready
to step forward and defend the campus
against the charge that it is aloof and
out of touch. Improved town-gown
relationships are not to be dismissed as
an important by-product of the engaged institution.
Finally, our students stand to gain
the most. Close partnerships with the
surrounding community help demonstrate that higher education is about
important values such as informed
citizenship and a sense of responsibility. The newer forms of public scholarship and community-based learning
help produce civic-minded graduates

who are as well prepared to take up
the complex problems of our society as
they are to succeed in their careers.
All of this seems a very tall order,
perhaps. But it is hardly a more ambitious vision for the 21st century than
Justin Morrill’s 19th-century vision of
a new kind of university that would
open access beyond the favored few
and make knowledge useful to
everyone. Today, we are called on to
reshape Morrill’s conception anew. If
we succeed, historians of the future
will continue to celebrate our
contributions because we insisted that
we could do more—and we could do it
better.

NOTES
1 G. Edward Schuh, “Political and Social Trends Affecting the 1860 Land-Grant
Institutions,” Journal of Agricultural and Food Information. Vol. 1 (1), 1993.
2 For an excellent compilation of data on lifelong learning, see: Gehres, Edward D. III,
(ed.), Lifelong Learning Trends: A Profile of Continuing Higher Education (Fifth Edition).
Washington: University Continuing Education Association, 1998.
3 Mary Lindenstein Walshok, Knowledge Without Boundaries: What America’s Research
Universities Can Do for the Economy, the Workplace, and the Community San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1995.
4 Barbara Holland, “Analyzing Institutional Commitment to Service,” Michigan Journal of
Community Service Learning (pp 30–41, Vol. 4, Fall 1997).
5 Sherril Gelmon et al., Health Professions Schools in Service to the Nation: 1996–1997
Evaluation: Portland State University, August 1997.
6

Judith A. Ramaley, “Inaugural Remarks,” University of Vermont, 1997.

7 See for example, Ernest A. Lynton, “Reversing the Telescope: Fitting Individual Tasks to
Common Organizational Ends.” AAHE Bulletin, March 1998, pp. 8–10.

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on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

The Engaged Institution

53

APPENDIX A ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T HE C OMMISSION WANTS to express its
gratitude for the contributions of many
individuals and organizations whose
assistance made this report possible.
Our first acknowledgment goes to
the board and officers of the W. K.
Kellogg Foundation for their support of
the Commission. In particular, we want
to thank the President of the Foundation, William Richardson, for his
commitment to this effort. Trustee
Wenda Weekes Moore was a faithful
and hard-working member of the
Commission’s National Advisory
Committee and Richard Foster and Gail
Imig from the Foundation’s staff were
tireless and committed friends of the
Commission.
Next we want to note the contributions of a subcommittee which guided
the development of this report under
the leadership of Martin Jischke of
Iowa State University. The members of
the subcommittee, including Judith A.
Ramaley (University of Vermont), Peter
S. Hoff (University of Maine), Benjamin F. Payton (Tuskegee University),
Constantine W. Curris (Clemson
University), Daniel Bernstine (Portland
State University), and Frederick E.
Hutchinson (Commissioner Emeritus)
worked diligently to frame the issues
developed in this document and to
invent the portrait methodology that
helped us explore them.
We also want to acknowledge the
contributions of the members of our
National Advisory Committee, under
the leadership of Roger R. Blunt, Sr.,
Chairman and CEO of Blunt Enterprises. Paula Butterfield (Bozeman
Public Schools), Wenda Weekes Moore
(Kellogg Foundation), Donald E.
Petersen (former President of Ford

