Service learning at the public research university

Universities are increasingly criticized for not taking an active role in contributing to the improvement of the communities surrounding them and for not instilling a sense of civic responsibility in students. The pedagogy of service learning addresses both of these issues by involving both faculty and students in the local community as students do relevant community service as part of their academic coursework. However, there is not a clear understanding of how to best coordinate service learning at large public research universities. This study examined service learning programs at a set of public, doctoral-granting research universities and evaluated how the location of the service learning program within the university organizational structure, the program reporting line within the university administrative hierarchy, and the program’s historical origin each impacted organizational legitimacy. Organizational legitimacy within this context is the perception that service learning is valued and that the studied program is the appropriate authority to coordinate this activity within the institutional environment. This study has not confirmed that service learning programs located in student affairs or jointly located in both academic affairs and student affairs suffer from a lack of organizational legitimacy as measured by program budgets, number of classes taught, percentage of faculty teaching classes, or community organizations offering student service opportunities. However, the culture of the studied service learning programs was different in student affairs versus academic affairs administrative locations. Institutional theory predicts that organizational legitimacy would be higher for service learning programs that report to an upper-level administrator. In this study, this is somewhat supported by the financial data, but not by results on stakeholder participation. The data indicate that for these institutions organizational history continued to influence organizational structure and function. Programs that were originally inspired by students continued to have stronger student leadership and involvement and support from student fee sources. Programs that had specific funding sources as the catalyst were supported more heavily by donations and endowment funds.