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In 2006, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching developed an elective classification for community engagement for institutions of higher education. To receive the classification, campuses must complete an application and respond to questions by providing evidence that demonstrates a commitment to sustaining and increasing their community engagement efforts (Welch & Saltmarsh, 2013). Many of the application questions relate to policies and practices that affect faculty careers. For example, the 2015 Community Engagement Classification application asked institutions to describe relevant professional development opportunities and ways in which faculty community engagement is incentivized, recognized, and rewarded. These questions are important, as research has shown that faculty members are central to campus community engagement efforts (O'Meara, Sandmann, Saltmarsh, & Giles, 2011). Yet, the 2015 Community Engagement Classification application failed to capture the contributions of and supports for non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF), an ever-growing segment of the faculty population (Burgan, 2006; Hoeller, 2014). This is not surprising, as few institutions collect data about their NTTF or have adequate structures to support their careers (Kezar, 2012; New Faculty Majority [NFM], 2014). However, until the classification application requests this information, it is impossible to know what role NTTF play in the larger institutional commitment to community engagement. If the institutionalization of community engagement is heavily dependent upon faculty, then future advancement of community engagement will be increasingly dependent on NTTF as well. This paper seeks to answer two key questions. First, unless campuses facilitate and encourage the full participation of NTTF, can institutions truly maximize their community engagement potential? Second, if fair treatment of faculty is a form of community engagement in and of itself, do institutions that subject their NTTF to unfair wages and working conditions deserve the community engagement classification?

The purpose of the "Bringing Theory to Practice" May 15th seminar was to examine and explore a wide range of faculty rewards (including promotion criteria, awards, faculty development support, and policies at various levels) that provide incentives and recognition to faculty for undertaking community-engaged scholarship (CES). The central problem the seminar addressed is that most universities lack a system of incentives and supports for faculty who undertake (or are considering) community-engaged scholarship addressing broad social impact. Thirty individuals participated in the seminar, primarily faculty and administrators from the five campuses in the University of Massachusetts system representing a range of disciplines and various levels of faculty rank. The seminar offered an opportunity to examine what is being done to reward community engagement across the campuses of the University of Massachusetts system within the context of national efforts and change initiatives, and in light of some emergent campus discussions. This paper briefly describes the seminar structure and findings and concludes with recommendations.

The Community Engagement Classification is an elective classification offered by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In order to be classified, campuses provide evidence documenting engagement through an application process. Campuses were classified in 2006, 2008, and 2010, and will be classified on five-year cycles from 2015 onward. (Information about the classification can be found on the Carnegie Foundation website.) This mixed-methods, two-part study sought to discover how institutions that received the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification in 2010 approached their application process and to examine the longer term outcomes of that process. How did they undertake a "full inventory" of their community engagement efforts, and what were the outcomes of undertaking such an inventory, beyond receiving the Classification? The study had two purposes: (a) To document the strategies and methods used by successful applicants for the 2010 Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, and (b) to document the cultural shifts experienced by institutions as they developed their successful applications for this Classification.

Americans love ranking systems. Whether we are ranking the hottest celebrities, the top ten singles, the top chef, or the next design star, ranking seems to be built into the American psyche as a symptom of our competitive, aspirational nature, and our desire to quickly understand the value of things. This desire has fueled a veritable ranking industry with respect to institutions of higher education. There is great diversity in what ranking systems purport to rank. Beyond the well-known U.S. News and World Report (USNWR) "Best Colleges" lists are those that rank specific institutional types, such as flagship, land-grant, and international universities. Others aim to provide information to consumers about how a particular college or university rates on anything from "value," broadly defined, to institutional commitment to sustainability, gender balance within the student population, and salaries of recent graduates, to the perceived quality of its athletic facilities, the popularity of its website, or its status as a party school. The ranking industry has become very influential in higher education, raising questions about the relationship between dominant ranking systems and the purposes and goals of institutions of higher education. Whose interests do the most widely-used rankings systems serve, and why? What purposes and ideologies are they not representing? Questions such as these led the first author of this paper to develop a graduate course on ranking systems in higher education. The second author was first a student, then a speaker in the course. The purpose of this article is to present the authors' critique of the main weaknesses and contributions of dominant ranking systems, to consider some of the positive and/or neutral roles that they are serving, and to offer three examples of purposes and goals of higher education the authors believe are not being fulfilled.

The Community College Student Success Think Tank, part of the Community College Student Success Project, funded by Lumina Foundation for Education, brings student and academic affairs officers together with institutional researchers to reflect on trends and issues surrounding data-driven decision making in community colleges. Participants consider various forms of accountability data, processes and analyses to bring about institutional transformation. At a recent meeting, Think Tank members discussed ways to create a culture of inquiry at community colleges.

