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¹ See https://ptie.org/

faculty working at our institutions or the students who attend them, we’ve got a problem. And right now, we have a problem, and we’ve got to address it,” Smith said.

O’Meara echoed the need to move away from cookie-cutter evaluation approaches, with the metaphor used by Sapna Cheryan of the University of Washington of fitting through a “cardboard cutout” to describe how existing frameworks are often ill-suited to the unique impacts of engaged work. Redefining hiring, promotion, tenure, retention, and awards processes to foster an environment in which all forms of scholarship are valued involves “scripting and educating and appropriately making sure that the evaluation that’s happening for folks in their different lanes is appropriate to the context within which they are working,” she stated.

Carter noted that the consensus recommendations for evaluating faculty based on innovation and entrepreneurship also apply to evaluating community-engaged work. Developed through engagement with 70 universities and 12 stakeholder organizations, the PTIE consensus process yielded four recommendations: (a) linking faculty evaluations with the values, goals, and priorities of the university; (b) developing the metrics to evaluate in keeping with those values, goals, and priorities; (c) recognizing that innovation, entrepreneurship, or community-engaged work happens in areas of faculty work beyond research; and (d) addressing the implicit bias that happens in the evaluation process.

“Promotion and tenure sit at the fulcrum of change on a campus,” said Carter. While fair and transparent evaluation processes foster excellent research institutions that value engaged scholarship, promotion and tenure are just “one of the many levers,” he pointed out. “If you’re not thinking about this when you’re hiring, if you’re not thinking about this at annual evaluations, if you’re not thinking about this in how you do a position description, how you assign space [and] how you assign resources, the whole house of cards falls apart.” While the exact definition of an excellent university will vary across institutions, he said, valuing a diverse ecosystem of faculty contributions, aligned with university values and goals, is a key component.

Agility, Adaptability, and Responsiveness

The qualities institutions exhibited during the COVID-19 pandemic are illustrative of excellent research institutions, stated Morales—namely, agility, adaptability, and responsiveness to changing community needs. To instill such qualities, institutions need courageous leaders at all levels, to push against the artificial constraints of traditional rankings and metrics. Echoing Carter’s comments, Morales further called for institutions to hire and train employees based on institutional values and to ensure evaluators at all levels

understand and implement these values. The true measure of excellence, she said, is represented by tangible improvements in communities, such as policy changes, poverty reduction, and addressing income disparities.

LESSONS FROM THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH MODELS FOR FUNDING COMMUNITIES DIRECTLY

Boyce discussed her insights from NIH’s direct funding to communities and the capacity-building needs of community organizations. She explained that recent strategic efforts have galvanized NIH’s long-standing history of community funding. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, initiatives like the Community Engagement Alliance² and RADx-UP³ emerged to involve communities directly in health interventions, demonstrating the importance of flexible and rapid responses. Community feedback revealed a need for genuine co-creation and equitable, community-driven partnerships in which communities are funded directly, not paid as subcontractors, said Boyce. This need led NIH to look to models, such as Native American Research Centers for Health,⁴ for new ways to fund community organizations. Subsequently for Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society,⁵ NIH paid communities directly for the first time, through its Other Transactional Authority awards.⁶ The unprecedented response to this new funding model indicated community organizations’ readiness and enthusiasm. Boyce noted that phased awards and planning time can ensure sustainable, effective interventions that communities want and need, ultimately advancing public health through inclusive, engaged research practices.

Boyce emphasized that NIH funding serves as a significant incentive for engaged research. She noted an array of funding mechanisms designed to incentivize diverse and impactful research approaches, including collaborative agreements, phased awards, other transaction awards, and small business mechanisms. Tailoring the language of announcements to select for certain types of applications can serve as an additional type of incentive, Boyce noted. She also pointed out the recent Communities Advancing Research Equity

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² See https://ceal.nih.gov/

³ See https://radx-up.org/

⁴ National Institute of General Medical Sciences. (2024). Native American Research Centers for Health (NARCH). National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.nigms.nih.gov/capacity-building/division-for-research-capacity-building/native-american-research-centers-for-health-(narch)

