UTM ICE

1. UTM ICE How the Institute for Civic Engagement at UT-Martin came to be, what it does and plans for the future. By Mike McCullough,UTM ICE Director and Professor of Management CharaVanHorn, Assistant Professor of Communications

2. ADP at UTM • UTM has been intentionally and systematically promoting civic engagement since the fall of 2004. At that time, UTM gave one faculty member (Dr. Mike McCullough) ¼ release time to head the American Democracy Project on campus, an AASCU-sponsored program inspired by the Carnegie Foundation for Teaching publication entitled: Educating Citizens, by Tom Ehrlich. 

3. Campus Compact In the fall of 2007, McCullough, already released for ADP, was asked to assume responsibilities for Campus Compact at UTM in exchange for ¼ more release time; which involved working to help create the Charter for the Tennessee Campus Compact. The charter was signed in Nashville, on March 13, 2008; with McCullough and the Vice Chancellor Affairs from UTM, Dr. Jerald Ogg, present.

4. Sources of Funds In the spring of 2008, the UT system provided $100,000 for UTM to lead the way among UT system campuses in working for the success of the new Tennessee Campus Compact. Around that same time, the UTM advancement office was able to secure a promise of several hundred thousand dollars to promote civic engagement at UTM, from a single, but highly interested and dedicated donor.

5. VISTA to the Rescue UTM was awarded an AmeriCorps VISTA member, Jessica Butkovic, as part of a Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) grant through Tennessee Campus Compact. Since August 2008 Jessica Butkovic, a recent summa cum laude graduate of UTM, has worked effectively to increase the impact of ADP and Campus Compact efforts at UTM.

6. ICE Formed in 2009 In the spring of 2009, the Institute for Civic Engagement was formed at UTM. The formation of this new institute coincided with the end of Jessica’s year of VISTA service, so she was hired with TARP funds as program coordinator for the new Institute for Civic Engagement (ICE). Her former role is now being performed ably by Katie Noles, also provided by the Tennessee Campus Compact CNCS grant. Three other faculty members are now released ¼ time for ICE.

7. Raising Awareness For six years, ADP and now ICE has partnered with the honors program to bring speakers to campus for Constitution Day, September 17. These speakers have included Eugenie Scott, noted authority on the teaching of evolution in schools; Nadine Strossen, then President of the ACLU; Morris Dees, Civil Rights attorney of the Southern Poverty Law Center; Julian Bond, former Chair of the NAACP; Harry Boyte, Civil Rights activist, author and promoter of civic engagement on University campuses; Louis Freeh, former FBI Chief and Alberto Gonzalez, former U.S. Attorney General. Most of these speeches have drawn student crowds of from 500 to 1000. We have also sponsored well-attended panel discussions/debates on evolution, the war in Iraq, and gun rights. We are in negotiations for future constitution day speeches with noted attorney David Boies, Justice Clarence Thomas and former Justice David Souter.

8. Earthweek Also for six years, beginning in the spring of 2005, UTM has celebrated Earthweek, sponsored by ADP and now ICE as well as UTM Recycles and other campus initiatives. In 2006 we had Brian Czech, author of Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train – speak to a group of around 100 students on the subject of a steady-state economy, as opposed to a continuously-growing economy. This spring we had Mireya Mayor, National Geographic Wildlife Correspondent and TV personality; speak to an audience of between 250 to 300 enthusiastic students, many of whom stayed around for an hour or so to talk to the speaker on the subject of rare and endangered species.

9. Engagement Recycling - Student involvement in recycling at UTM has simply exploded in the last four years, and especially in the last two. Recycle bins were purchased and placed around campus in 2005 and UTM opened a recycling facility in 2007 that accepts refuse not only from campus, but also from the surrounding community. UTM has ranked high in the annual nationwide recyclemania competition. Student and faculty volunteers and a few paid staff make sure someone is there most of the time during weekdays and on many Saturdays until about 2 pm to accept just about any form of recyclables. Our campus has won several awards and small grants for recycling, purchasing paper and plastics compacters and other machinery needed. For the last two years, on the Saturday at the end of Earthweek, we have held Earthfest, with live music and art competition using recycled materials; and we plan a 5k run for future events.

10. Deliberative Poll In 2009, UTM participated in an ADP-sponsored deliberative poll pertaining to how UTM could create a more environmentally-sustainable campus. This polling exercise, was conducted according to the protocol laid down by Jim Fishkin of Stanford and was conducted by Dr. McCullough at UTM. Scores of students took the survey and a dozen or gathered to question university administration on our environmental policies.

11. Mock Debates and Debate Watches In the fall of 2008, during the Presidential election; UTM participated in a live debate watch with UT-K, UT-C, the University of Memphis and Tennessee State University. Several hundred people packed our auditorium to watch the Presidential debate and then to discuss it by live-interactive video, afterwards. We also had mock presidential debates in 2004 and 2008 that were highly successful and well attended.

12. Walls of Hate In the spring of 2004 and fall of 2008, UTM constructed walls of hate, on which hate speech was written and then scores of people gathered to tear the walls down. Both events created a little controversy and a lot of conversation on campus.

