A few thoughts on serving the community, prompted by the book What’s Public About Public Higher Education by Stephen Gavazzi and Gordon Gee (which is not as good as their 2018 work Land-Grant Universities of the Future but it still contains interesting material).

The notion of having a “community” mission is not entirely accepted within higher education.  Certainly, the “land-grant” institutions, which trace their histories back to a moment in time when the American government decided to throw science and engineering at agricultural problems have it in their blood. In Canada, the universities of Saskatchewan and Alberta were more or less founded on land-grant principles, though it played out a little bit differently here.  In Europe and Asia this whole idea was more or less unknown until quite recently; institutional responsibility to the state was implicit, but much less so to the community.

Now of course, everyone claims to have a community mission, but the way it gets operationalized differs from place to place.  But if you want to get a sense of how well a university serves the community, you need to ask four key questions and judge how complete and coherent the answers are.

• Can the university identify the community to which it is responsible?   In some places it’s pretty obvious. For instance, it is difficult to stay at the USask for more than a few minutes before someone tells you that they are not just the University of Saskatchewan but the University for Saskatchewan.  And McGill and the University of Toronto will be pretty upfront about their communities being Montreal and Toronto, respectively.  But I don’t think I’ve ever heard Mount Allison (to take a random Maple League school) talk about itself as being for Sackville.  And in Ontario, there is a whole swathe of universities from Queen’s to Western who are very reluctant to identify themselves exclusively with their local community because at heart many of them feel they serve the Toronto market. 

• How is responsibility to the community to the community demonstrated?  I’m not talking about printed community reports, nor am I referring to having members of the local community on the Board; those are both important, but far from sufficient.  I’m talking about how the university actually develops partnerships and accountability arrangements with an array of local groups which collectively make up “the community”.  To whom does it actively listen?  With whom does it form partnerships?  How does the university on a practical basis communicate with and make itself useful to nearby cities, municipalities, school boards and Indigenous communities? 

• How is Community Service integrated into the job descriptions of the senior leadership?  I am thinking here of Deans in particular.  Are any of their annual objectives related to community service initiatives?

• How are faculty expected to contribute?  This is maybe the most interesting question.  Do institutions which claim a community service mandate ever make clear to new faculty what that mandate is and the extent to which they are expected to contribute to it?  Twenty percent of faculty time is allegedly for “service” – but does anyone keep track of how much of it actually makes it into the local community (as opposed to more inwardly-focused notions of service like working on institutional committees or editorial duties in academic journals or the like)? 

To be clear, I don’t think there is a single set of simple or “correct” answers to each of these questions.  I suspect truly community-engaged universities will have answers which vary enormously from one another due to various local nuances and institutional histories.  And I don’t even think every university needs to think of itself as being especially “locally” oriented.  It’s fine to have larger national or global responsibilities too (though on the whole systems look better if there is a mix of local and global outlooks across the universities in a region).

But I do think that if a university wants to which make a claim to excellence in community service, then it needs to have good solid answers to these questions.  My guess, though, is that at some of them the answers to some of these questions don’t go much beyond hand-waving.  And that needs to change.