⁵ See https://commonfund.nih.gov/compass

⁶ See https://www.era.nih.gov/erahelp/ASSIST/Content/ASSIST_Help_Topics/OTA/OTA_About.htm#:~:text=An%20Other%20Transaction%20(OT)%20is,terms%20and%20conditions%20of%20award

for Health™ initiative,⁷ which aims to build trust and relationships in the primary care setting. To sum up the incentive for engaged research provided by NIH, she concluded, “The incentive is funding, but it’s the incentive for funding that makes sense based on what we know in science [and] what we know about working with communities that really leads to a better outcome. We want sustainable interventions that work [and] really improve health.”

CHANGING EVALUATION: LEVERAGING DISCRETIONARY MOMENTS

O’Meara highlighted the main types of steps institutions are using to address the disincentivizing of engaged scholarship in promotion and tenure evaluations. Both systemic change and incremental steps are required to improve evaluative spaces, she emphasized, noting that it is a work in progress—“we are building the plane as we fly it.” Achieving systemic change requires many discretionary “micro moments” or opportunities for leaders to make impactful decisions that can provide needed support or resources outside of formal processes, along the trajectory, O’Meara noted. She categorized these changes in three types of discretion that people may already have within their existing authority at their institutions: leveraging, checking, and restructuring.

1. Leveraging discretion: Small changes, or “micro moments,” can reorient the way people view engaged research, such as updated job descriptions that emphasize the value of engaged scholarship, and scripts in promotion letter requests emphasizing an institution’s support of engaged research. Even the organization of a curriculum vitae can leverage a viewer’s discretion to see engaged work differently, she said, pointing out an example in which diversity, equity, and inclusion work was weighted more heavily when it was consolidated in one part of a curriculum vitae rather than throughout teaching, research, and service sections.
2. Checking discretion: This practice involves ensuring that important practices are happening, O’Meara explained. “We’re going to [. . .] check because we’re not quite sure the plane is flying right and this person’s getting a fair deal.” Such actions could include ensuring that promotion and tenure committee members are knowledgeable about interdisciplinary work or ensuring that an institution has engaged scholars in its applicant pool.
3. Restructuring discretion: Large-scale changes that involve creating new faculty roles or even entire institutions that embed a novel set of rules can leverage equity and support for engaged scholarship.

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⁷ See https://commonfund.nih.gov/clinical-research-primary-care

the classification—by requiring institutions to reflect on their practices and policies, the classification process drives them to implement needed changes.

The classification continues to evolve based on campus trends, best practices, and a community partner survey, Morales said. For example, she pointed out the inclusion of a new section on civic life and learning in the 2026 cycle, with questions about voter participation rates and free speech policies. “The things that need to show up, we try to make them show up,” she said. She also noted the recent implementation of individualized feedback reports, which provide campuses with specific, actionable insights for enhancing engagement efforts.

Morales described initial data from reclassification applications—namely, explicit language around tenure and promotion policies—indicating that the Carnegie Classification process incentivizes institutions to make concrete progress toward valuing engaged research. She invited collaboration to further refine their metrics and leverage their extensive data to understand trends and best practices for incentivizing engaged research in higher education.

The Role of the Association of American Universities in Promoting Engaged Research

Smith explored the unique role of AAU in both incentivizing and disincentivizing engaged research. Beginning with disincentives, Smith noted that research remains a central focus in AAU evaluations and that traditional evaluation metrics are deeply ingrained in academic culture and often hinder change. However, in terms of incentives, he noted that there is a growing recognition within AAU of the need to evaluate universities on a broader set of metrics, including community engagement.

While institutional leaders might advocate for change, true transformation requires grassroots support from faculty, Smith said. To illustrate such a grassroots approach, he used the example of teaching excellence—one pillar of excellence supported by AAU. The traditional metric used to evaluate teaching excellence, namely teacher evaluations, is widely believed to be ineffective. Institutional leadership could begin to change this deeply ingrained practice by facilitating departmental discussions about alternative teaching evaluation methods, including diverse artifacts of excellence, such as syllabi and teaching philosophies. New strategies could then be incorporated into evaluation practices and, along with structural changes, including altering promotion and tenure committees and establishing a vice chair for undergraduate teaching, could ultimately shift a department’s emphasis from research to teaching, Smith suggested.

