Road Map Strategic Priority 4 ’deep dive’

The March 24 meeting of the Road Map Steering Committee saw Strategic Priority 4 — enhance the University’s economic, social and cultural impact through engagement from the local to the global level — present its deep dive.

Kelli Smith, assistant vice president for student success, opened the presentation by referencing the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement definition of community engagement: The collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger community for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.

“It’s very different than what we think of in a community,” she said. “Mutually beneficial means it’s not about us going in, but it’s about an exchange of knowledge. It’s not a one-way thing. It’s a partnership and reciprocal and that’s what we want you to keep in mind.”

Smith noted that community engagement touches on nearly everything we do at the University, “or at least it can,” and that there is a lot of overlap with the other strategic priorities. “It’s really exciting to be doing this work for the public good.”

SP4 received $115,000 in funding over two years, Smith said, and it has been used largely for faculty stipends and grants, to purchase the Collaboratory software, and to hire someone to manage the software and to collect data. “That will help us showcase the great work we’re doing,” she said. “And we also have a speaker line up for a conference this fall.”

To showcase some of the community engaged work that’s already being done by faculty, Carl Lipo, associate dean for research and programs for Harpur College and professor of anthropology and environmental studies, said there are many dimensions to it.

“Faculty work with partners around the world,” he said. “My own work is in Rapa Nui (a Chilean territory in the southeastern Pacific Ocean also known as Easter Island) and the reality is communities in these environments around the world aren’t welcoming scientists to show up. That’s one reason we have to work in partnership. We have to ask the community what it is they need, what product they need and what problems they need to solve.

“That’s how we get to the research questions and deliver what the community wants,” he said. “At Rapa Nui, documenting their heritage is hard and it’s important to them, so we can bring noninvasive ways to document and work with them to help develop tourism and benefit the community.”

Lipo said he and his team also work with natural resources on an island like Rapa Nui. “The fact is that with climate change and invasive species, the landscape is changing dramatically. We’re working on a new project in partnership with Chile doing water documentation. How did past populations get fresh water? We’re directly tied into helping with fresh water for future sustainability.

“We work with a great many people, at the family scale, the island scale, the Chilean government scale,” Lipo added. “A panoply of groups: business development, the Council of Elders, students in the high school.”

Pam Mischen, associate professor of public administration and faculty advisor to the president, spoke about the classroom component of community engagement.

“The Randolph Area Mutual Aid Network in Vermont was formed in response to COVID to respond to area needs,” Mischen said. “But what at what happens to networks that emerged to deal with COVID once we are past the crisis stage?”

Mischen teaches the PAFF 536 Managing Networks course, so students helped to answer the question. “What they found was that they had created the network 10 years before when Hurricane Irene came through, and yet now they felt like they were recreating the wheel. We’re asking ‘How do we make that not happen again? Should we continue to respond to existing problems?’ This network is a perfect match between what they’re interested [in Vermont] and what we do. Our students needs to learn. Is there a dormancy period for these networks? What happens during the dormancy when there isn’t an active situation? Is there something that will enable them to start them again?”

These courses are research opportunities for the faculty member, a learning tool for the students and a way to answer questions for the organization that doesn’t know what to do and is asking for help. “The question really came from them, not me,” Mischen said. “This is how I can turn that into a research project.”

The SP4 subcommittee also reviewed its goals and metrics:

• Goal 1 has to do with community collaboration through teaching and research, said Pamela Stewart Fahs, professor and Decker Chair in Rural Nursing in Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences.

“We used a baseline of 16.2% from 2019-2020 for our first metric, and our target is now 20%,” she said. “Community engagement has been added to the annual faculty report to give us data going forward. Our second metric is for the number of faculty offering designated community engaged learning courses. From a 2020-21 baseline of 23, to 32 in the current year, we’ve set a target of 45. And for the number of designated community engaged learning courses being offered, we’ve moved from 42 in 2020-21 to 54 this year and we’ve set a target of 90.

“Supports for these initiatives are underpinning this goal,” Stewart Fahs added. “Faculty can consult with Center for Civic Engagement Faculty Engagement Associate Barry Brenton, the Center for Learning and Teaching continues to offer professional development and our SP4 funding is helping. We have given seven grants this year of $1,000 each to faculty for course development.”

“For the designated courses, the numbers include just the people who have gone through the designated process, but we know there are many others out there,” said Kelli Huth, director of the Center for Civic Engagement. “The process is a way to track the designated courses, but the designation also give students the benefit of seeing it in the registration process.”

With the addition of Chancellor’s Awards in Community-Engaged Teaching and Community-Engaged Scholarship, along with changed to the promotion and tenure guidelines, “people are talking about what community engaged scholarship looks like in their discipline,” said Huth. “It’s exciting to see that trickling down.”

• Goal 2 is that Binghamton University students are engaged in their communities, and they are said Huth.

