University Park, Pa. — A Penn State geography professor guides his students as they live and work in a West Philadelphia neighborhood, undertaking research activities to improve health care in the community. A Penn State program shares valuable resources with farmers, helping them cut energy costs and increase revenues. Another University program offers training to child support enforcement officers, helping Pennsylvania become the highest-performing state in the nation for child support. These are just a few ways Penn State engages with communities.
For these efforts, and many more like them, Penn State has received the Community Engagement classification from the distinguished Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
According to the Carnegie Foundation, “The elective Community Engagement classification provides a way for institutions to describe their identity and commitments to community with a public and nationally recognized classification. It extends and refines the classification of colleges and universities.”
“At Penn State, engagement is a core priority of the University, and we strive to encourage joint academic-community definitions of problems, solutions and success,” said Penn State President Graham B. Spanier. “We are pleased that Carnegie Foundation has recognized Penn State’s institutional commitment to being a university that listens to its constituents; a university intimately connected to its communities; a university that is fully engaged. The Carnegie Foundation’s recognition reaffirms Penn State’s longstanding leadership in this national engagement arena.”
The foundation, founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered in 1906 by an Act of Congress, defines community engagement as “the collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.”
“Engagement is tightly woven into Penn State’s history, culture and identity,” said Craig D. Weidemann, vice president for Penn State Outreach. “Penn State’s vision of engagement involves the integration of teaching, research and service to enable its faculty, staff and students to address pressing societal challenges faced by its communities. We are delighted that the Carnegie Foundation has recognized the breadth and depth of Penn State’s many outreach and engagement efforts.”
Last month, Penn State and the "Rethinking Urban Poverty: The Philadelphia Field Project," headed by Professor Lakshman Yapa, were recognized as the 2008 recipients of the C. Peter Magrath University Community Engagement Award. In October of this year, Penn State hosted the annual National Outreach Scholarship Conference, which serves as a forum to advance outreach scholarship and strengthen cooperation between the university and the public, as well as a way to provide an opportunity for critical reflection on the public mission and work of an academic institution. It was a return to Penn State for the conference, where it originated 10 years ago.
In addition, Spanier has been a longstanding champion of the need for higher education institutions to fully engage with their communities. More than 10 years ago, Spanier began his chairmanship of the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land Grant Institutions. Under his leadership, the Commission issued the seminal engagement report, "Returning to Our Roots: The Engaged Institution," celebrating the contributions higher education institutions have made to society and calling on them to do more, and to do it better.
Penn State Outreach is the largest unified outreach organization in American higher education. Penn State Outreach serves more than 5 million people each year, delivering more than 2,000 programs to people in all 67 Pennsylvania counties, all 50 states and 80 countries worldwide. Visit http://www.outreach.psu.edu/ for more information.