Making public work count in academia

I started seriously writing for mass media more than 10 years ago. I jumped into a news cycle about the retirement of Pope Benedict XVI that I thought might benefit, perhaps unsurprisingly, from my insights as a historian of medieval religion. Bylines at CNN and The Atlantic led to more writing opportunities. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was embarking on a very different kind of career. But I was still a professor, just up for tenure and later up for promotion. As I began accumulating bylines, colleagues would ask me, “Does this work count?” I would laugh and say, “No, of course not,” and they would laugh in return, and we’d move on.

At least on paper, funnily enough, I was wrong. Sustained public engagement could have counted at my university, and, according to official documents, also at many other colleges and universities at the time. And when it comes to published standards and guidelines, the situation is even better now, with many models for scholars to reach for and consider as they work.

But in the past few years, although I’ve focused on coaching individuals, I’ve realised that there’s a lack of practical advice for universities and departments that want to begin including public work meaningfully in hiring, tenure and promotion standards. So here’s how to get started.

First: Decide whether you really mean to count public scholarship as scholarship. Many institutions categorise public engagement and related activities as “service”, equivalent to serving on committees and other more standard faculty roles. This is common – and while it’s not nothing, it does little to encourage or reward public engagement in a meaningful way.

Second: Do the reading. You do not have to reinvent the wheel. Peer institutions will have models to refer to. But there are also more conceptual pieces, starting with the innovative and broad taxonomy of scholarship developed by Ernest Boyer, which includes the “scholarship of engagement”. There are more recent models from major disciplinary organisations, useful even if trying to craft standards to stretch across entire schools. The American Sociological Association (ASA), the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Historical Association (AHA), to pick just three, each provide a variety of provocations with which to wrestle.

• Spotlight guide: How to engage the public in research
• Campus talks - how to do public engagement
• Steps to take to encourage more support for public engagement in research

The ASA, in What counts? Evaluating public communication in tenure and promotion, argues that “high-quality public communication demonstrates deep knowledge of the required format, needs, and frames of reference of the audiences it seeks to reach. A criterion for quality is thus mastery of such rules of the game…” In other words, the ASA is arguing that public engagement should be assessed on its own terms, not through a lens of whether it’s like other kinds of countable work.

The MLA’s Guidelines for evaluating publicly engaged humanities scholarship in language and literature programs stresses that the kinds of questions we might ask of traditional scholarship are questions we can also apply to public-facing work, so that evaluators should, consider how “characteristics valued in peer-reviewed scholarly books and journal articles also appear in public-facing projects: depth of engagement with previous scholarship, scope of contribution to major lines of inquiry in the field, impact on the field and on the broader community, and inventiveness and clarity in communication.”

The AHA’s Guidelines for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship discusses the importance of public scholarship broadly, but the most practical intervention is its discussion of post-publication peer review. “All scholarship should be subject to careful professional review [but]…there is no reason such work cannot be peer reviewed after publication as part of a promotion process…[a] department can adapt its standards of quality and quantity to any mode of diffusing knowledge.”

Third: Differentiate between everything an academic does and ask each department to define what sustained public engagement looks like in their field – iterative writing, juried performance or exhibit, public science and health, for example. Public engagement offers protections and benefits, but also prompts scrutiny; when I write about history in public spaces, I’m being a historian; when I review cheesy movies for fun, I’m not.

New academic norms have to emerge from difficult and inclusive community conversations. It’s easy to just stop at service, and many institutions have. But if you want to fully incorporate public engagement into your standards – and many more faculty would do this work if it counted – at least the conceptual work behind counting public engagement for formal hiring, tenure and promotion in academic jobs has been done. You don’t have to reinvent that wheel. You just have to let it roll.

David Perry is associate director of undergraduate studies in the history department at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and the author of The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook.

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