The number of students enrolled in community engaged learning courses (metric 1)was 820 during the 2020-21 baseline year and is currently 1,035, with 1,200 set as the new target, “though we may have guessed a little bit low and will adjust the target in the future,” Huth added.

Metric 2 looks at the percentage of students participating in co-curricular community engagement, as tracked through B-Engaged. Activity dipped from 35% in 2019-20 to 30% in the 2020-21 academic year due to COVID, not because of a lack of engagement, Huth said. “They really wanted to get out into the community and we had waiting lists, but it was about partner capacity during COVID.” The new target is that 40% of students will participate in co-curricular community engagement.

Metric 3 is the student voting rate among eligible voters. According to the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement, 47.6% of our students turned out to vote in 2016, and 63.7% did so in 2020. The target moving forward will be to meet or exceed the national average of 66%. “We have a comprehensive program in place across campus to make it happen,” Huth explained. “We’ve made some pretty significant progress in voting rates and we want to see all our students, regardless of race or ethnicity, showing up to vote.”

Supports for these metrics include voter engagement activities, co-curricular services and programs. “We have lots of voter registration activities, tabling, we’re at orientation and in classes, we have an on-campus polling place and a Residential Life voter registration competition,” Huth said. “Over 300 students a year are typically involved. We also have a micro-credentialing program that gives a little more preparation and training where we talk about our community history, best practices in community engagement and bring in community partners to speak to studnets.”

The major challenge with community engaged work is transportation, Huth added. “We used to have contracts with schools, but with the driver shortage that’s not an option and there are no taxies left to contract with the University. We’re working with our Transportation and Parking Services office, but now expenses are skyrocketing. We want to make sure these activities are accessible to all of our students.”

• Goal 3 addresses staff and faculty volunteerism in the community, Smith said.

Faculty information can be gathered from their annual reports, but it’s not an apples to apples comparison with staff, she noted. Staff information came from a Professional Staff Senate survey. The baseline for faculty service, set in 2019-20, was 27.7%, and is 19.5% for 2020-21. The target has been set at 33.3%.

Staff was new this past year, Smith said, so 73% was established as the baseline in 2020-21, and the new target is 75%.

• Goal 4 looks at mutually beneficial relationships between the University and community, Mischen said.

“Goals 1, 2 and 3 are mostly about what we are doing,” she said, “but Goal 4 is what happens as a result of that — the outcomes, so we started surveying local partners, but skipped over the COVID time period and set 2019 as baseline. At that time 61% of those surveyed responded that their collaboration with Binghamton University greatly impacted or advanced their mission and goals. Our new target is 75%.

Carnegie Community Engagement Classification

The Carnegie Community Engagement Classification is what we’re focused on right now, Mischen said. ”It requires a culture of engagement that is reflected throughout the institutional mission, identity and commitment. It really is institutional and we have to be able to show it with documentation and use it for self-assessment.”

The timeline for applying for the Carnegie designation has changed from a 5-year cycle to a 2-year cycle, so the University opted to apply in 2025, making our reporting period the 2023-24 academic year, Mischen said. “This is not about what we did in the past, but about what we do in the reporting period. There’s a 27-page guidance document to get a sense of what they’re asking for, but an easy thing for us to do is adopt its definition of community engagement that we saw at the beginning of this presentation as our definition. Our proposal is to vote on this and adopt it as a steering committee.”

The University doesn’t currently have an institutional definition of community engagement, Mischen said, even though we have been using the Carnegie Classification’s definition as a working definition for the past few years.

The Steering Committee then voted unanimously to approve using the Carnegie Classification’s definition as Binghamton University’s definition, emphasizing the language about being a mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.

Mischen said that, moving forward, we will have to answer a number of provocative questions for Carnegie, really looking at the institutional level, and we must consider as well how our partners will answer these questions.

There was discussion about thinking of other ways to indicate community engagement, including service on boards and the addition of two Binghamton University Council members to the SP4 subcommittee. “I think we have to hunt first to see what exists before we develop something new,” Mischen said. “Soon we’ll need to reconstitute a lot of committees to help answer the questions, so we will be tapping a lot of people to create the mechanisms in advance of our reporting period.”

“We’re also waiting for sample applications from the last Carnegie cycle,” Huth said. “How are others answering these questions?”

Announcements from the other strategic priority teams

• SP1: We are closing on the faculty awards coordinator search and hope to have someone on board in a month.
• SP2: We are drilling down on its data for high-impact information and working on developing a teaching metric as well as working with others to look at the 6-year graduation rate and specific opportunities to support individual students who have dropped out to help them get across the finish line.
• SP3: The recruitment video for ‘where you can be you’ is underway and will start with video from the March 25 mixer tomorrow. We have reached out to employees. There is an art museum event March 29 by Spanish Harlem artists.
• SP 5: We’re prepping for our next deep dive.
• SP6: There is a meeting about the Road Map website the week of March 28.