Savior, Servant, or Scallywag? Ethical Challenges of Community Engagement
Randy Stoecker
Draft presented at Trent University, as part of Ashley Fellowship program, 2006.
Thanks to Lynne Davis and Gayle Broad for assistance with learning more about Aboriginal approaches to research ethics, and to Tammy Rogers, Barb Woolner, and Jennifer Bowe for assistance with the title.
Introduction
“The word ‘academic’ is a synonym for irrelevant.” So goes the quote from one of my heroes, Saul Alinsky (1969:ix), perhaps the most famous community organizer in the United States. It has haunted me ever since I first read the quote in the mid-1990s, and even though by that time I had spent a decade trying to make myself useful to communities.
For it’s not easy to bridge the divide between academy and community. The community is open continuously for 365 days a year. The academy is open for only 10 to 16 week stretches. The community is subjected to strict government imposed deadlines. The academy operates on loose, mushy, fungible deadlines. The community is a place where mistakes have real consequences for real people. The academy provides an insulated space where mistakes are expected as part of the learning process. Higher education institutions are often quite powerful, and communities (unless they are very well organized) quite lacking in power. Universities have been historically structured to extract information, process it using rigid methods controlled by privileged academics, and transmit it to passive audiences often without regard to applicability. Communities are used to scrapping for whatever information they can find using whatever methods they can come up and putting it to work on practical problems.
Such a quandary brings us to today’s title: For as universities try to engage with community across such differences, they often seem stuck in one of two problematic roles.
The first role is that of savior. So self-assured are we in our belief that academic methods of creating and transmitting knowledge are best, that we see communities as ignorant or helpless—so helpless that untrained undergraduate students are considered smarter than the residents themselves. Communities are not even smart enough to determine their own needs, so we tell them what they should want from us. Some academics reject this savior syndrome by adopting the second role of servant. In doing so we often adapt the idea of noblesse oblige—since we are so privileged, we must donate time, knowledge and skills to communities. And instead of telling communities what they want, we ask them what they want, and attempt to provide it. We serve them, but retain control over the information extraction and production process.
Consequently, we are often seen as scallywags. Historically, this term appears to have been first used in the United States to refer to deformed cattle, soon after being adapted to refer to disruptive or disreputable people. Then it was used to pejoratively reference southerners in the United States who worked, out of a personal profit motive, for post-civil war reconstruction governments (Quinion, 2006). the perfect term to describe higher education’s attempts to engage with community—as we are so often seen as traitors to our heritage communities, especially when we try to combine serving or saving with meeting the self-interested goals of educating students and publishing articles. The term appropriately expresses the ethical messiness of much of what passes for university engagement with community. First, because of the savior syndrome, so much of the service learning, community-based research, and other forms of engagement have indeed disrupted or otherwise disempowered communities, and the university’s reputation has suffered, often to the point where community organizations started coming up with their own contract templates for any academic who wanted to partner with them. The servant syndrome was so internally contradictory, attempting to provide help for community-defined issues but so caught in the university’s own motivations to provide course content for students and publications for faculty that the service was seen as suspect.
To explore this scallywag problem a bit further, it might help to extend our discussion to the contradiction between capital and community. By community I mean those face to face social groups that provide for mutual support across multiple roles—neighbor, parent, worker, gardener, consumer, etc. Such groups are often defined as neighborhoods, or small towns, or geographically concentrated identity groups. By capital I mean those actors in a capitalist political economy who control land, machinery, large workforces, and information to support the accumulation of profit.
And here is the challenge. Capital constructs the world into what are called exchange values. Buildings and material goods, and even land, water, and air, are managed in terms of their value in an exchange marketplace dominated by corporations. Communities see these things very differently. A park, clean air, and the water supply are seen as what can be called “use values” from a community perspective. They are to be used for the fulfillment of community needs rather than exchanded in a marketplace. Even our houses are considered to be not just property but homes. Commodifying the material world (and even the social world—witness the emphasis on creating commodifyable “social capital” for community development) disrupts community traditions and ties, forcing ever further commodification by replacing goods and services that used to be provided through friendship with goods and services that now must be provided for money (Stoecker, 1998). It replaces a focus on the common good with a focus on self-interest.
