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 Barbara Cambridge Director, Teaching Initiatives American Association for Higher Education |
Barbara Cambridge and Robert Bringle have co-directed a three-year collaborative effort by representatives on all eight Indiana University campuses to establish ways to define, document and evaluate service at IU. In today's IU Home Pages, the two discuss the committee's work, which resulted in a guidebook, Service at Indiana University: Defining, Documenting and Evaluating (see end of interview for information on obtaining copies).
Cambridge, who is currently on leave from the university in order to serve as director for Teaching Initiatives at the American Association for Higher Education in Washington, D.C., is professor of English at IUPUI. Bringle, a national expert on service learning, is director for the Center of Public Service and Leadership at IUPUI and professor of psychology.
 Robert Bringle Director of the Center of Public Service at IUPUI and Leadership and professor of psychology |
Q: What was the need behind organizing the effort to define, document and evaluate service?
A: Cambridge--Faculty members are responsible for research, teaching and service. Unfortunately, the latter is obscured by the other roles. New faculty members are often counseled to leave service to tenured colleagues and tenured faculty have not developed ways of documenting and peer reviewing service that enable distinctions between poor and excellent service work.
As Indiana University and other institutions of higher education emphasize their engagement with the community, faculty members are collaborating with new partners. Evaluating that service--to decide what kinds fit the mission of the institution and to judge the quality of the service--is a major responsibility. Equally important is the service faculty members do for the institution itself and for students. Building, maintaining and improving an educational environment take expertise and commitment. In the past, institutional service has often been shrugged off as "just citizenship," yet we know that leadership and participation in a community can be done well or not so well.
Q: How did you approach the organization of this project?
A: Bringle--The first step was initiated by William Plater, dean of the faculties at IUPUI, and Kathleen Warfel, president of the IUPUI Faculty Council. They created a task force on service to address the lack of clarity that service has in faculty roles and rewards. As the report of the task force was being completed, Barbara and I saw the wisdom of expanding this discussion to the system level. Strategic Direction Initiatives funded part of the work.
A: Cambridge--Clearly, we needed to work on this issue with colleagues from all IU campuses. Bob and I invited chief academic officers and faculty senate presidents to nominate members of a task force.
The task force would spend the first year of the project studying current practices on IU campuses and on campuses across the country, drafting a definition of service, brainstorming kinds of appropriate documentation for each kind of service identified, and developing a set of criteria that could be used to judge quality of the service.
In the second year, faculty members would be invited to apply to become a "Faculty Service Fellow" to test the definition, documentation and criteria developed by the task force.
The third year would be devoted to studying the results of the Fellows' work and revising the documentation types and criteria.
Finally, the task force and Fellows would publish a guidebook to increase the ability of faculty members to judge service and to stimulate further work on campuses and in units of the university. During each year of the project, public occasions on campuses, such as informative meetings and workshops, would garner faculty ideas and responses.
Q: How did you define service?
A: Bringle--According to the guidebook that is in preparation, service applies a faculty member's knowledge, skills and expertise as an educator, a member of a discipline or profession, and a participant in an institution to benefit students, the institution, the discipline or profession and the community in a manner consistent with the missions of the university and the campus.
The following four types of faculty service can be documented and evaluated: 1) service to students; 2) service to the institution; 3) service to the discipline or profession; and 4) service to the community.
Q: Why is documentation and evaluation important and how are you suggesting it be accomplished?
A: Bringle--The university is concerned about internal assessment of its work and being held accountable by external constituencies. Very little intellectual work has been devoted to an analysis of the nature of service in the academy when compared to research and teaching. If it is part of an institution's mission--it is at IU, which is not always the case at other institutions--then it is reasonable that the institution hold members and units accountable for the full spectrum of the mission. In addition, it is important to know the impact of the academy's work.
A: Cambridge--Until we develop the means of representing and evaluating service, it will remain undervalued in the reward system. We must have a way of rigorously examining service with the same degree of confidence that we have in the peer review of research and the growing confidence that we have in our ability to critique and affirm teaching.
Our project team's suggestion is that we study, modify, retest and continue to revise the kinds of documentation that get warranted by the various individuals and groups who look at service.
For example, every faculty member will be the beneficiary of a system that helps him or her decide on what kinds of service best fit his or her career path. One suggested criterion in the guidebook is that service, research and teaching should be symbiotic. In this light, some kinds of service will be appropriate for one faculty member but not another.
Another example is the use of a set of criteria that will enable promotion and tenure committees to make valid decisions about the quality of work of all faculty members, but especially and quite importantly, those who claim service as an area of excellence.
Q: Service is seldom mentioned in conversation that has centered around the balance between teaching and research. Why has service not become part of that debate?
A: Cambridge--Service has sometimes been regarded as less than intellectual work. Sometimes, just the fact of being an officer of a disciplinary society or serving on a university task force has been seen as sufficient to demonstrate service, allowed partly because we haven't cared enough to be more precise and additionally, because we have contended that we simply can't judge the quality or impact of service.
Just as we did for many years with teaching, faculty members have assumed that it is impossible to document service or to develop standards for service. Yet, we know that the quality of service varies greatly. And, we know that some colleagues achieve results that benefit the constituents served and others do not.
Another impetus for focusing on professional service is the emerging interest at the national and local levels in building communities that work. Sometimes spoken about in terms like "civic responsibility" or "fostering democratic participation," this emphasis on what it takes to function and prosper in a diverse community calls us to honor through our reward system the skills and expertise that are needed to foster an institution and a society that serves all its members.
A: Bringle--There is an unfortunate mutual agreement between faculty and those who perform administrative review that professional service is adequately documented by listing service activities. Instead, documentation must deal with what was done as a result of position or role, how it was accomplished, with what impact, and why it is relevant to the faculty member, department, institution, community constituencies and discipline in a way that is relevant to a set of criteria. Material that does not speak to the criteria of evaluation should not be presented.
Q: What do you hope the outcome of this project will be?
A: Bringle--My foremost hope is that we can stimulate discourse on each IU campus about the nature of service in a way that influences how faculty plan and document their professional service activities and how administrators review professional service activities. These discussions must occur now at the campus, unit and department levels. The project has implications for faculty roles and rewards, institutional mission statements, external portrayals of campuses, planning and assessment at the institutional level, the curriculum, the infrastructure and organization of the campus, and budget decisions--in short, all aspects of campus operations. We have also found that this work is of interest to other institutions struggling with the same issues.
A: Cambridge--The guidebook produced by a coalition of IU faculty members from all campuses means that others do not need to start from scratch or from sketchy information. The guidebook includes the best thinking to date of a number of faculty colleagues who have studied, acted and written about the subject of professional service.
I hope that this work will stimulate further conversation and, more importantly, changes in the way we do business. We must figure out how we at IU want to define, document and reward service so that we can contribute to building the communities to which we are committed and so that we can support appropriately those who do so.
For more information on service in the academy, go the American Association for Higher Education's Web site at:
http://www.aahe.org/pubs/intro-BC.htm
For more information about the activities of the Center for Public Service and Leadership, visit:
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