Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Department of Education Leadership and Policy Studies, 2022As institutions of higher education evolve and adapt to meet the increasing needs of their communities, faculty are faced with the choice of where and how to employ their time and expertise. To advance and encourage partnerships between institutions and their greater communities, academic reward structures must be designed in ways that support those who choose to leverage their expertise, resources, and time to engage with community in meaningful and mutually beneficial ways. This study contributes to the growing body of higher education community engagement literature by investigating how school- and department-level promotion and tenure committees not only define and understand faculty’s engaged research, but how they evaluate it. Specifically, this study explored what goes into making evaluative decisions, if and how committees utilize tools for evaluation, and how evaluative decisions are made. In this single case multi-site qualitative study 12 participants across five R1 institutions classified as engaged by the Carnegie Foundation, participated in semi-structured interviews. All participants were tenured, engaged scholars with experience serving on a school- and/or department-level promotion and tenure review committee. Participants shared that in their experience, school and department review committees and their institutions more broadly struggle to define, categories, and evaluate community engaged research in promotion and tenure. Though their universities were making strides to institutionalize engagement within other areas of campus (e.g., faculty development, creation of engaged centers or offices), appropriate recognition of engaged research within promotion and tenure is not yet a reality. Conclusions drawn from this study include: (1) Definitions of community engaged research do not matter to review committees, as most reviewers have “no idea what it even means”. (2) Promotion and tenure guidelines are too rigid to appropriately categorize or value engaged research. (3) Metrics used to evaluate traditional research do not work for community engaged research. (4) Institution-wide supports to assist with the evaluation of community engaged research do not exist. (5) When it comes to community engagement, institutions and their leaders are “talking out of two sides of their mouth[s]”. (6) The events of 2020 have both positively and negatively affected community engaged research.