In the United States our universities have become more and more expensive with less and less government support, shifting the emphasis from the use value of education to the exchange value of employment training. “Rack-em, pack-em, stack-em” is the new strategy of classroom enrollment management. And as students have to pay more and more of the cost of higher education, the pressure is on for those students to get a return on their investment. In response, universities in the United States pump out career-prepped prospects to support the further accumulation of corporate wealth and power. From all I have read and heard about Canadian universities, you are sadly following our lead. Can universities under such exchange value pressure support community use values?
So should true community engagement require fighting corporate and government exchange value pressures, including the university when it becomes corrupted by those pressures? If so, can we do that through a university context? It may in fact be getting harder rather than easier to discard our scallywag reputation. Two examples, a decade apart, may serve to illustrate. In the early 1990s I was teaching a new course called Community Organizing and Development at my previous university using, among other things, the writings of my hero Saul Alinsky quoted above. I was also intrigued by the growing call for “civic engagement” from universities across the country. So I gave my students the option of volunteering for community organizing/development projects instead of writing a long paper. Two students approached me and said that they heard the university was trying to quietly buy out the small working class neighborhood on the south side of the campus and tear down the homes for parking lots, and they wanted to help the residents organize against the university. Well, here I was an untenured assistant professor and my students wanted to get course credit to fight my university in support of a local neighborhood. I watched my career flash before my eyes and said yes. To their credit, the students did a wonderful job, making sure the residents, not themselves, were front and center in the local news. The university won this round, but they were forced to at least pay fair prices for the houses, rather than the low-ball offers they were originally making.
Over a decade later, that same university tried to make another land grab, this time choosing the upper-middle class neighborhood on its north side, for another parking lot plan that was right next to my house. This was particularly important to me, because I had accepted a job offer at the University of Wisconsin and we had just put our house up for sale. So I had a self-interest in the issue. Most of my career has been spent working with communities of which I was not a member. But this was my community, and I finally understood how it felt to have one’s use values threatened (not to mention the threat to our house’s exchange value). By this time I had taught that community organizing and development class a bunch of times and I figured it was time to find out if I could actually walk the talk. So I reread Alinsky, flyered half the neighborhood and got some other volunteers to flyer the rest of the neighborhood, got some people to ask hard questions of the university president at a couple of public meetings, held some organizing meetings, helped organize a public meeting with the university president and 100 neighborhood residents—not counting the dozens who had to be turned away when the room reached capacity. Well, in the midst of this we successfully sold our house (though at nearly $20,000 less than we had originally listed it), and a month after we moved away the university trustees passed a resolution backing off on their parking lot proposal.
What can we make of these examples in light of higher education’s new found emphasis on “community engagement?” It is, in fact, interesting to consider the choice of “engagement” to label higher education’s attempts to do good. For the term “engage” has some interesting meanings. Merriam Webster says “engage” can variously mean to offer, to entrap, to bind, to involve, to hold the attention of (which could also mean distract), to carry on an activity, to come together, and even to come into conflict (as in, engage the enemy). Which of these do we say? Which do we actually implement? Which do we mean?
In the examples above, we mean nearly all of these things. The university administration engaged its neighboring communities as enemies in conflict. And the communities obliged. I, as a member of the institution, engaged community members both as a coming together and to engage the university as an enemy. My students became engaged in binding themselves to the community and the integration of the course with the real life issue kept their attention focused.
Community engagement, then, is an extraordinarily complex, conflict-riven, multi-dimensional process filled with cross-cutting relationships and power inequalities. And because it involves both conflict and cooperation—and forces together incompatible structural interests of faculty, students, grass roots community members, and elites—it is filled with ethical dilemmas. Should I have given students course credit to attempt to save their neighborhood from a university parking lot? Should I have used my academic skills to organize a neighborhood against the university? But those are just my own specific examples. For many of you, there are other questions. Should unskilled students be sent out to use communities as a training ground, potentially leaving the communities worse off as a consequence? Should faculty be able to take the information obtained from their community work to advance their own careers?
In the United States we have, I would argue, been neither very conscious of the ethical dilemmas of community engagement nor very successful in addressing those dilemmas. We have nonprofit organizations inundated with students demanding service learning opportunities to the point they can’t get their own work done. We have ill-prepared and culturally insensitive students who reinforce the idea of communities as needy and incompetent rather than oppressed and exploited. We have faculty who impose their favored theories on communities, rather than build solutions out of listening carefully to community. We have institutions who will only support politically safe projects that are as likely to reinforce inequality as empower poor communities. In the United States we have a federal funding system that will only fund the university side of university-community partnerships, reinforcing power inequities between university and community.
