They respond to the rewards they receive, but the present structure does not reward them very much for civic engagement. Modifying the reward structure of the research university to accommodate civic work requires recognizing that creating new knowledge and publishing it in scholarly journals is only one way of knowing. Wingspread participants agreed that we need to broaden the criteria for evaluating excellence in scholarship and establish a new system for documenting and assessing activities. We must also change the way we train graduate students, the criteria for review of journal articles, and the priorities of funders that support the research enterprise. The obvious insufficiency of the present structure does not, however, justify the inaction of individual faculty members regarding their responsibility for civic engagement.
Faculty do many things that offer few rewards.
The reward structure is an important institutional instrument, to be sure, but it is neither the only vehicle for behavioral change nor the one that best fits the civic situation. Faculty do respond to the rewards they receive, and the reward structure does need modification, but I believe that civic work should not require monetary reward. On the contrary, civic work should be a nonremunerative responsibility of membership in the commonwealth. Before long, one-third of the United States population will be of African, Asian, or Hispanic descent. As the numbers of people of color increase in a nation historically dominated by those of European descent, education for democracy will become more complex.