He also pointed out that other professional societies, funding agencies, and publication standards could provide additional incentives for change by broadening their criteria for excellence to recognize and support engaged research.

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⁸ See https://searchadvocate.oregonstate.edu/

build relationships and the mismatch with the lengths of grants and funding cycles, and the time-consuming nature of the work.

Smith reiterated the challenge of limited faculty time, noting, “If you expect every faculty member to do everything we want them to do, they will never be able to do it.”

Several suggestions were made for developing relationships and achieving impact despite time constraints:

• Create a diverse faculty with varied skill sets to achieve comprehensive excellence (Smith).
• Develop frameworks that incorporate sufficient time for relationship-building and planning activities (Morales).
• Establish flexible tenure and evaluation models and alternative timelines for meeting criteria in teaching, research, and service to address time-related challenges in faculty evaluations (O’Meara).
• Provide institutional financial support to sustain key programs and relationships with communities beyond the traditional funding period, such as NIH’s 10-year Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society program, which builds in time for comprehensive evaluation, impact assessment, and sustainability (Smith and Boyce).

Improving Measurement of Engaged Research

Establishing metrics is one of the most tension-filled aspects of evaluating engaged research, said Carter. Moving beyond traditional conversion factors to a broad collection of metrics, such as those established by PTIE,⁹ can better value individuals throughout the life-cycle of their work. “There is no conversion factor. We should not be boiled down to a number. We should not be boiled down to some ratio. It’s about a narrative thesis of impact,” Carter stated. Boyce and O’Meara echoed the idea that evaluation metrics need to capture discovery, innovation, and overall impact.

Boyce also suggested that strong metrics can both improve outcomes and document the opportunities of existing programs. O’Meara added that engaged scholars need to be given the latitude to define their objectives and outcomes. She shared an example of a scholar who influenced state policy to provide subsidies to underresourced mothers, highlighting the need for evaluation metrics that measure diverse impacts, such as policy changes and community health improvements. Morales added that

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⁹ See https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/defaults/jw827k251

engaged scholars and community partners require considerable time to work together to determine “what success looks like” for a project.

Sustainability

Given the long time frame of community-engaged research, a follow-up question addressed the sustainability of programs across leadership changes at various levels. In response, panelists brought forth several relevant points.

• Data are key in proving the efficacy and impact of community-engaged scholarship to successive leaders, ensuring continuity of support (Boyce).
• Embedding engaged research throughout an institution’s mission statement, strategic plan, accreditation documents, and other accountability measures can promote sustainability. “So, it doesn’t matter who’s in charge. Whoever comes to be president is already walking into a place that they know believes in this. And it’s part of their ethos” (Morales).
• Sustainability can also be driven by community engagement—community stakeholders can take ownership of programs and advocate for their continuation (Smith).

The Role of Legislation

Susan Renoe, planning committee chair and associate vice chancellor at the University of Missouri, asked Smith whether legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act¹⁰ could help to align missions and incentives to bolster engaged research, akin to the Bayh-Dole Act for university technology transfer. Smith expressed skepticism, noting the lack of funding for the new TIP directorate and emphasizing the ongoing challenges in achieving knowledge exchange beyond patents and licenses. Given the current funding realities, Smith stressed the need to advocate for National Science Foundation (NSF) funding to support technological innovation. Carter reminded the audience that challenges related to the Bayh-Dole Act still exist 44 years after its implementation, suggesting that legislative solutions alone are insufficient.

INSIGHTS FROM KEY LEADERS

The workshop also featured reflections from two institutional leaders. Neeli Bendapudi, president of Penn State University, offered her views on

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¹⁰ CHIPS and Science Act, Pub. Law No. 117-167, 136 Stat. 1366 (2022). https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4346

the strategic opportunities for university leaders. Erwin Gianchandani, the NSF assistant director of the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP), reflected on the challenges and opportunities for advancing engaged research within academia.