You are in somewhat better shape, both nationally and even locally. Locally, the Trent Centre for Community Based Education, because it started with an emphasis on community-based research rather than service learning, has been able to develop a model of community-directed projects. Nationally, SSHRC’s Community University Research Alliance program, though woefully underfunded, at least allows for the possibility of community-led partnerships, though it does not require them. The TCCBE’s receipt of a five year $965,000 J. W. McConnell Family Foundation grant shows the national funding scene’s commitment to community-driven partnerships. Of course the real test will come in five years when the grant runs out. Will Trent University, local and regional government, and others then accept the opportunity to provide increased support for a model of community-university partnership that is independent of university control?
Seven Ethical Issues
But even with these hopeful signs, growing community engagement through community-based research, service learning, technical assistance, and other activities will also increase your confrontation with the ethical dilemmas of community engagement. So perhaps this discussion will give you something to think about as you grow your work and develop your practice. By presenting these dilemmas I do not mean to propose positions on them. Indeed, some of them I feel some fear at even mentioning, as their resolution could restrict my practice. But I believe they are important for us to discuss, so I will look past my own trepidations in the hopes that the discussion will be of value. You will notice that many of these ethical issues seem to imply a role for university ethics review committees, those university committees who must implement government guidelines governing what is ethical research. But whether your human subjects, or ethics, review committee is the appropriate vehicle for addressing these issues is an open. Indeed, such committees are often too limited in scope to take on some of these issues. So we may need entirely different structures to address these issues. That, too, I take no position on here. My role is mainly to confuse. So let’s take a look at the issues.
1. Should all community engagement, for research, or service, or technical assistance, require an ethics review?
This is the broadest and deepest of all the ethical questions we face. If you recall the historical origins of ethics review, the model comes out of the horrific scientific abuses of the Nazi regime in Germany, and of United States researchers as late as the 1970s (Reverby, 1998; The Belmont Report, 1979). The goal is to prevent harm being done to research subjects, without their knowledge, in the name of data gathering. Now, it is quite easy to argue that much community engagement does not involve data gathering. Students doing tutoring, or creating membership databases for organizations, or handing out meals at a soup kitchen, are not involved in a research project per se. On the other hand, it is also easy to argue that such activities are, just like medical experiments, designed to have an impact on human subjects. We can even argue that, because service learning projects and technical assistance projects are designed to impact individuals and organizations, they should be designed as research projects, with the same rigor expected in their design and conduct as for any research project. Should a tutoring project using students from a university class, for example, be designed with careful attention to what the treatment variable will be, how those administering the treatment will be trained to maintain quality and consistency, what the intended impacts will be, how those intended impacts will be measured or documented, and what the potential risks of the project are?
2. When should ethics review begin: at first contact or when there is an actual project design?
In traditional research, the researcher creates the design and then sends it to the ethics committee. In community engagement work, ideally, the project design is created jointly by the faculty and some kind of community representative. But too often that does not happen. I sit on the board of the Sociological Initiatives Foundation, which funds community-based research in the United States. I recently analyzed over 200 proposals to the foundation, and only a minority of them had any involvement of community residents or community-controlled organizations in the design of the project itself. Is it, then, the university’s job to review the professor’s approach to the community for any project designed to impact the community? I know many of my colleagues complain that their ethics review process requires exactly this, because it considers the partner organization to be a research subject. Personally, I think that is a misreading of the ethics requirements, since those same colleagues also complain about how it seems like they are supposed to come up with a research proposal before they’ve even met with the community.
The problem here is that both the ethics committee and the researchers are stuck with an ethics review process that can only talk about passive research subjects rather than active research partners. Under most ethics reviews, the review process only makes sense when there is an actual research design, which is well after the many meetings it takes to come up with the design. If there is to be an ethics review prior to the actual design, then it must deal with issues like how the community will be approached, how they will be informed of the researcher’s and university’s self-interests, and other things. This is a wholly different protocol for which ethics committees are not structured. Aboriginal communities and researchers speak of an ethical space where discussion and joint design of the knowledge process can occur (Ermine, Sinclair, and Jeffery, 2004). Such a process is also one of the ideals of community-based research. But it is not part of the current ethics review process.
It is also important to understand that often the community organization with which the university is working may itself not be controlled by the community. In such a case, should the same ethics protocols that apply to the university in its relationship with the community also apply to the organization’s relationship with the community? Is it ethical, for example, for a community organization to ask for an evaluation of its services without also involving the recipients of those services in the design of the evaluation?
