Media often reports that the public has lost trust in higher education. Over the last decade-plus data also suggests that fewer people see the value of attending college.
Putting aside the shameful fact that a good deal of this fading trust is the result of targeted, disingenuous, and political-motivated campaigns to defund and undermine colleges and universities, colleges have also failed to convey their important social and economic roles for the public.
Regardless of fault, diminished trust is a problem in need of solution. I have one straightforward suggestion to get us started.
Communicate.
I am currently a university professor and an associate dean in the humanities and fine arts at a large public, research-focused, and liberal arts university. In my dean role, I get a chance to see how many faculty are engaged in our communities, both locally to globally. I have also taught and designed a course that won an award for its community engagement efforts. So, the problem is often not a gap in community connections – although these certainly exist – but a weakness in effectively sharing the mutually beneficial community-serving work being done.
Certainly, when deep pocketed donors appear, university representatives do their best to convey the most compelling research and stories. But this is not the same as making the case to the broader public; whom at least the public universities purport to serve.
UCSB’ mission statement never mentions the larger community, the public. Yet we have amazing partnerships that would demonstrate community partnerships and benefits.
The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, for example, oversees a translation services program that matches bilingual Spanish-speaking student interpreters with families in need of better communication during parent-teacher conferences. An Edible Campus Program tackles issues of food insecurity and food sustainability by supporting the creation of community gardens and increasing sustainable food production. In the recent past, environment studies students designed plans to help the city of Fulton, Missouri mitigate potential flood damage. Oceanographer David Valentine uncovered a massive toxic dumping site in the ocean off Los Angeles, featured in a Los Angeles Times exposé and the documentary Out of Plain Sight, and which is now possibly leading to state legislation. While the coverage of Valentine’s work has received more public attention than most, these examples are still just a drop in the bucket of numerous impactful projects that benefit the public.
At UC Santa Barbara we hosted a community engagement brainstorming session inside a downtown space that the university recently purchased (formerly a Staples office supply store). The plans for this space remain undetermined, and attendees were asked how we might best use the space to extend our community footprint, invite the community to partner more, and to generate new mutually beneficial opportunities. This exercise was certainly important, welcome, and perhaps even locally innovative – which may be appropriate given the intimations that it should become a community-facing and innovation hub. But I also could not help lamenting that such a gathering should feel so monumental, and relatively novel. It puts the university in an awkward position where if this local connecting space fails it will likely prove disastrous in the public eye. It must succeed, or its risks further justifying the growing lack of trust.
If we can’t take the time to share this with the public, why would they and how could they trust us? How would we expect them to intuit the broader value of higher education?
A cursory glance at many university websites show they lack any visible space that shares their ongoing community engagements and opportunities.
I know that a webpage alone will not restore trust. The lack of such presence on university websites, however, certainly conveys a lack of attention to promoting all the good community-based work happening and sends a clear signal that such things don’t matter.
Before they even set foot on campus, students and their parents should already see and know how their college partners with and provides benefits to their community.
Here is a quick thought exercise: Ask yourself what are the two or three most important contributions that your local university makes to your community?
If the school has a big-time sports presence, the opportunities to gather for games is likely one of the first answers that come to mind. My university certainly draws reasonable interest based on sports (though we have no football team). The Arts and Lectures programs draws big audiences. There is local attention to the dense student neighborhood of Isla Vista which has long been a notorious party space. Recognition also comes from an elite physics research program, signaled by our multiple Nobel Prize winners.
Wonderful or notorious as these perceptions may be to the everyday observer, none quite register as a compelling “return on investment” for the public. To be sure, many university leaders are fond of explaining that sports are a university’s “front door,” a place where the community enters the rather exclusive grounds of the ivory tower. Yet this metaphor suggests that the community might also enter through a “backdoor,” that entryway through which “family” pass. Right now, too few get past that front door, and I suspect most only eyeball the university “house” from the sidewalk or from across the street.
So, we need more people walking through that back door; precisely where the family congregates, meeting us precisely where the most meaningful gatherings happen. The place we really get to know one another – the university and the public, especially locally.
My primary argument here is not that we need more outreach activities, although we probably do in fact need more, and especially more impactful ones. Looking at a sampling of university websites, I see that almost none highlight their community engagements very well, and the places where they are celebrated are too often submerged.
Most people don’t like to talk about themselves and many faculty are especially averse to anything that seems like self-aggrandizement. Yet these stories need to be shared. People want to understand and see how university work benefits them. So let’s make these important contributions more visible.