CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been selected by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in the foundation’s 2008 community-engagement classification.
The U. of I. was selected in the Curricular Engagement and Outreach & Partnerships category, which honors institutions with substantial commitments to teaching, learning and scholarship that engage faculty, students and community in “mutually beneficial and respectful collaboration,” the foundation said.
“Receiving the Carnegie Foundation recognition documents our longstanding land-grant commitment to engage with the citizens of the state and the world to assist them in addressing key societal issues,” said Richard Herman, the chancellor of the Urbana campus. “It is impressive that nearly 70 separate programs were described in the documentation submitted to support our selection. This demonstrates the breadth of our public engagement at Illinois.”
Colleges and universities with an institutional focus on community engagement were invited to apply for the classification. Illinois was required to submit documentation describing the nature and extent of its community engagement, including descriptions and examples of institutionalized practices of community engagement that showed alignment among mission, culture, leadership, resources and practices.
The U. of I. was one of 119 U.S. colleges and universities selected for the community-engagement classification.
Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered in 1906 by Congress, the foundation is an independent policy and research center based in Stanford, Calif., whose primary mission is “perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher.”
The foundation, through the work of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, developed the first typology of American colleges and universities in 1970 as a research tool to describe and represent the diversity of U.S. higher education. The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education continues to be used for a wide range of purposes by academic researchers, institutional personnel, policymakers and others.
More information can be found on the foundation’s Web site.
