Creditable Civic Engagement? Aligning Work on Civic Activity with Faculty Incentives

Creditable Civic Engagement? Aligning Work on Civic Activity with Faculty Incentives

By Kenneth W. Moffett and Laurie L. Rice, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Less than two years into our time as assistant professors, our university’s then-Director of Marketing and Communications emailed us to discuss a partnership among our institution, interested collaborators at Washington University in St. Louis, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This project’s goal was to jointly administer a survey across both campuses of randomly chosen college students, subject to Institutional Review Board approval at both sites. The survey data would be used for a series of media articles about local college students and the 2008 presidential election. Although both of our training and primary research interests focused on American political institutions, we also were interested in political behavior. Thus, the possibility of collaborating with another institution alongside the media and pursuing interests in political behavior was alluring and exciting.