Public scholarship partners community and academe in works that produce "a public good"

A new UND Center for Community Engagement approved in September by the State Board of Higher Education will place much of its emphasis on “public scholarship,” says its first director, Lana Rakow, professor of communication.

Public scholarship, she explains, includes scholarly and creative work in the public interest, scholarship planned and carried out in cooperation with community partners, and academic work that produces a “public good” such as exhibits, performances, and broadly accessible research results.

The other focus of the Center, which reports to the University’s vice president for academic affairs, will be “experiential learning” in which students earn credit outside the traditional classroom.

Vice President for Research Peter Alfonso welcomed both program thrusts of the new Center, noting that the concept addresses a number of Legislative roundtable recommendations that advocate a closer connection between higher education and the economic and social vitality of the state.
“The University of North Dakota has an excellent record of research and scholarship directly connected to meeting real-life challenges of the world outside the campus,” he said. “In fact, many of the articles in the current issue of the University’s research magazine, UND Discovery, report upon such projects that focus on the engagement theme.”

Rakow said the University had recently completed a large-scale survey of potential community partners in North Dakota with very positive results, and that interested faculty were meeting regularly on the campus.
She said the agenda for the public scholarship project includes:

• Seeking external funds to support UND faculty in designing and carrying out public research projects.

• Providing links between community and nonprofit partners in need of research assistance and appropriate faculty.

• Distributing research dollars to UND faculty for public scholarship projects.

• Making research findings broadly available to the public through the publication of a monograph series and other means, and facilitating public use and discussion of results.

• Encouraging, supporting, and highlighting the public scholarship of the faculty.

The Center for Community Engagement, with offices in O’Kelly Hall, can be reached by telephone at (701) 777-0675, and through its Web site at www.und.edu/dept/cce.