St. Mary’s Earns Prestigious Carnegie Classification

President guides University through comprehensive self-study that leads to national recognition

by Jennifer Speed, Ph.D., Director of Foundation Relations

During the first week of 2011, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching announced that St. Mary’s had been awarded its coveted Community Engagement Classification. This prestigious recognition publicly celebrates the University’s ongoing commitment to service and engagement as an integral part of our educational mission. At St. Mary’s, academic excellence, leadership development, and experiential learning are inseparable from a commitment to working for the common good and the pursuit of justice and peace. University President Charles L. Cotrell, Ph.D., talks about this Carnegie Classification and what it means for St. Mary’s.

Speed: St. Mary’s recently announced that it was awarded a special Carnegie designation. Why is this significant for St. Mary’s?

Cotrell: The Community Engagement Classification underscores why a St. Mary’s education is distinctive and worthwhile. At St. Mary’s, we prepare our graduates to be a transforming presence in the world. The Catholic Bishops of the United States have explicitly called for Catholics to be responsible citizens who engage the world around them and work for change. This designation is a reminder to us and to everyone else that St. Mary’s students seek and work for the common good long before they are college graduates. They seek out opportunities for service and community engagement while they are still students. For them, the experience of being a student is one that connects classroom learning with lived experience. Here, community engagement is part of the learning process, because it teaches students how to work with others in service, to analyze political and social issues, and to enjoin others to work for common remedies to shared problems. Significantly, St. Mary’s students see that community engagement and service is modeled by faculty and staff from every department. We don’t just talk about the importance of engagement—we live it out as part of our Catholic and Marianist mission.

Speed: What is the Community Engagement Classification and how did St. Mary’s earn it?

Cotrell: This new designation is known as an elective designation, that is, it is one that we sought out. This Community Engagement Classification recognizes mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity between an institution of higher education and its larger community. The application process was lengthy and rigorous and took months to complete. It required that we study and report on dimensions of community engagement that are part of the St. Mary’s culture, its academic life, and its programming. We gathered information about community engagement from individual faculty, from department chairs and deans, and from staff across campus, in order to understand how the entire University community was reaching outside of our classrooms and our campus to be of service in meaningful and lasting ways. We submitted our report to The Carnegie Foundation and they evaluated it over a period of four months.

Speed: St. Mary’s has always prided itself on being engaged with and oriented toward a community that is broader than its faculty, staff, students and alumni. How hard was it to prove that to someone else?

Cotrell: The application itself was daunting, there’s no doubt about it. The Carnegie Foundation demands information about community engagement from every corner of the University. They want to know what we do to engage our larger community, how we promote that engagement, and how we support it with financial and other resources. We approached it as a learning process and as an opportunity for self-study. In completing the application, we were required to carefully examine our strengths and weaknesses, reflect on our priorities, and think about the ways we not only serve the greater community but also learn from it. Our model of community engagement—and that of The Carnegie Foundation—is based on partnerships and reciprocity. We have to serve and be engaged in a way that is meaningful for everyone, not just for us. Perhaps most importantly, as an institution of higher learning, we have much to offer the community but we have to be open to what we can learn from those whom we serve.

Speed: Were there any surprises that came out of the application process? Cotrell: Absolutely! Because we had to do such a thorough investigation of community engagement across every department and division of the University, we found that community engagement at St. Mary’s is even more dynamic and vibrant than we had imagined. We were overwhelmed at what we learned about the efforts of student leaders, faculty and staff, who engage and are of service to some population—large or small—in our community. We certainly make community engagement part of our strategic goals and priorities, and those are shaped by our Marianist charism. We celebrate service to others and promote a commitment to the common good. What we saw during the application process, however, revealed that community engagement is really part of the fabric and the soul of St. Mary’s.

Speed: Will this Community Engagement designation change anything at St. Mary’s?

Cotrell: In some ways, this external designation will help to keep us on our toes. The Carnegie Foundation Classification publicly recognizes and rewards what we already do. But we can’t stop there, because we always have room for improvement. We have a moral imperative, as an urban Catholic university in a democracy, to ensure that our students can connect academic and professional excellence with thoughtful citizenship. Because we educate tomorrow’s leaders, we must take that imperative seriously.

Speed: Are there many other schools that have this designation?

Cotrell: In fact, very few schools have this designation. Only about seven percent of Carnegieclassified schools have this Community Engagement Classification. The 2010 application process was very competitive. Fewer than half of the schools that applied were actually awarded this designation. St. Mary’s is one of only 13 schools in Texas to have this Community Engagement designation, and the only one in South Texas.

Speed: Does St. Mary’s have another Carnegie designation?

Cotrell: Indeed we do. In fact, nearly every accredited college and university in the United States (roughly 4,300 schools) has a designation from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Those classifications reflect a college’s size, its residential population, whether it is private or public, the type of degrees it offers and some other characteristics. It allows for some comparisons among similarly classified institutions. The basis of those all-inclusive classifications is data that each school submits to the Department of Education, but they don’t tell the full story about what makes a particular school distinctive. The Foundation created the Community Engagement Classification to recognize important aspects of institutional mission and action that are not reflected in the national data.

Jennifer Speed, Ph.D., earned a bachelor’s degree from St. Mary’s University, a master’s from Marquette University, and a doctorate from Fordham University before returning to St. Mary’s as the University Advancement Director of Foundation Relations. In her position, she is responsible for initiating and managing foundation relationships, representing St. Mary’s and its needs to the foundations community, and soliciting funding resources for the University community. She is a Fulbright Scholar (Spain, 2001) and is active as a professional historian.