Thursday, January 13, 2011

Award: The Carnegie Classification

Exciting news!  Oberlin College has been awarded the Carnegie Classification for its commitment to community service.  Here is the official press release.  This is quite an honor, because they do not hand out these awards to anyone.

I'm very happy I can tell people about this now.  Beth (Director of the BCSL) started working on the application in the summer; helping Claudine compile the data and info for it was actually one of my first tasks as a VISTA.  The final application detailed all aspects of community engagement at OC.  Beth gets a big round of applause for being the one who did the bulk of the work on the application, since it's final form was 40 single-spaced pages.

The civic engagement/community service movement in higher education is fairly new, and awards like these are helping to shape it by what requirements they have for applicants.  It's cool to be in such a new field that people are still haggling over the definitions of things; just this morning I drove Beth to the airport so she could fly to Washington D.C. to talk about these things.  Exciting times!

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