Abstract
In this paper, we describe the outreach and engagement movement in the United States and explore the implications of this movement for university continuing education units in Canada. Across the United States, major universities have adopted the vocabulary of “outreach and engagement” to foster a shift in the relationships of those universities with communities and organizations beyond the traditional boundaries of the institution. This vocabulary has its roots in the work of Ernest Boyer (1990, 1996) and the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities (1999, 2000). In the past decade, many American universities have adopted new leadership and organizational structures to make an operational commitment to outreach and engagement. In Canada, university continuing education units have traditionally been involved in activities that fit within the concept of outreach and engagement, and leaders of such units should consider the implications of the outreach and engagement movement.
Highlights
Outreach is a term with a long heritage in higher education, the notion of engagement has only recently taken on a distinctive meaning in the university context
The following universities were selected as case studies: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UI-UC); Ohio State University (OSU); Michigan State University (MSU); North Carolina State University (NCSU); Pennsylvania State University (PSU); University of Toledo (UT); and University of Wisconsin (UW)
There is no doubt that outreach and engagement is an important movement in a number of major universities in the United States, their approaches to outreach and engagement and the outcomes experienced from such approaches have varied
Summary
Outreach is a term with a long heritage in higher education, the notion of engagement has only recently taken on a distinctive meaning in the university context. At the level of individual faculty members, engaged scholarship is widely associated with the work of Ernest Boyer. In an article published posthumously, Boyer (1996) replaced the term “application” with that of “engagement.” Engaged scholarship requires moving beyond the “noblesse oblige” model of university experts providing service to communities to a truly collaborative model in. While Boyer was reconsidering the nature of scholarly work, the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities mobilized the presidents or chancellors of 24 major American universities to reconsider the future of publicly funded higher education. The commission’s work was rooted in a widespread sense of malaise among state and land-grant universities. Another part of the issue is that 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
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