2008 Lynton Award Call for Nominations

2008 Lynton Award Review Committee members

 

Dr. Ernest A. Lynton, a founding member of NERCHE, was interested in realigning the mission and focus of American higher education “to direct outreach to society.” In his original conceptualization, outreach took the form of applied knowledge with faculty serving as the delivery system. Today faculty professional service has taken hold at a great many colleges and universities across the nation. Its multiple forms include individual faculty work; collaborations among teams of faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students; and jointly conceived initiatives between a faculty member, class, or multidisciplinary team and community agencies. In all cases, the outreach results in new and rigorous scholarship and enhances the mission of the institution.

In 1996 NERCHE created the Ernest A. Lynton Award for Faculty Professional Service and Academic Outreach to recognize faculty members who connect their expertise and scholarship to community outreach. Award recipients demonstrate excellence in each of the four criteria for the award:

• sustained effort in community outreach and professional service;
• use of innovative and imaginative approaches;
• institutional impact through teaching, program development and student/faculty participation; and
• external success through scholarly output, community impact and student learning.

In the past decade, NERCHE has received nearly 700 nominations of exemplary faculty members whose work has had a significant impact on scholarship, teaching, and societal problems. Award recipients represent disciplines as varied as sociology, philosophy, medicine, library science, anthropology, chemistry, English, engineering, education, and American Studies. They teach at universities, both public and private; liberal arts colleges; and community colleges. They have inspired students to consider using their education to make a socially meaningful imprint on an increasingly complex world. They are role models, not only for students, but also for their colleagues and their institutions seeking to find ways to connect the rich resources of the academy with the local and global community.

The Lynton Award pays tribute to the memory of Ernest Lynton, who raised the profile and status of faculty professional service both nationally and internationally. Lynton championed a vision of service that embraced collective responsibility and an understanding of colleges and universities as catalyst not only in the discovery of new knowledge but also in its application throughout society.

In 1984 Lynton wrote: “viewing professional service as an institutional priority is important because only when it is recognized as a priority will professional service as an individual faculty activity be given serious attention and the proper incentives it requires and deserves.” When NERCHE first presented this award, many nominees carried out their professional service with few if any institutional supports or rewards. Over the years, we received more and more nomination letters from provosts and presidents indicating a sea change in the level of regard for and the institutional commitment to this kind of engaged scholarly work. (To read a remembrance of Ernest Lynton, click here.)

In 2007, the Lynton Award was renamed the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of
Engagement. The change in language represents a shift from a more unilateral, expert-driven approach to outreach that prevailed in the 80's and early 90s to one that O’Meara and Rice describe as “going beyond the expert model that often gets in the way of constructive university-community collaboration, …calls on faculty to move beyond ‘outreach,’…asks scholars to go beyond ‘service,’ with its overtones of noblesse oblige. What it emphasizes is genuine collaboration: that the learning and teaching be multidirectional and the expertise shared. It represents a basic reconceptualization of faculty involvement in community-based work” (Faculty Priorities Reconsidered 2005).

 

NERCHE and CUMU are partnering to manage the Lynton Award. NERCHE will continue to be the Lynton Award home, and will also be primarily responsible for the selection of the annual award recipient and finalists. The award will be presented each year at CUMU’s annual conference.

 

For more information about the Ernest A. Lynton Award, please contact NERCHE at (617) 287-7740 or via email at nerche@umb.edu.

 

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