How Community Service Can Help Your Career

Martha J. Shott had a track record of doing community service while growing up. She packed bags of groceries to be distributed to needy families, wrote letters to retirement-home residents, bought Christmas gifts for low-income children, and pitched in on home-repair projects for elderly and disabled homeowners. But once she got to college, and then went on to graduate school, competing demands managed to squeeze out any time for community service.

“It was something I really wanted to get back into doing,” says Ms. Shott, who earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of California at Davis.

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An unexpected path for doing just that came along three years ago, when she began her job as an assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at Sonoma State University. The California college requires its tenure-track and tenured faculty members to do community service as part of its tenure-and-promotion process.

While colleges often say they want their faculty members to be engaged in the surrounding community, such service is rarely counted toward promotion and tenure. Sonoma State’s requirement openly signals to faculty members that the institution values their work in the community enough to reward it. Such work can also be a tool that helps some professors — junior faculty members in particular — navigate a common work/life struggle: finding a meaningful way to connect with their communities while staying on track for career advancement.

Ms. Shott is active in a local chapter of Girls on the Run, serving as a coach for the nonprofit program, which uses running to promote fitness and self-esteem in young girls. She’s also a volunteer coordinator for an annual one-day math-and-science event, Expanding Your Horizons, geared toward exposing middle-school girls to careers in science, technology, engineering, and math.

“There are so many demands on you as a tenure-track professor. Unless you’re really encouraged to do community service, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll do it,” Ms. Shott says. “I was really pleased with what I heard about community service when I got to Sonoma State. It gave me the impetus to start back up.”

To be sure, colleges seem to take pride when professors are engaged in the surrounding community, and some give out accolades and awards to recognize that work. But even when institutional support exists for faculty community service, it varies widely. And some professors grapple with what form of community service would be more likely to count toward tenure and promotion.

At Sonoma State, tenure-and-promotion guidelines provide a clear framework, stating that faculty members will be evaluated first on the basis of effective teaching; then on scholarship, research, or creative teaching; and then on service to the university, profession, and the community.

The community-service requirement — written with the idea that faculty members would serve in the institution’s “backyard” — is longstanding, detailed in documents that date back to at least the 1970s.

Among the examples of community service listed are participation in civic, community service, and cultural organizations, and work with schools, political groups, and local, state, and federal boards and committees.

But what community service looks like on the ground is left up to individual faculty members and their departments, says Merith Weisman, coordinator of the university’s Center for Community Engagement, which helps professors, staff members, and students connect with service opportunities.

In the philosophy department, faculty members have to do at least one community activity, which can include presentations to civic groups. The department of American multicultural studies suggests that its faculty members volunteer in local schools, or serve as community resources on the basis of their expertise, or join organizations that help underserved people in the surrounding North Bay area. In the chemistry department, tenure-track professors need to “show a record of some involvement in outreach to the community,” promotion-and-tenure requirements state.

“Some faculty do their community service in a way where you don’t need a Ph.D. to do it, and some do it in a way that you do,” Ms. Weisman says. “Some scholars really want their community service to tie into their scholarship.”

Still others, like Ms. Shott, a runner, choose community service that reflects outside interests. She eschewed a mentor’s suggestion to serve on boards of various organizations because “I wanted to do something that was more hands-on,” she says of her commitment to Girls on the Run. “It’s a nice combination of my love of running and my love of teaching.”

Thomas Targett, an assistant professor of astronomy, decided to link his community service to teaching as well. He tapped Ms. Weisman’s connections to nearby middle and high schools to begin offering a presentation that challenges what people believe about astronomy, gleaned largely from television shows and movies like Star Wars and Star Trek.

“I find things people think they know about astronomy — they’re myths — and then fix that with real science,” says Mr. Targett of the talk he adapted from one he first gave to undergraduates in his introductory-astronomy course. For example, he shows a scene from the Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back in which the action involves what looks like a dangerous flight through an asteroid field. Then Mr. Targett explains that the Mars asteroid belt is mostly empty space, which means that navigating an asteroid field isn’t nearly as dangerous as it appears in the movie. “Once you get them interested, students have 100 questions,” he says.

Doing community service offers faculty members less-obvious benefits as well, Ms. Weisman says. Professors who serve in the community often find that the work informs their scholarship or teaching.

Emily K. Asencio, an assistant professor in the department of criminology and criminal-justice studies, says her work helping Big Brothers Big Sisters of the North Bay has paid off in that way. For about a year now, she has worked with the organization to produce a user-friendly version of data that detail its successes and outcomes. It’s a match-up that Ms. Weisman made after the agency contacted her. The relationships she has built have resulted in agency employees’ visiting Sonoma State to speak about their work to her students.

“Most of them are interested in working with kids in some capacity, so they’re interested in what they have to say,” says Ms. Asencio of her students.

Ms. Asencio, who came to Sonoma State in 2014, also spends at least an hour a week helping struggling readers at a local elementary school. And her research on juvenile delinquency has allowed her to work with the local juvenile-detention facility — which has led to her students’ taking tours there and officials’ coming to her class to talk about their work.

In a previous university job, “community service was not among the things I was required to do, but I did a lot of it,” says Ms. Asencio. “It’s naturally who I am.”

Yet like many academics, she has struggled with her decision.

“I always felt like I should be locked in my room writing,” she says. “Now that I’m at Sonoma State and community service is actually a piece of my job, I don’t have to feel guilty, like I’m not using my time the way I should be.”

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.