On Jan. 5, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching awarded Mississippi State University the 2010 Community Engagement Classification.
According to carnegiefoundation.org, the Community Engagement Classification is composed of two parts: Curricular Engagement and Outreach and Partnerships.
Cade Smith, director of the Office of Student Leadership and Community Engagement at MSU, said the classification is an opportunity for MSU to show its community involvement.
“The Community Engagement Classification is a voluntary application in order to recognize institutions that have exemplary programs for exchanging resources and knowledge with community agencies in the spirit of reciprocity and cooperation,” Smith said.
Along with Smith, MSU put together a committee of four other university faculty members to fill out the 39-page application for the classification.
The committee includes Tim Chamblee, director of MSU’s Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness, Lisa Harris, associate vice president for Student Affairs, Gary Jackson, director of Human Extension, and April Heislet, assistant professor of counseling and educational psychology.
“We all worked really hard to put together an application that we felt like would meet the benchmarks of the evaluators, and we put in a lot of time and many revisions to submit a quality application,” Smith said.
The committee provided answers and examples of MSU’s involvement and outreach into the community, such as building Habitat for Humanity homes, giving school supplies to children in Afghanistan, Bulldog Bash and over 1,300 student athlete community service hours.
“Our biggest challenge as a committee was to figure out how to pair the list of community services Mississippi State offered down into a succinct list on the application. There were just so many things to cite,” Chamblee said.
Three hundred and four schools requested an application; of those, 154 completed the whole packet, and 115 received the classifications from the foundation.
Despite not being able to fit all the charities that MSU exerts in the application, Harris said she thought it was eye-opening to get a behind-the-scene view on all the ways MSU is involved throughout the community and beyond.
“One of the true benefits that those of us who were in the committee received was seeing the depths and the breadths of involvement that Mississippi State University has, not only in the community, but in the state and in the region and in the nation,” Harris said.
Outside of the recognition on behalf of the committee members, Smith said he believes the Carnegie Foundation’s prestige pays a significant compliment to the community involvement of MSU.
“The fact that Mississippi State and our mission as a land-grant institution is formally recognized by the Carnegie Foundation has the authority and weight to say what [MSU] is doing is significant and meaningful,” Smith said.
Harris said she also sees MSU’s reception of the classification as a fulfillment of the university’s original purpose as a land-grant institution.
“I wasn’t a bit surprised that we were recognized in that manner,” she said. “This institution was founded on those principles, and you can see that they are still alive today in all the work we do.”