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As the new academic year gets underway during a hotly contested midterm election season, student voting, civic engagement and the democratic mission of higher education are about to become a major focus and talking point. This is of course critically important. Students are one thing that all higher education institutions have in common and they are at the heart of the “education” of higher education.
We are far less likely to hear much about a different yet critical aspect of that democratic mission: the civic engagement of faculty members, both as citizens and as scholars. Faculty members have much to contribute to the civic health of our cities, states and country. They are members of local communities, where they can volunteer, participate in civic organizations, speak up on issues they care about and, at least for most, vote in elections. Perhaps even more importantly, as scholars, they bring a wealth of expertise that could benefit communities, support civic organizations and influence public policy.
Yet higher education institutions often overlook, or actively discourage, faculty civic engagement. In an era of democratic backsliding and increasing questions about the value and contributions of higher education to society, that must change.
As it stands, the limited evidence we have shows that faculty members are pretty average when it comes to engaging as citizens. According to one study, assistant faculty members are registered to vote at lower rates than the U.S. population, a difference that may be at least partially explained by the number of noncitizen faculty members. The study found that less than 20 percent of faculty make federal political contributions, with rates lowest for assistant professors. Similarly, the study found that faculty members are somewhat less likely to make political campaign contributions than other similarly educated Americans.
Another study found that when it comes to direct political engagement, faculty are about equally as engaged as other highly educated Americans, although the form of political engagement varies. When it comes to volunteering more generally, according to the most recent data from the Higher Education Research Institute, about 60 percent of faculty engage in at least one hour of community or public service each week—which of course means that around 40 percent do not.
There is no good data on the numbers of faculty members who are civically engaged in direct relationship to their scholarly work, which can include providing expertise to community organizations; writing policy briefs, white papers or op-eds; drafting model legislation; providing public comment on proposed regulations; and testifying in legislative hearings. But we do know that there are a number of barriers to this type of engagement.
Doctoral students are often socialized into narrow views of valuable academic work, and then, once they become faculty members, civic engagement is, at best, seen as something “extra” that they do on top of their “real” work. Faculty incentive systems, including promotion and tenure processes, also often disadvantage the work of civic engagement in favor of narrower views of scholarly work.
Even worse, many institutions actively discourage faculty from being civically engaged. This was certainly my experience as a faculty member, when I would regularly receive emails from well-meaning administrators about all of the things that faculty were not allowed to do with regard to participating in the political process. These messages included prohibitions against using university-issued computers or email to engage with policy makers and requirements to coordinate any political activity with the dean. Importantly, neither of these mandates were actually consistent with university policy or principles of academic freedom related to extramural speech. What I never received was any communication to help me understand and enact what I was allowed to do. Even without expressly censoring faculty civic engagement, these types of communications exert a strong chilling effect.
Finally, many faculty members have either lost, or never developed, their civic engagement muscle. Given the intense time demands of faculty careers, there is often little time for civic engagement. At the same time, opportunities for shared governance within the institution, which might provide opportunities to develop civic skills, are limited and deteriorating.
All of these challenges are amplified for non-tenure-track and contingent faculty members. Many of these faculty members are excluded from shared governance processes that do exist, may be teaching courses across multiple institutions to make ends meet, and lack even the limited protections that tenure provides against retaliation for public-facing work.
Although these barriers present challenges for faculty civic engagement, they also provide a roadmap on how institutions can better embrace the role of faculty in their democratic mission. And given how little many institutions are doing to actively encourage faculty civic engagement, there are some easy first steps.
To start, institutions can learn from effective practices in encouraging student voting and civic engagement and adapt those practices for faculty. That could entail providing voter registration forms at new faculty orientation, just as many do during new student orientation. This would both provide practical support, particularly for those faculty members who recently moved to start their positions, and communicate the value the institution places on voting and civic engagement. Canceling classes on election day, hosting candidate forums or debate watch parties on campus, and setting up on-campus polling locations have all been shown to support student voting and can be expanded to intentionally facilitate faculty voting as well.
Beyond voting, institutions can provide more direct encouragement for faculty to engage with communities, organizations, policymakers and others to get their work into the hands of the people who can use it. A first step is to stop actively discouraging faculty from this type of engagement. Beyond that, though, institutions can and should provide workshops and trainings on topics like communicating to diverse audiences, writing op-eds, writing policy documents and legislation, building relationships with legislators and much more. Just as institutions provide grant writing workshops and editorial support for academic manuscripts, they can also provide nonpartisan, viewpoint-neutral, civic engagement–related skill development to interested faculty.
Institutions should also recognize that, in the current highly charged political climate, faculty who engage with the public and policy makers might face pushback, and even harassment, from those who disagree. Campus leaders and faculty groups need to proactively develop policies and procedures for supporting faculty members who are targeted for their work and make sure that faculty know they will be supported—especially contingent faculty members who face the highest levels of precarity.
Ultimately, though, institutions need to recognize that faculty civic engagement is part of their democratic mission, and thus the work of civic engagement needs to be incentivized and rewarded in the same way that other mission-critical work like teaching and research is. This argument is not new; Ernest Boyer argued for expanding our understanding of scholarship decades ago, and organizations like the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, Campus Compact and even Carnegie Classifications provide frameworks for promoting engaged research. Organizations like the Scholars Strategy Network provide practical support for faculty to translate research into policy. And foundations, like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have also started to take an interest in re-imagining faculty reward systems, as evidenced by the recent Modernizing Academic Appointment and Advancement (MA3) Challenge, which will hopefully provide actionable examples of real reforms.
For higher education institutions to truly live out their democratic missions, however, these frameworks and practices cannot be one-off projects that happen in pockets of campus or at a handful of institutions. While encouraging student voting and civic engagement has become a widely shared practice, the culture of the sector needs to shift to also embrace faculty civic engagement as an everyday, mission-critical practice.