To address the perennial challenge of making real change in academia toward prioritizing public impact research—a goal that has been pursued for decades without consistent success—Bendapudi introduced the nascent Presidents and Chancellors Council on Public Impact Research. This group, which met for the first time in the days before the workshop for initial conversations, was organized by Bendapudi, Angela Bednarek of The Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Transforming Evidence Funders Network, a group led by Bednarek that aims to create a meta-network of funders, university presidents, and government agencies that “has stickiness to it” and can make a substantial and lasting impact.

Bendapudi articulated three main reasons that the current moment is crucial for advancing public impact research. First, questioning the value of higher education is becoming more widespread, and steps are required to address this existential threat. Higher education institutions need to increase efforts to effectively communicate their worth and relevance, she noted. Second, Bendapudi expressed deep concern over the declining trust in expertise and science, which she believes poses a threat to democracy itself. The evolving nature of scientific knowledge, which can contribute to lack of public trust, is not a deficit, she noted, but is an intrinsic characteristic of the scientific method. Last, she highlighted the relatively short tenure of university leaders, which makes it imperative to build systemic, rather than individual, solutions.

In her role as president of Penn State, Bendapudi sees a unique opportunity to champion public impact research. She described Penn State’s distinctive structure, with 24 campuses across Pennsylvania, many of which serve majority-minority and first-generation students. This diverse and extensive network provides a fertile ground for engaging in meaningful public impact research. Bendapudi noted that today’s students care deeply about such research and that involving them can enhance their engagement and persistence in higher education. She emphasized that expertise is not enough—academic institutions need to be seen as both competent and well-intentioned to build and maintain trust and effectively engage communities. She called for greater involvement of professional organizations in valuing engaged research. While public impact research should not detract from basic research, it is critical that engaged research involve genuine knowledge creation, not merely service, she said.

To conclude, she used the analogy of a sports team to call for a cultural shift that appreciates the varied contributions of faculty members, which

collectively can make universities a “triple threat”—excelling in research, teaching, and service.

Gianchandani provided a complementary view by discussing NSF’s evolving role in driving use-inspired, impact-driven research through strategic partnerships and capacity building. While NSF is well known for its long history of supporting basic, foundational science and engineering, it is less known for its focus on use-inspired, impact-driven research, he said. The TIP directorate aims to accelerate the process of foundational research to impact by fostering collaboration and addressing societal, economic, and national challenges. This focus on use-inspired, impact-driven science complements—and does not distract from—NSF support of foundational work, he explained.

NSF has been committed to engaged research and researcher-participant partnerships for many years, said Gianchandani. “We just don’t talk about it as much at NSF and, frankly, we just don’t invest as much in it as we invest on the foundational side of the house.” Programs like Smart and Connected Communities¹¹ and the Civic Innovation Challenge¹² were early efforts to bridge research with practical community needs. To accomplish TIP’s mission of accelerating research to impact and broadening participation, Gianchandani noted the directorate’s two-fold focus: growing the capacity of institutions, including emerging and minority-serving institutions, to participate in engaged work; and establishing a balanced approach within NSF between foundational science and use-inspired research. Some NSF programs aim to work collaboratively with institutions to address their unique challenges and maximize their potential of success in NSF funding competitions, including Enabling Partnerships to Increase Innovation Capacity¹³ and Accelerating Research Translation.¹⁴

The time is ripe, Gianchandani said, for advancing impactful research through collaborative, cross-sectoral efforts. Many students today are motivated by a desire to create a positive and lasting impact on society. These students believe in science and engineering as tools for societal transformation and are eager to tackle real-world challenges. He urged immediate action to capitalize on the motivation of students toward societally transformative work, framing the current moment as a generational opportunity to advance impactful research.

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¹¹ See https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/scc-smart-connected-communities

¹² See https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/civic-civic-innovation-challenge

¹³ See https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/enabling-partnerships-increase-innovation-capacity

¹⁴ See https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/accelerating-research-translation-art