The question, then, is whether we should we require an ethics review of the process of the partnership itself, to make sure that the community’s interests are being served? If so, what are the interests that are at stake? There are at least two interests, which constitute the next two ethical dilemmas.
3. Who should receive funding for a community-university partnership project?
In the United States, as I mentioned, and also in Canada in all practicality, the universities have received the bulk of the funding for partnership projects. Is that ethical? Should an ethics review process take into account not only the potential harm to subjects from the research or intervention itself, but also the potential inequities that could result from the university being paid to participate while a community organization contributes volunteer labor? I know of one community organization that tallied up its unreimbursed costs, to a total of $9,000, to participate in a service learning project with a local college whose participation was grant funded.
Universities often also typically scrape off 40-60% of a grant for overhead, even when they are subcontracting with community organizations. That leaves only half of the grant to support the actual work. There is no evidence that such a practice has anything to do with the university’s actual costs to manage the grant. Is that ethical? Or should there be a university ethics process that reviews the equity of funding formulas?
4. Who should control the fruits of the project?
This is the flip side of the front-end funding question. What happens when an academic writes a book about a community, with data generated from a community-based research process? Who should receive the proceeds? When I wrote my dissertation about the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, which fought off an attempt by a developer-government coalition to wipe the neighborhood off the map, nearly 20 years ago, the work got me my first academic job. The subsequent book (Stoecker, 1994) I wrote got me tenure. I used a community review process for all that I wrote, and returned all of my meager royalties from the book to the neighborhood, but we never had any formal agreement about that. Should there be such formal agreements and should universities make sure those agreements are established and followed? And how should benefits be distributed? What if a service learning tutoring project results in a new tutoring handbook that is sold far and wide for thousands of dollars? Who should receive the proceeds?
In addition, we mustn’t forget the ethical issue of who the data belongs to. First Nations in Canada, and indigenous people around the world, having suffered the extraction of cultural knowledge without permission for as long as there have been western researchers, have been developing their own codes of conduct and ethical review, many of which prohibit the extraction of data without the community’s permission. Far beyond the question of simply who the data belongs to, First Nations have elaborated this question to cover the issues of ownership, control, access and possession of information (Schnarch, 2004). Should universities also adopt such standards? The question of who owns the data, and what agreements should be required for its use, lead us to the next two ethical dilemmas.
5. Who should we consider when we ask about impact—only individuals or the community as well?
Most ethics review processes consider the health and welfare of only the individual receiving the “treatment.” But one of the fundamental features of community-based research is that it is supposed to impact an entire community. What are the possibilities that a feasibility study of a controversial economic development project could introduce conflict into a community, creating factions that could ultimately harm the community’s future economic development prospects? Should the ethics review process only consider the potential for harm to individuals participating in the feasibility study, or should the community as a whole be considered a subject to whom harm or benefit could also occur? And in such cases is a community-based research process even more imperative?
I do not mean here to imply that research which causes such conflict is inherently unethical. Indeed, I do research with groups whose purpose is to cause conflict around policy issues. The question is whether such conflict outcomes are ethical when they result from research that is not sponsored by a community organization. Denying community-sponsored conflict causing research through a university ethics review process could in fact further inequality and injustice. I recently had to turn down a research request from a community organization that wanted students to interview local businesses regarding whether they provided paid sick time, and to identify which businesses did and which did not. I knew we would have too much trouble getting such a project through our ethics review process. But not doing the research means this community organization has less information with which to advocate for paid sick time for its members.
6. Should the practice of informed consent extend to only the individual or to the entire community?
Remember, traditional ethics review requires informed consent only of the individual, who should be told what will be done to them and the possible consequences of the treatment for them as an individual. When we do research with communities or community organizations, however, the consequences will accrue to not just the individuals who were direct participants, but to others who were not involved, and to the organization or community to which they belong. Should the practice of informed consent thus be expanded to the community organization and even community level? If so, what should such a consent process include and what should it require? At my current university, all participating university researchers are required to undergo ethics training. There currently is no language that adequately takes into account the complications of conducting research jointly with community organizations, which means the researcher bears the entire burden of accountability for the ethics obligation. Should partner community organization staff also go through research ethics training, particularly if the organization is sponsoring research “on” a client population?
