Public Scholarship, Graduate Education, and the Research University
Higher Education Exchange 2007, pp. 4-11. Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation Press
9 Pages Posted: 31 Mar 2016
Date Written: 2007
Abstract
Many colleges, universities, and departments have embraced public scholarship as something to be lauded in a mission statement and celebrated in public addresses. A few initiatives have gone even further. For instance, Penn State has a Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy to strengthen community ties with the university and the University of Minnesota convened a Public Scholarship Committee to study the subject. Other programs dot the nation’s higher-educational landscape, and various national initiatives also promote the idea.
In spite of these advances, I have found only one program where public scholarship is a required course for graduate study. Whereas undergraduate service-learning requirements have become common, my home unit, the Department of Communication at the University of Washington (UW), may be the only academic department in which each incoming graduate student is required to take a full-credit seminar on public scholarship. The seminar has done our department and our students a tremendous service. In this essay, I will explain how this anomalous course-offering came about and what exactly it has done for us.
Keywords: public scholarship, graduate education, research university, course impacts
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