The message of new faculty is not new, but their power may be. As the demand for new faculty increases due to retirements and increased enrollments in systems and institutions around the country, large cohorts of tenure-track faculty are being hired. Early-career faculty want what they've wanted for many years now: clarity surrounding the tenure process, a workload that is meaningful and manageable, professional development for research and teaching, a hospitable campus climate, a collegial workplace, work-family balance, equity, transparency, and fairness. Many young teacher scholars are interested in collaboration over competition, research that is organized around problems rather than disciplines, and a multidisciplinary work environment shaped by interaction between researchers and users. At the same time, colleges and universities are facing pressures from outside to change what they do, how they do it, and how they measure it--much of this in line with the values and concerns of new faculty cohorts.

The United States Supreme Judicial Court is currently deliberating the University of Michigan Affirmative Action lawsuits involving three white students who claim they were discriminated against because of race-conscious admissions policies. Organizations, such as the Center for Individual Rights, which sponsored the Michigan plaintiffs, and the Center for Equal Opportunity, have spearheaded drives to evaluate affirmative action programs in light of equal protection under the law. Viewed in this light, these policies appear to be unfair to white candidates. Examined more closely, concerns about equitability are missing from arguments about fairness. NERCHE's Multicultural Affairs Think Tank members discussed the changed environment brought about by these lawsuits and its implications for colleges and universities.

Perhaps more than most academic issues, remedial education evokes fervent emotions and unyielding opinions. Consensus is hard to reach even about the nomenclature, with remedial conveying a sense of deficiency in need of correction pitted against the developmental approach that focuses on change and growth. On campus, the many aspects of the controversy often get voiced in questions rather than answers: What can we do to help these students? Why were these students accepted? Who should and who will teach in these remedial programs? Should we in higher education, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, still be talking about this issue?

Assessment, with a capital "A", has become in the academy a politically loaded buzzword that closes many more doors than it opens. Assessment, with a small "a", however, is a necessary part of any attempt to find the best path forward in environments that change. At meetings this spring, Members of NERCHE's Departments Chairs Think Tank and Associate Academic Deans Think Tank discussed this controversial issue, focusing on ways to foster climates in which faculty and administrators are collaborative partners in assessment with the intention of strengthening teaching and learning.

Immediately after the events of September 11, the US was stunned by horror and disbelief, angry at the perpetrators of such awful violence, puzzled by the country's inability to recognize itself in the eyes of the world, and eager to learn more about other cultures from which it felt so alien. Our college campuses reflected this range of responses. At their first meetings of the academic year, members of NERCHE's Think Tanks, who represent faculty and administrators in New England, and SAGES (Senior Academics Guiding Educational Strategies), retired presidents and provosts, described their reactions and the range of responses campus.

There is rarely a perception in colleges and universities that everyone owns the financial plan. Deans, department chairs, and division heads are most concerned with their own budgets, rather than the aggregate. Mythologies about how the academic and financial sides of the house operate create artificial divisions and compromise the development of shared responsibility. Driven by myth, each side tends to view the other as a threat to its values and priorities. These views often stereotype the other in ways that become self-fulfilling prophesies. For example, Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) believe that academics are inefficient and that CFOs, with their particularly keen grasp of reality, are better suited to set institutional priorities. They believe that, as in the for-profit world, finance is the language and measurement of success, and everyone should be fluent. And from the academic side of the house comes the conviction that those who work in finance are unable to comprehend the essence of higher education and that CFOs will arbitrarily take away needed resources. In a recent discussion NERCHE's [New England Resource Center for Higher Education] Chief Financial Officers Think Tank approached the task of finding ways for the CFO to help dismantle these myths and build partnerships with academic administrators.

The New England Resource Center for Higher Education's (NERCHE) Civic Engagement Cluster is a multi-institutional model for strengthening civic engagement in higher education across ten institutions simultaneously. Reflecting NERCHE's mission to promote community, collaboration, and change in higher education, the Cluster is based on the premise that significant change can be accomplished most effectively through collaboration and communication across institutions. The purpose of this Brief is to pass on some key lessons learned in the pilot year of this project about laying the groundwork for collaboration and improving institutional practice.

One of higher education's crowning achievements is that colleges and universities are currently educating many groups of people who have been denied access to this resource in the past. A growing percentage of the new population of students arrives on campus with unique mental health needs, which until now campuses have been largely unprepared to accommodate. This new student profile may be more familiar to Student Affairs' offices, but the educational implications extend to the whole campus. Members of NERCHE's (New England Resource Center for Higher Education) Student Affairs Think Tank discussed this topic at one of their meetings and offer the following insights.