Motor Company), Walter Scott, Jr.
(President of Level 3 Communications,
Inc.) Mike Thorne (Executive Director
of the Port of Portland) and Edwin S.
Turner (President of EST Enterprises)
made major contributions to our
understanding of these issues.
We thank the friends and colleagues
cited in Appendix B who took the time
to share their views with us. In particular, we appreciate the contributions
of the Honorable Michael O. Leavitt,
Governor of Utah, and of Charles B.
Knapp, former President of the University of Georgia now serving as President of The Aspen Institute. We hope
this document reflects their contributions to our work.
We are grateful to the capable and
hard-working staff that helped guide
our work. John V. Byrne, President
Emeritus of Oregon State University,
served ably as Executive Director of
the Commission (and an ex officio
member of the Commission). Dr.
Byrne had the assistance of a Steering
Committee that included Richard
Foster (W.K. Kellogg Foundation), C.
Peter Magrath (President of the National Association of State Universities
and Land-Grant Colleges), James
Harvey (Harvey & Associates), Roselyn
Hiebert (Director of Public Affairs,
NASULGC), Stephen MacCarthy
(Executive Director of University
Relations, The Pennsylvania State
University), Richard Stoddard (Director
of Federal Relations, The Ohio State
University), Teresa Streeter (Executive
Associate to the President, NASULGC),
and Michael Vahle (Staff Assistant to
the Kellogg Commission). Each of
these contributed immeasurably to our
efforts.

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We also want to acknowledge the
assistance of a task force put together
by the Extension Committee on
Organization and Policy. The task force
helped us think through how continuing education and extension activities
could help advance the concept of the
engaged university.
Several consultants assist us also:
Cathy Henderson has developed
working papers for many of our
reports, and James Harvey helps with
drafting and editing these documents.
Many assistants to members of the
Commission provided significant help.
We are indebted to Moira Ferguson
(University of Nebraska-Lincoln),
Christine Haska (Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey), Martha L.
Hesse (Michigan State University),
Stephen MacCarthy (The Pennsylvania
State University), Richard Schoell
(University of Illinois), and Richard
Stoddard (The Ohio State University)
for their interest and contributions.
This particular report of the Commission could not have been developed
at all without the contributions of each
of the eleven instituions which provided us with detailed portraits of their
engagement activities. We gratefully
acknowledge our debt to each of these

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

institutions and the individuals at them
who made our work possible:
Arizona State University
Ruth S. Jones
Iowa State University
Sherry Glenn
The Ohio State University
Council on Outreach Engagement
The Pennsylvania State University
Stephen MacCarthy
Portland State University
Amy Ross
Rutgers: The State University of
New Jersey
Paul Snyder and Harvey Trabb
Salish Kootenai College
Michael O’Donnell
Tuskegee University
Benjamin F. Payton and
Velma L. Blackwell
University of California, Davis
Larry Vanderhoef and
the Outreach Staff, UC Davis
University of Illinois at Chicago
Wim Wiewel
University of Vermont
Kelly Clark and Jill Tarule

The Engaged Institution

55

APPENDIX B MEETINGS, GUESTS, AND SPEAKERS
Date(s)

Location

Guests and Speakers

April 14–15, 1998

Washington, D.C.

The Honorable Michael O. Leavitt
Governor of Utah

June 23–24, 1998

Washington, D.C.

David Ward, Chancellor,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Gary Augustson,
chair of the Internet 2
Networking, Planning, and Policy
Advisory Board,
The Pennsylvania State University
Mike Roberts, Vice President,
Educom

October 13–14, 1998

Washington, D.C.

Charles B. Knapp,
President, The Aspen Institute

December 1–2, 1998

Washington, D.C.

