navigate: home: magazine: fall 2000: article

Vice Provost Secor discusses the role and value of outreach in the University By Celena E. Kusch
Dr. Robert Secor is vice provost for Academic Affairs at Penn State	What is outreach?   A speaker at Penn State’s international Best Practices in Outreach and Public Service conference suggested there is confusion regarding the meaning of “outreach,” and this confusion serves as a “countervailing force” against its growth in higher education.   At Penn State, Dr. Robert Secor, vice provost for Academic Affairs, offered a practical definition: “To do outreach is to bring rigorous scholarship into active engagement with partners outside of the institution.”   Referring to the terms of the 1999 Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities report, Secor observed that engagement requires redesigned and innovative practices for conducting teaching, research and service that can enable institutions to become more involved in the communities they serve, whether these communities are local, statewide or nationally or internationally defined.   “Engagement means partnering in these communities,” he added, “and not simply extending what you know to someone else, who presumably does not know. This two-way model is the new direction of outreach.”   When asked about ways to promote faculty awareness of the meaning of outreach and its professional potential, Secor offered a literary analogy: “It reminds me of a play by Molière in which Monsieur Jourdain asks to be taught what prose is. After he hears the explanation, he exclaims his surprise that he has been speaking prose all his life and never knew it.”   “It’s the same thing with outreach,” Secor explained. “Faculty are often doing outreach and don’t know it. The first step is to recognize when one is doing outreach and then to value that work.”   Secor also noted that many of the activities that faculty already perform and value, both personally and professionally, often aren’t reported as outreach efforts. He offered the example of a faculty poet who gives a reading on NPR or organizes other poets to deliver a poetry series through Penn State Public Broadcasting. “That work is serving an important role in the community while drawing upon faculty expertise in ways that others can learn from it,” he explained. “It’s important that faculty know that such outreach is valued.”   According to Secor, Penn State’s method for valuing outreach through promotion and tenure makes room for the new engaged forms of scholarship that do not fit the traditional mold.   “Several years ago, we incorporated outreach into the various cells of the promotion and tenure rainbow dividers,” Secor explained. “At that time we made the decision not to create a fourth cell for outreach nor to confine it to the service cell. We were concerned that those options would relegate it to the margins of the process. Instead, we determined that outreach is in the teaching cell when the activity is one of teaching, in research when it is research and in service when it is service. Outreach has been integrated throughout the cells.” Imagining the future   Achieving a University culture that can embrace such models of engagement as central responsibilities in faculty scholarship is, for Secor, his vision of the future of outreach.   “Outreach is another one of the University’s opportunities for faculty,” he added. “A faculty life can be a long life of doing essentially the same things — teaching, publishing, serving on committees. Outreach can be renewing and invigorating for faculty members in allowing them to use their expertise in new ways. In my vision for the future, outreach is valued because it is part of what faculty see as fulfilling in their personal and professional lives — something that is not an extra burden, something in which an entire department can participate.” Penn State’s record in recognizing and rewarding faculty outreach   Although his vision for outreach is optimistic, Secor takes a realistic look at Penn State’s progress toward that goal. “It’s really going to take a change in the culture to let people know that outreach is important, but we’re ahead of other universities in extending the land-grant mission to include a wide-ranging vision of engagement,” he commented.   Secor points to President Graham Spanier as the model of an “engaged president.”   “President Spanier does a radio show every other week in which he talks to the Commonwealth about issues important to both the University and communities. He serves on the Presidential Advisory Board for Information Technology, chairs the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges and is the chairman of the Division I Board of Directors of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. He has taken the lead in addressing the problems of binge drinking on college campuses and has spoken before the National Press Corps on this issue,” he noted.   “All of these activities send a message that Penn State looks outward, as well as inwardly,” concluded Secor. “Our slogan is ‘Making Life Better’ for Pennsylvania, and from the development of the School of Information Sciences and Technology curriculum in collaboration with government and industry leaders to the many interdisciplinary consortia — whether they involve environmental issues or those of children, youth and families — we are doing that.” Next steps   “To achieve a wide range of faculty engagement, committees and evaluators have to value it,” Secor added, “and we’re still working to see this evolve.”   According to Secor, the work of groups like UniSCOPE (University Scholarship and Criteria for Outreach and Performance Evaluation) are helping to make outreach centralized as part of the evaluation process. The UniSCOPE report offers continuums of teaching, research and service in which a wide range of both internal and external consumers for faculty scholarship in all three areas are recognized (see story). In this conception of scholarship, faculty members are seen as conveying their knowledge in various, not always traditional, forms, and they can disseminate it more broadly to groups ranging from undergraduates to colleagues and members of the public.   By rethinking all forms of scholarship rather than designating a separate category for outreach, Secor believes, UniSCOPE shows promising signs of effecting change in valuing outreach.   “That is one of the best things that the UniSCOPE report does,” he said. “Once all the different forms of teaching, research or service are placed on the same continuums, it is easier to see how we are all engaged in the same enterprise and how we can extend what we do along those continuums, shuttling back and forth from one end to the other. In that way, we not only fulfill our societal obligation to be an engaged university, we also enlarge the scope of opportunities and avenues for impact and fulfillment for our faculty.”
© 2002 Outreach Communications,   Outreach & Cooperative Extension,   The Pennsylvania State University phone: (814) 865-8108,   fax: (814) 863-2765,   e-mail: outreachnews@outreach.psu.edu