13. MLK Day Martin Luther King Day of Service – This past MLK day, UTM students and faculty picked up litter all over Martin as a day of service, sending much of it to our recycle center. The following Wednesday a student was asked to give a reenactment of MLK's "I have a dream" speech in an open plaza that many students walk through during the lunch hour. He was beautifully prepared and delivered the speech a couple of times that day. That evening, we all met for a special service at the local African American Baptist Church and then marched about 50 strong, about a mile, from the church to our campus auditorium, to watch a segment of “Eyes on the Prize.”

14. Times Talk Weekly lunch sessions are conducted by a faculty member or student(s) leading the discussion of a NY Times (ICE supplies free copies of the NY Times across campus) article of interest, such as: the natural environment, the war, elections, journalism, politics, civic engagement, taxes, and the like. These sessions have been increasingly well attended, with the average attendance this year around 25. The discussions are often lively and always interesting.

15. Community Service First-Year-Initiative - This past fall, 2009, all first-year students taking a course on how to prepare for college were asked to complete an act of community service. It was organized across fifty or so sections of the course by having faculty mentors and student pep leaders sign up to lead the sessions requiring students to participate in and then report their hours and reflect on it in writing. The total reported hours served for first-year initiative FYI for the fall semester was 1161.75, which is an average of 2.46 hours per student. A total of 38 community partners were served, most locally with a few extending the experience back to a student’s hometown. Thirty of those were “new” in the sense that ICE had never sent volunteers to the organization. The credit for this can most certainly be given to the students who found their own organizations to volunteer with, based on individual interests. With a little over 1,000 freshmen students enrolled in FYI, there was about a 47% participation rate, but that was only the ones who reported the hours. The actual rate could have been higher, but not lower

16. Service Learning Service-learning courses – Twice, ADP and now ICE have offered mini-grants from $500 to $1000 to faculty members as incentives to put service learning into one of their courses. Eight faculty members have done so, in addition to the ten or so already engaged. We had 10 faculty members participate in a service-learning workshop offered in-house and taught by Dr. Mike McCullough and Dr. Cherry Watts, which will result in another large group of courses incorporating service learning. The sociology department just received approval to designate their social problems class in the catalog as a SL course, and the plan is to so designate a number of other courses in the next couple of years.

17. SL courses, examples A sampling of successful service-learning projects over the last several years include: an engineering class that made a device to allow a child with no mobility to be able to move around in the house or driveway; an agriculture class that raised a community garden; an MBA class that has had students organize golf tournaments for St. Jude Hospital and other charities, collect toys for the Carl Perkins Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse; an English student-teaching class that worked with a high school English class to collect stories of community heroes in a nearby town; a biology class that has students visit a retirement village to interact with the residents and to study the aging process. These are just a few of the many SL courses being conducted at UTM, many funded by ICE.

18. Data and Assessment Community Service - Number of students, community partners being served, and hours served per student are all being reported and collected from community partners and faculty members on UTM students. This is, at times, inconsistent and we are moving forward with plans to maintain a continuous level of cooperation on data sharing from community partners and other student organizations on campus. In the future we hope to administer surveys to all community partner to assess the effectiveness of student volunteers in their organization.

19. SL Courses Service Learning - The number of service-learning courses, students in those courses, hours served per student and number of community partners being served is information being collected on service learning by a faculty service-learning survey. It is our goal to have this survey required of all faculty members in order to have a consistent campus wide data collection of service-learning activities. A SL survey for students have been issued in some SL classes. It measures pre and post attitudes towards service learning and community involvement. The results of this survey were presented at the Southeastern Psychological Association Conference in Chattanooga, TN in March, 2010 by Dr. Angie MacKewn, an ICE faculty representative. We hope to establish a protocol for all service-learning classes in which faculty are required to participate in a data collection survey and attitude assessment, students are required to participate in pre and post attitude assessments, and community partners being served by the course take a survey measuring the effectiveness of the service.

20. Release Time For Faculty We provided release time for three faculty members this past Spring to give them time to work on Institute for Civic Engagement (ICE) projects. This was paid for out of the academic affairs budget.

21. Vision Summits Each March, we plan to have a ICE-Sculpting Summit, to reflect on the past year’s accomplishments and plan the future. This creates costs associated with awards to faculty and perhaps students, as well as lunch and perhaps the expense of speakers, although to date; the speakers have been free (Gordon and Culvahouse).  

22. ICE Office The ICE will need to be funded with personnel: faculty released from teaching, coordinator (currently taken from stimulus funds), an administrative assistant; as well as the usual expenses of running an office, such as fax, phone, computers, and such. I only list this here because we will need to figure out how this will be paid for in the future.

23. Reading Initiative and Debate Team Several of us have discussed the possibility of either all Freshman students, all students, or indeed; all members of the campus community (ala the way some cities do it), to read the same book; discuss it and invite the author (as is possible) to campus to speak. We could check with other campuses to identify the expenses such a program would entail, whether it meant defraying book-purchase costs or actually buying the books, etc. We are strongly considering creating a debate team, starting on campus and eventually making it an intercollegiate endeavor.

24. Leadership Program • Students who sign on to being first, second, third or fourth-level (bronze, silver, gold or platinum?) ICE scholars will be asked to create and carry out community-service projects regionally, at the state level, at the national level or internationally? They may need financial support to carry out these projects. • Students who are leadership minors or serve as leaders on the campus in some capacity will be eligible to serve in this program. The final details of this program will be worked out between the offices of academic affairs and those of student affairs