| Over the past decade, American colleges and universities have made a marked reinvestment in their public service missions. In the name of greater civic engagement, a return to public purposes, and education for citizenship, campus leaders have recalibrated institutional objectives and implemented new strategic plans. Their aims have included the forging of stronger connections with outside constituencies, establishing more research partnerships to help address problematic social issues, taking a lead role in community development projects, and contributing to K-12 improvement initiatives. Perhaps most visibly of all, service-learning has become a regular fixture in the undergraduate curriculum, and community service and volunteering more generally are now common practice for a significant majority of undergraduates.; The focus of this study is the rhetorical underwriting that has guided the emergence of a public service and engagement agenda, and the effects of this underwriting on how this agenda is implemented within colleges and universities. The root questions of this study are rhetorical and institutional: What are the terms by which public service and engagement are justified as necessary, legitimate, and desirable concerns for the academy? Who are the most prominent producers of this discourse, and how effective have they been in stimulating changes in practice and policy? Why do campus leader respond as they do to shifts in the imperatives they are compelled to fulfill, or to uncertainties about whether emerging imperatives will take hold? This study addresses such questions by examining how the public service and engagement imperatives materialized, how an agenda took shape under the rubric, and how this agenda was adapted to fit the strategic aims of top administrators at a large public research university. Addressing these questions helps to develop a robust model of higher education transformation, adding to a growing body of literature and practice that places organizational and institutional cultures at the center of explanations of organizational change. |
