Why Faculty Promotion and Tenure Matters to Community Partners

Communities across our nation - whether geographic, ethnic, or issue-based in their composition - are struggling to be healthy, to grow, and thrive. The production of knowledge and the sharing of knowledge by both the community and the higher education institution is the key to helping our communities to improve. Retaining and valuing community-engaged faculty who can both represent the academy to the community and bring the community into the academy are essential to helping secure our vision of the common good. In this paper, three community partners, experienced with and engaged in partnerships between universities and communities with varying challenges of success and failure, examine the specific challenge of review, promotion, and tenure for community-engaged faculty.