The Student Affairs profession has changed significantly. Is graduate training keeping up? Do young Student Affairs professionals know what to expect once they get to campus? Members of NERCHE's (New England Resource Center for Higher Education) Student Affairs Think Tank met to discuss the relationship between graduate training and the workplace.

Ten years ago higher education scholars predicted a major faculty turnover in the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century--a prediction based on demographic data on an aging faculty. The turnover is under way, accelerated by early retirement policies. Currently blocks of faculty positions are opening up at regional colleges and universities, and new faculty are being hired in groups, rather than a few at a time. In larger universities, the impact of this kind of hiring is felt most acutely at the department level. At small institutions, the effects can be institution wide. Throughout this academic year, [New England Resource Center for Higher Education's] NERCHE's Department Chairs, Chief Academic Officers, and Associate Deans Think Tanks have examined changes in faculty demographics and discussed the structures and policies that campuses need to orient and retain new faculty.

[New England Resource Center for Higher Education's] NERCHE's think tank members recently participated in a discussion of the competitive forces driving change in higher education. The discussion, facilitated by The Futures Project: Policy for Higher Education in a Changing World (www.futuresproject.org), revealed tremendous concern among faculty and administrators in New England about safeguarding the principles of equal access and equal educational opportunity during a time of accelerating competition for students. This is a crucial time for a reevaluation of barriers to full educational opportunity in this country. We need policies both at the institutional level and the state and federal levels to reverse the widening educational and economic divide.

This brief was derived from the discussions of [New England Resource Center for Higher Education's] NERCHE's think tank for coordinators of GEAR UP school-college partnerships. The insights of these coordinators point to the principle that it is the quality of the relationships among the partners that determines the effectiveness of multi-institutional collaborations. This means then that those who support and invest in multi-institutional collaborations should also focus on supporting the process of partnership building. But what does this mean in practical terms? It means being strategic right from the beginning in the design of grant structures, and throughout the relationship with the grantees. This brief provides examples of the kinds of structures and purposeful actions that build effective partnerships. The examples and the recommendations that follow are intended primarily for project funders but are relevant for all those involved in higher education collaborations. Both the funders and the grantees need to advocate for partnership building as a sound investment strategy.

Scholars of higher education have long recognized that existing reward systems and structures in academic communities do not weight faculty professional service as they do teaching and research. This paper examines how four colleges and universities with exemplary programs for assessing service as scholarship implemented these policies within colleges of education. Case studies suggest that policies to assess service as scholarship can increase consistency among an institution's service mission, faculty workload, and reward system; expand faculty's views of scholarship; boost faculty satisfaction; and strengthen the quality of an institution's service culture.

Within any college and university, it is in the academic department where most of the work is accomplished in educating students and carrying out the institution's academic mission. Department chairs are at the front lines of policy implementation. At a recent meeting members of [New England Resource Center for Higher Education's] NERCHE's Department Chairs Think Tank weighed in on what they have learned from their experiences with post-tenure review (PTR) policies.

Assessment and accountability are embedded in the context in which most colleges and universities operate. In the current climate, one is deeply entwined with the other. Originally, assessment in higher education meant assessing students. The broader appeal of the concept quickly claimed the attention of a multitude of constituents within the academy, each with a different goal in mind -- from program review to public relations. Those whose relationship to the academy was once or twice removed, such as trustees, accreditors, and legislators, saw assessment as a simple and cost effective means to report information about the effectiveness of complex organizational processes as a way to hold institutions accountable. Especially in times of economic upheaval, "accountability" held much promise for those watching the bottom line.

Benchmarking is a widespread practice in all industries today. Higher education is no exception. One need only look at annual rankings in "U.S. News and World Report" to appreciate power of benchmarking in a market-driven society that is seeking the best value in education. To the public, and even to leaders in higher education, measures such as these amount to an externally imposed evaluation. The impact of benchmarking on an institution can be significant. But is it worth it? Chief Financial Officers from the New England area offer their views.

The process of reviewing and renewing a program of general education is complex, challenging, and often frustrating. This paper is presented with the aim of facilitating the process from inception to successful conclusion. Practical guidelines and suggestions, derived from long experience as faculty member, academic administrator, and consultant, are offered to assist those responsible for reviewing, evaluating, developing, and implementing general education curricula. Emphasis is placed on collaborative practices, ongoing open communication, thorough planning, and reliable information. It is assumed throughout, that pitfalls can be avoided, obstacles circumvented, and a climate of civility maintained despite the difficulty and scope of the task.

The wonders of the information technology (IT) revolution have landed hard and fast on college campuses bringing with them a myriad of challenges for academic leaders. A group of Chief Academic Officers met to discuss the challenges of technology on their campuses. They identified three categories that have implications for organization and planning: 1) Finances and Economic Capacity, 2) Priority Setting and Assessment of Value and 3) The Role of the Faculty.