Engaging Departments: Moving Faculty Culture from Private to Public, Individual to Collective Focus for the Common Good

by Kevin Kecskes (editor)

While the importance of service-learning and engaged campuses has gained broad recognition in recent years, the infrastructure for enabling such deep academic and civic engagement has yet to emerge. The authors of this book embrace the call for such institutional renewal and provide the critical guidance needed for leaders in higher education who are serious about building genuinely engaged campuses. Engaging Departments fills an important niche in the literature on institutional engagement and advances the National Campus Compact agenda to create engaged departments. Representing a range of disciplines and institutional types—including two-year and four-year, public and private, comprehensive and research—this work features case studies of 11 departments and their journeys to engagement. The book presents readers with transferable steps and strategies, key factors that helped move civic engagement from the individual faculty level to the collective departmental level, an analysis of successes and barriers, and visions for the future. Also outlined are engagement efforts at the institutional and state levels. Written for department chairs, faculty, and faculty developers, this book offers approaches to support and sustain the building of engaged departments and invites readers to contemplate and refresh their visions for the relevancy of their disciplines in the 21st century.

299 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2002