Michigan State University
Michigan State University (MSU) is committed to individual and collective action for the greater good. Strengthening civic engagement and social responsibility are core to its mission and integrated throughout teaching, learning, research, and service. MSU shares information about our civic engagement work broadly for the advancement of the field.
As a pioneer land-grant university in the United States, at its roots, Michigan State University began as an experiment that democratized higher education and brought science and innovation into everyday life. Today MSU is one of the top research institutions in the world—one of the biggest, greenest campuses in the nation. It is home to nationally ranked and recognized academic, residential college, and service-learning programs. MSU is a diverse community of dedicated students and scholars, athletes and artists, scientists and leaders.
MSU’s Center for Service-Learning and Civic Engagement is one of the oldest centers of its type in the United States. It was founded in 1967 and will celebrate its 50th Anniversary in 2017. The Center’s mission is to provide engaged, issues and service-focused, community-based, mutually beneficial, and integrated learning opportunities, building and enhancing commitment to academics, personal and professional development, and civic responsibility.
University Outreach and Engagement (UOE) at MSU connects university knowledge with community knowledge in mutually beneficial ways. UOE provides resources to assist academic departments, centers and institutes, and MSU-Extension on priority issues of concern to society by encouraging, supporting, and collaborating with MSU faculty and academic staff to generate, apply, transmit and preserve knowledge. UOE also engages in research designed to demonstrate the disciplinary and inter-disciplinary impact of engaged scholarship and on faculty work and university-community partnerships. In all of its work, UOE emphasizes university-community partnerships that are collaborative, participatory, empowering, systemic, transformative, and anchored in scholarship.