The centrality of engagement in higher education: Reflections and future directions

In her article on higher education and its relationship to efforts to solve wicked problems, Judith Ramaley (2014) noted that “workable responses and solutions to today’s problems require new ways of learning, new ways of working together, and new definitions and measures of progress and success” ( p. 9). In our original article, we argued that for higher education to contribute meaningfully to transformational change in society, it would have to act to make engagement scholarship a central aspect of its work, spanning the spectrum of its disciplinary units, centers, and institutes (Fitzgerald, Bruns, Sonka, Furco, & Swanson, 2012). Solving societal problems requires recognition that the problems are in society; as an embedded part of complex society systems, these societal problems affect universities and the students, alumni, faculty, and staff who are a part of both the university and community systems. Thus, we argued, efforts to solve problems-in-society require new approaches to knowledge generation, generally described within the context of partnerships, collaboration, exchange of knowledges, and cocreation of solutions. Ensuring sustainability of successes gained through the scholarship of application also requires similar collaborative processes. In effect, as Checkoway (2015) noted, higher education needs to view research in communities as “a process which builds community” (p. 139). Because higher education is a social institution (Fear, 2015), it has an implicit responsibility to serve the public that created it and sustains it financially through tuition, government grants and con tracts, corporate giving and partnerships, and public philanthropy. Indeed, public land-grant colleges and universities were founded on “ideals that recognized the need to apply knowledge-based solutions to societal challenges, requiring that researchers work with people outside academia as partners with as much to offer as to learn” (Fitzgerald & Simon, 2012, p. 34). Universities in partnerships with communities can play a key role in enabling individuals to chart pathways to achieving upward mobility. This requires a reaf firmation of the centrality of engagement within the knowledge process role that universities need to play within society. There is