Promoting institutional change to support public psychology: Innovations and challenges at the University of California.

Abstract

Community partnerships are vital for the co-production, implementation, and dissemination of practice- and policy-relevant research to advance public psychology. Particularly in "Research 1" universities, the institutional infrastructure, culture, and criteria for faculty advancement are often a mismatch for impactful community-partnered research. Past and current efforts by psychologists and others at the University of California (UC) seek to promote partnerships, infrastructure, and practices for faculty development and advancement that align excellence and impact in scholarship with advancing the public mission of the UC and its campuses. Here, we delineate "partnered" public scholarship and provide an overview of mismatch between this scholarship and university structures. We then describe unique features of the UC and three cases of interdisciplinary partnerships to advance educational equity that illustrate how distinctive campuses and units engaged resources, deployed diverse strategies, and succeeded as well as failed to address challenges related to (a) how partnered scholarship is enacted, (b) supports to sustain the initiatives, and (c) faculty evaluation. We then consider lessons learned, implications, and ethical issues related to public psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).