An aboriginal perspective, as I understand it through my western-clouded lens, emphasizes, among other things, connectedness. So strong is the connectedness that the distinction between human and earth is more difficult to make, and thus research ethics protocols that attempt to protect humans may apply also apply powerfully to research on the earth (Castellano, 2004). This can extend the principle of informed consent beyond the individual and the community to the soil itself.
7. How should ethics review be structured to prevent the review process itself from doing harm?
As I mentioned, I do not have a position on who should address and/or police all of these ethics issues. But you can probably tell already that the resolution of these ethical issues could involve some large changes for the entire ethics review process that would dramatically increase its workload and scope. Already, in many institutions, ethics review takes weeks (Brydon-Miller and Greenwood, 2006). Community organizations don’t have that kind of time. In many cases, issues arise for which service or research is needed immediately. If universities can’t respond to those needs they risk denying service to significant segments of the community. How do we design an ethics review process that can respond in days, rather than weeks, even when the research or service population includes children or prisoners, which increases the scrutiny required of the ethics review process?
In addition, many ethics review processes are predicated on the assumptions of western positivist science—that there will be separation between researcher and subject—and even see connectedness as a violation of ethics. Such procedures as respondent validation, where “research subjects” are provided with transcripts of interviews to correct errors, or drafts of reports to provide correction and perspective, are often seen as bad science. And yet, in aboriginal communities, such a community validation process is considered a critical ingredient of knowledge construction (Castellano, 2004).
Connected to the question of the ethics review process doing harm is the question of how to structure the ethics review process to not be caught in a conflict of interest between top-down defined interests of the university and bottom-up designed interests of the community. Returning to the two examples at the beginning of this paper, to what extent do we need to insulate the ethics review process against pressures from university administrators, or corporate leaders, or government officials, whose power will be thwarted by a successful community-based research or service learning project? For many of us, the other goal of community engagement through a university, along with having a positive impact on the community, is equalizing the social relations of knowledge production—putting in the community’s hands the ability to produce and distribute their own knowledge and to successfully challenge, through careful research, the untruths told by corporations, governments, and other institutions--even universities (Gaventa, 1993). Does our present ethics review process protect and support that goal?
Conclusion
Returning to our theme of exchange values vs. use values, many of you may see the more fundamental issues facing higher education. As higher education becomes more expensive, it becomes vulnerable to exchange value pressures—to do less for communities rather than more. For true community engagement means more pro-bono services, greater sharing of existing grant funds, more credit to community partners, and more hard budget funding of offices like the TCCBE regardless of whether they are under the university’s control.
It may be, in fact, that the most important ethics review process we need to undertake is the review of the university’s community relationships. As the call grows in Canada for social accounting (Quarter, Mook, and Richmond, 2003), and in Europe and Australia for triple bottom line (Elkington, 1999; City of Melbourne, n.d.) accounting that seeks to measure the economic, social, and environmental impacts of institutional and corporate decision-making, we can apply such models to assess the practical impacts of university community engagement activities. What would a university-community impact index, which took into account the community effects--both good and bad--of university decisions and faculty and student activities look like? Could such an effort be used to guide the development of a higher education ethics review process? Could such an effort be sponsored through an independent community-based research shop that could bring together university, community organization, government, and local business stakeholders?
Moreover, should such a process govern not just the university’s research and service relationships with community, but also its employment, land use, and spatial access decisions? You may recall that I began with a discussion of student and faculty involvement in opposing what we saw to be unethical university land use decisions. If a university is truly committed to community engagement that is not a distraction, is not primarily for institutional profit, and is not “engaging the enemy” then perhaps decisions such as whether to remove a campus from the heart of a community, or expand a campus over the top of a neighborhood, require the same kind of partnership-based, rather than top-down bottom line-based, decision-making process.
We see, in the end, that neither the savior, nor the servant model of university engagement is appropriate. In the United States we have been slowly turning a corrupted service learning model away from its focus on serving the university at the expense of the community toward a model that puts the community first. And, while I hear increasingly of similar problems in Canada as service learning becomes popular here, the Trent Centre and the Native Studies program have both been forging the alternative, putting community first. Canada’s First Nation’s communities are also forging a new path for academic-community relationships. Is there any reason that the models guiding research with First Nations communities cannot inform all university relationships with all communities? Could Section Six of the Tri-Council Policy Statement (Government of Canada, 2005) apply to more than research relationships and to more than aboriginal communities?
We need a new model, perhaps even a new word, and certainly a new way of thinking about community engagement.
References
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