Engaged Scholarship and the (Re) Emergence of a Lost Tradition

Academics are increasingly getting off college campuses in efforts to collaborate with various community partners on a variety of research, policy, and advocacy activities. This is happening despite, or perhaps in part because of, the Trump Administration’s sweeping attacks on US universities.  Sometimes referred to as engaged scholarship, public sociology, counter system research, community engagement, service learning, and many other terms, all capture the same sentiment as more scholars, and their students, are asking the age-old question “which side are you on?”

But academia has had a schizophrenic relationship to such work.  While universities brag about their involvement with their local communities, the traditional incentive and reward systems call for “objective,” “value free,” “detached” scholarship in the “right” journals and books, often discouraging the engagement many scholars would like to pursue.  As a sociologist I learned about the active involvement in the most critical public affairs of their day by our “big three,” Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim.  As Craig Calhoun, former President of the Social Science Research Council, observed in 2018 “Thinkers have been doers (contrary to stereotype).” And there is emerging support for collaborative, social justice, engaged scholarship.  But it’s not clear which side the academy is on. 

Several organizations have been created in recent years to encourage academics to work with non-academic organizations on a variety of fronts.  Campus Compact, Scholars Strategy Network, Urban-Based Research Action Network are just some of these groups.  The Carnegie Foundation has created the Carnegie Community Classification in recognition of those universities that have made serious commitments to this work.  The American Sociological Association provides 3 or 4 small grants of approximately $3,000 each year through its Community Action Research Initiative (CARI) to scholars who are collaborating with community organizations on a variety of social justice issues.  Titles of some of the recent grants that reflect this activity are the following:

• Black business development in the wake of police shootings of black residents of Milwaukee, 
• Enhancing health services for refugees in Los Angeles,
• Providing health services to black senior citizens in North Omaha,
• Transition to higher education for racial minorities and low-income students,
• Environmentally sustainable energy development in high-risk rural communities,
• Assisting formerly incarcerated women in accessing housing in Wisconsin,
• Providing better security for residents in the most dangerous favellas of Rio de Janeiro,
• Building data literacy and social research capacity for the National Indian Council on Aging in Albuquerque.

But not all academic institutions are on board.  And even when lip service is paid, the traditional incentive system gets in the way. Even in departments and among university administrators who pride themselves on their progressive politics, when it comes to annual faculty evaluations, tenure and promotion procedures, and other rewards, the focus is on articles that appear in the highest status scholarly journals and with the most prestigious book publishers.  Sole authored articles are the most valued with co-authored pieces rewarded somewhat, particularly if the scholar under review is the first author. Co-authored pieces with non-academics are not held to the same esteem as work with other recognized scholars. The key pieces of a promotion and tenure dossier are the letters that are solicited from other scholars in the field who are asked to evaluate the impact of the candidate’s work.  The ideal reviewers are the recognized senior scholars at the most prestigious universities. 

One important piece of evidence of scholarly productivity is the frequency with which a scholar’s publications are cited in other scholarly publications.  Contributions to widely read but not peer-reviewed publications are given little credit.  Service to professional academic associations might be rewarded but little recognition is given to work with government organizations, community groups, and other non-profits. That work might be recognized as “service” but not “research” which is the primary activity for which most academics are evaluated.  As Diane C. Colleson, an associate vice-provost at the University of North Carolina, and her colleagues concluded: “If we want faculty to be involved in communities but reward them for other activities, we are our own worst enemies.”

Things may be changing.  At least a few universities are including community engaged research explicitly into their tenure and promotion guidelines. For example, the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro includes the following language in the definition of scholarship and research in its guidelines on reappointment: “Community engaged scholarship includes research/creative activities undertaken by faculty members in collaboration with community partners.”  Portland State University’s “Policies and Procedures for the Evaluation of Faculty for Tenure, Promotion, and Merit Increases” includes “application” which “involves asking how state-of-the-art knowledge can be responsibly applied to significant problems.” Arizona State, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, and University of Minnesota are among several other universities that have recently taken steps in this direction. And this year the American Sociological Association endorsed guidelines for evaluating and rewarding community engaged scholarship in tenure and promotion decisions.

So research and scholarship, at least in some cases, go beyond publication in respected academic outlets and includes the application of knowledge to change and not just understand, the subject of the investigation. There is reason to believe this will be a growing movement in the nation’s colleges and universities.

It is time to further recognize one of the longstanding traditions in sociology and related social sciences, that of engaged social justice scholarship. In his classic 1939 book Knowledge for What Robert Lynd noted:

If the social scientist is too bent upon ‘waiting until all the data are in,’ or if university policies warn him off controversial issues, the decisions will be made anyway – without him.  They will be made by the ‘practical’ man and by the ‘hard-headed” politician chivvied by interested pressure-blocs…

Nor is its role merely to stand by, describe, and generalize, like a seismologist watching a volcano.  There is no other agency in our culture whose role it is to ask long-range and, if need be, abruptly irreverent questions of our democratic institutions; and to follow these questions with research and the systematic charting of the way ahead.  The responsibility is to keep everlasting challenging the present with the question:  But what is it that we human beings want, and what things would have to be done, in what ways and in what sequence in order to change the present so as to achieve it?  (p. 250).

But he feared that social science may not be playing the role that it could and should play, observing that many social scientists were:

“Lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down” (p. 2,3)

But engaged scholarship is on the rise.  Facts, evidence, rational theoretical reasoning, and 

practical application of knowledge remain the watchword in the academic community and among its community partners.  Current attacks on the basic concept of knowledge, where loyalty reigns supreme will pass.

Perhaps the best guidance for the social sciences comes from the world of journalism where it is often stated that the job of a good newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  Community engaged scholarship constitutes one clear pathway by which social scientists can do just that.

Gregory D. Squires is a Research Professor and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at George Washington University. This essay is drawn in part from his chapter “Wins, Losses, and Lessons of Engaged Social Justice Research: How Academic Institutions Nurture and Undermine Collaborative Community-Based Scholarship” in the book The Oxford Handbook of Sociology for Social Justice edited by Corey Dolgon  published by Oxford University Press in 2024.