As a person who works for Outreach and Engagement—obviously we do the type of community outreach work that Mathieu is writing about. And I am sort of offended (in a naïve sort of way) about how she feels about community engagement work through Universities and how she feels that Universities exploit and ultimately do not help the communities they are “serving”. However, I also recognize that she is in fact right about a lot of her views and I have seen first-hand how researchers don’t really care if they help the community they simply want grant money and data to get more grant money.
The University Outreach and Engagement department website says that they “foster a reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationship between the University and the Public.” Then in the next paragraph they say that “outreach and engagement provides university scholars with new information for publications.” Perhaps the extent to which each study or research project is “mutually beneficial” depends on the researcher and the type of project. I like to think that when I am a grant writer or a principal investigator on a community project my work will truly be mutually beneficial (or maybe my view is a little too romantic and I need to acquire a little bit of healthy cynicism). I would think that this type of work HAS TO be mutually beneficial or else we wouldn’t be able to continue doing it.
Looking at the UOE website a little further I think that we do our best. We appear to be helping communities with the projects that we do. Maybe it would be beneficial to do a study on whether or not the community wants us to help
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I think there is a need in the community for university partnerships, and I think that there are parts of the community that would like our help. I think, though, that a lot of the time, the individual programs go about community engagement the wrong way. There are some really good community engagement/service learning programs here, and then there are some that are not so good, but I think that the University should definitely build a better relationship with its community partners.
ReplyDeleteAmen Sista! lolz ;)
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. However, I think Mathieu is coming from the tradition of English studies, which has worked hard to repress the public. The public has often times found no use of English studies outside of Freshman Writing courses. In fact, that is how a lot of English faculty keep their jobs. So, there is a lot of animosity floating around this air. Like I said before, many English professors write as though they have to defend their career choice to their parents.
ReplyDeleteI love the overarching theme of hegemony in English literary criticism...
ReplyDelete