William C. Richardson
President, The Kellogg Foundation

National Association
of State Universities and
Land-Grant Colleges

Returning to Our Roots

56

APPENDIX C HOLLAND MATRIX
Levels of Commitment to Service Characterized by Key Organizational
Factors Evidencing Relevance to Institutional Mission
Level One

Level Two

Level Three

Level Four

Low
Relevance

Medium
Relevance

High Relevance

Full Integration

Mission

No mention or
undefined
rhetorical
reference

Service is part
of what we do
as citizens

Service is a vital
element of our
academic agenda

Service is a central
and defining
characteristic

Promotion,
Tenure, Hiring

Service to
campus
committees or
to discipline

Community
service
mentioned;
volunteerism or
consulting may
be included in
portfolio

Formal guidelines
for documenting
and rewarding
service

Community-based
research and
teaching are key
criteria for hiring
and evaluation

Organization
Structure

None focused
on service or
volunteerism

Units may exist
to foster
volunteerism

Centers and
institutes are
organized to provide
service

Infrastructure
includes flexible
unit(s) to support
widespread faculty
and student
participation

Student
Involvement

Part of
extracurricular
student life
activities

Organized
support for
volunteer
activity

Opportunity for
extra credit,
internships,
practicum
experiences

Service-learning
courses integrated in
curriculum; student
involvement in
community-based
research

Faculty
Involvement

Campus duties;
committees;
little
interdisciplinary
work

Pro bono
consulting;
community
volunteerism

Tenured/senior
faculty pursue
community-based
research; some
teach servicelearning courses

Community research
and service-learning
a high priority;
interdisciplinary and
collaborative work

Community
Involvement

Random or
limited
individual or
group
involvement

Community
representation
on advisory
boards for
departments or
schools

Community
influences campus
through active
partnership or parttime teaching

Community involved
in defining,
conducting, and
evaluating
community research
and service

Campus
Publications

Not an
emphasis

Stories of
student
volunteerism or
alumni as good
citizens

Emphasis on
Economic Impact,
links between
community and
campus,
centers/institutes

Community
connection as
central element;
fundraising has
community services
as a focus

Source: Barbara A Holland, “Analyzing Institutional Commitment to Service.” Michigan
Journal of Community Service Learning, Vol. 4, Fall, 1997.

Kellogg Commission
on the Future of State and
Land-Grant Universities

The Engaged Institution

57

APPENDIX D GELMON ASESSMENT APPROACH
(SELECTED INDICATORS)
Impact of Enlightenment
Issue
UniversityCommunity
Partnerships

Impact of
service
learning on
preparation
of health
professionals

Faculty
Commitment

Institutional
Capacity

Impact on
Community
Partners

What Will We
Look For?

What Will Be Measured?

How Will It Be
Measured?

Establishment of
Partnerships

Number/duration of partnerships

Survey, interview

Role of community
partners

Partners’ contributions

Survey, interview, focus
group

Capacity to meet
unmet needs

Types of services provided;
number of clients served

Survey, interview, focus
group, direct
observation

Type/variety of
student activity

Content of service learning
activities

Survey, interview,
syllabus review

Awareness of
community needs

Knowledge of community
conditions and characteristics

Survey, interview, focus
group, journal

Career Choice

Influence of service on career
plans

Survey, interview,
journal

Role in service
learning
implementation

Number of faculty implementing
& number of courses

Survey, syllabus analysis

Commitment to
service

Attitude toward involvement and
participation

Survey, interview, focus
group, direct
observation

Scholarly interest
in service learning

Influence on articles,
presentations, and scholarly
activity

Survey, interview, vita

Departmental
involvement

Number of faculty involved;
departmental service agenda

Survey, focus group

Investment of
resources

Investment in organizational
infrastructure and faculty
development

Survey, interview

Commitment
among academic
leaders

Pattern of recognition/rewards

Survey, interview

Capacity to serve
community

Number of clients and students

Survey, interview

Economic benefits

Cost of services provided;
funding opportunities

Survey, interview

Satisfaction with
Partnership

Changes in partner relations

Survey, interview, focus
group

Adapted and abbreviated from: Sherril Gelmon et al, Health Professions Schools in Service to the
Nation: 1996–1997 Evaluation Report. August 1997.

National Association
of State Universities and
Land-Grant Colleges

NASULGC
National Association of State Universities
and Land-Grant Colleges
Office of Public Affairs
1307 New York Avenue, NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC 20005
202-478-6040
http://www.nasulgc.org
February 1999