The Politics of Teaching Risk: The Hidden Costs of Community…

Abstract: What do we risk when we take pedagogical chances to reimagine student learning? This op-ed examines the risks of teaching community-engaged courses in research universities that celebrate pedagogical innovation while structurally discouraging it. Drawing on experience teaching at a top tier Research I university, it argues that contingent faculty often bear the costs of innovation without adequate institutional support, even as universities showcase exceptional cases as evidence of success. The piece highlights how evaluation systems centered on predictability and student satisfaction can discourage sustained community-engaged teaching.

Juan G Berumen, Lecturer, Ethnic Studies

Grant Type: Lecturer Teaching Fellows Program (LTF)

The Politics of Teaching Risk: The hidden costs of community-engaged teaching for contingent faculty

Community-engaged learning has become one of higher education’s favorite buzzwords. Universities promote partnerships with local schools, nonprofits, and community organizations as evidence of public impact and civic responsibility. Brochures celebrate experiential learning. Mission statements praise collaboration beyond campus walls. Administrators encourage instructors to “innovate” in the classroom.

But for many contingent faculty and lecturers, innovation comes with risk.

I often think about competitive diving when I reflect on teaching community-engaged courses. Watching the Olympics as a kid, I wondered why divers attempted the most difficult dives when a simpler one, executed perfectly, seemed safer. Later I learned that harder dives carried higher point values. Greater risks could produce greater rewards.

College teaching works similarly. The safest courses are often the most predictable ones: lecture-based classes with familiar assignments, controlled classroom environments, and clear expectations. This predictability is catnip for faculty, seducing us into the comfort of familiar routines and the illusion that what worked once will always work again. Sometimes the labor required from semester to semester is reduced to little more than updating dates on a syllabus, maybe a few readings here and there. If it is not broken, why fix it?

Community-engaged courses are different. They require instructors to navigate relationships between universities and community organizations, coordinate schedules across institutions with vastly different priorities, and prepare students for forms of learning that cannot be fully scripted in advance. Every semester brings new circumstances as community needs shift, organizational capacities change, and partnerships evolve. Teaching these courses often means rebuilding large portions of the course each term and relaunching the work from the ground up. Why bother with so much work when it’s not necessary?

At research universities especially, these risks are amplified by institutional contradictions. Universities encourage faculty to innovate pedagogically while simultaneously maintaining structures that discourage experimentation. Student evaluations remain one of the primary tools used to assess teaching effectiveness, particularly for lecturers and contingent faculty who often lack long-term job security. Yet community-engaged courses frequently challenge the very expectations students bring into the classroom.

Over five years at a top tier Research I university, I taught multiple community-engaged research courses. Some required students to work directly with local organizations. Others involved conducting interviews and collaborative research with community members. In the most successful iterations, students produced meaningful research that aligned with community needs and contributed to ongoing conversations beyond the university.

But not every iteration succeeded in the same way.

In some courses, students struggled to distinguish between community service and community-engaged research. Many defaulted to immediate acts of service because that framework felt more familiar and emotionally legible. Research, especially collaborative and long-term inquiry, required a different understanding of reciprocity, accountability, and sustained engagement. These tensions did not mean the courses failed. If anything, they revealed the complexity of teaching students to think critically about their relationship to communities beyond campus.

The problem is that universities often evaluate these courses using the same tools designed for traditional lecture classes. Community-engaged teaching involves variables that cannot always be controlled: transportation issues, shifting community priorities, uneven student preparation, evolving student interests, institutional bureaucracy, and the unpredictability of collaborative work itself. These realities can produce discomfort for students accustomed to more structured classroom environments. That discomfort can then reappear in student evaluations, which carry significant consequences for lecturers whose employment may depend on consistently high scores.

Universities often celebrate the few faculty who manage to make community-engaged teaching work exceptionally well, holding them up as evidence of what is possible. These examples become institutional success stories featured in newsletters, grant reports, and promotional materials. But what often goes unacknowledged are the conditions that made those successes possible: extra unpaid labor, years of relationship-building, personal sacrifice, or simply the protection afforded by tenure, funding, or institutional support.

For lecturers and contingent faculty, these success stories can quietly function as a form of pressure. If someone else managed to do it successfully, then failure becomes individualized rather than understood structurally. The problem is no longer inadequate resources, unrealistic workloads, or evaluation systems poorly suited for community-engaged pedagogy. Instead, the implication becomes that other instructors simply are not trying hard enough or are not doing it well enough.

What universities rarely provide, however, are the conditions necessary for this work to succeed consistently: course releases, long-term institutional partnerships, flexible evaluation structures, logistical support, funding, or grace when things do not unfold perfectly. Community-engaged teaching is celebrated symbolically while the labor required to sustain it remains largely unsupported.

The logic reminds me of the motivational speeches often given at underfunded schools when a successful graduate returns to inspire students. The message is usually some version of: “I came from the same neighborhood. I faced the same obstacles. If I can do it, so can you.” The story is meant to empower, but it can also flatten structural realities into individual determination. Exceptional outcomes become proof that the system works rather than evidence of how difficult the odds were to overcome in the first place.

Universities often approach community-engaged teaching in much the same way. A small number of instructors manage to build extraordinary partnerships, create transformative student experiences, and sustain deeply collaborative projects despite limited support. These instructors are then showcased as models of innovation and institutional excellence. Their success becomes evidence that meaningful community engagement is achievable within existing structures.

But exceptional cases do not erase structural problems. In many ways, they can obscure them. What disappears from view is the immense labor, instability, emotional strain, and institutional negotiation required to make these courses work. Instead of asking why these forms of teaching require extraordinary effort to sustain, universities often celebrate the exceptions while normalizing the conditions that make such work difficult in the first place.

This creates a powerful incentive structure: play it safe.

Why spend hundreds of additional hours building community partnerships, redesigning assignments, coordinating logistics, and adapting to unexpected challenges when there is little institutional protection if something goes wrong? Why take pedagogical risks when the metrics used to evaluate teaching often fail to account for the complexity of experiential learning?

Community-engaged teaching can be transformative. It can push students to rethink the purpose of research, understand knowledge production beyond the university, and recognize communities not as subjects to be studied but as collaborators with expertise of their own. With the permeance of AI infiltrating every aspect of higher education, Dr. Rory Truex reminds us in his Op-Ed, “The Shell University: AI has taken something fundamental from the business of teaching and learning,” of a need for professors to focus on humanizing courses, “our comparative advantage over the LLMs.”

Community engaged courses do exactly that: connecting students with their humanity and that of others by putting theory into practice, regardless of the possible challenges. For me, learning first hand the complexities of engaging communities is the good stuff, equivalent to standing in the Sistine Chapel versus just reading about it or having an LLM write a research paper on it..

But if universities genuinely value this work, centering the human experience, they must also reconsider how they support and evaluate the faculty who undertake it.

Innovation cannot simply be encouraged rhetorically while penalized structurally. Otherwise, universities will continue rewarding the safest dives while publicly celebrating the most difficult ones, even if they are the exception to the rule.