Document Type
White Paper
Publication Date
9-2026
Abstract
Scholars have described the current era as a polycrisis, with climate change overlapping and interacting with other social justice and environmental challenges. While the expertise and capacity housed in academia has tremendous potential to help society face these threats, scholars and others have long critiqued academia as too isolated from the practical problems of society and front-line communities. While engaged scholarship (ES) connects academia and real-world problems, tenure policies are usually designed to primarily reward “traditional” scholarship focused on journal articles and academic books. This study sought to investigate the contrast between higher education institutions’ publicly shared values aligned with ES and the degree to which they have adopted written tenure policies that acknowledge and reward ES. We documented ES-related themes in public-facing documents (mission statements, strategic plans and web pages) from 27 small liberal arts colleges and searched tenure documents from the same colleges for approaches recommended in the literature to support ES. We found that 26 of 27 institutions used language aligned with ES in their mission statements and strategic plans (highlighting leadership, societal and global impact and engaged citizenship). However, uptake of recommended tenure policy language changes to support ES was relatively low. Less than 12% of tenure documents explicitly acknowledged ES as a form of scholarship and only about 5% contained guidance around elements that are often critical in tenure cases involving ES: non-traditional research products, community impacts, external reviewers, and public writing. Overall, we found that these colleges are often publicly signaling an interest in social impact but are largely not adopting tenure guidelines optimized to enhance and support social impact-focused scholarship. We also found overlap between approaches designed to support ES and those recommended for cultivating diverse faculty pools. These results highlight the potential for small liberal arts colleges (and higher education more generally) to align policy with values by revising tenure guidelines to better support engaged scholarship.
Keywords
public scholarship, public engaged scholarship, community engaged scholarship
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY 4.0 under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy.
Version
Author's Submitted Manuscript
Recommended Citation
Bareket, Sian; Barron, Alexander R.; O’Meara, Abigail; and Chettri, Charavee Basnet, "Aligning Tenure with Institutional Values: Supporting and Rewarding Engaged Scholarship in College Tenure Policies" (2026). Environmental Science and Policy: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/env_facpubs/37