This page provides guidance to faculty members who wish to engage in public-facing work (PFW), and to include such work in their dossiers for review, promotion, and tenure (RPT). This page complements Section 2.2.1.5 of Lehigh’s Rules and Procedures of the Faculty (R&P), which establishes that faculty may demonstrate excellence, in part, through PFW.

What is Public-Facing Work?

Public-facing work (PFW) consists of faculty activities (research/creative activities, teaching, and/or service) designed to engage a broader audience beyond the traditional academic sphere. It involves sharing ideas, knowledge, and expertise grounded in one’s scholarship with the public through non-academic channels, aiming to make academic work more accessible and relevant to everyday life and to society as a whole.

Examples of PFW include op-eds or blogs, public speaking, social media engagement, creation of open-source educational materials, translational research (patents, licensing, commercialization, etc.), pro bono work for non-profits, and large-scale open-source data collection or curation.

An important aspect of PFW is that it is grounded in the faculty member’s scholarly expertise. This draws a distinction between, say, an op-ed that uses one's research expertise to comment on an issue of the day, compared to an op-ed that is the expression of one's opinion as a private citizen.

Although there is not always a clear distinction between “traditional faculty work” and public-facing work, a rough rule of thumb is that if the audience is primarily outside academia, it’s PFW, and if the audience is primarily within academia, it’s “traditional” work.

Disciplinary Differences 

In some fields, knowledge creation and public engagement go hand-in-hand to constitute a faculty member’s work—PFW is recognized as traditional scholarly activity. For example, in creative writing or theater, the intended audience for faculty members’ “traditional” scholarship often includes the public. Similarly, community-based participatory research (CBPR) is co-created with the public, yet the research itself simultaneously addresses audiences within and outside of academia.

This webpage is likely more relevant to fields whose audience is usually within academia. (In fields in which traditional scholarship is inherently public-facing, norms for PFW already tend to be well-established.) Fields with primarily academic audiences have often valued and rewarded public-facing activity in RPT, but expectations and guidelines have sometimes been unclear. This website aims to present transparent guidelines for faculty members about how they may, if they wish, include PFW in their path to reappointment, promotion, or tenure.

PFW is Work

Historically, PFW has sometimes been considered not as work but as evidence of impact of one’s work. For example, if a faculty member is interviewed for a news story or invited to testify at a legislative hearing, that demonstrates that the faculty member’s scholarship is impactful and that the faculty member is recognized as a subject-matter expert. 

In contrast, Lehigh treats PFW as work in its own right. PFW requires time and effort on the part of the faculty member, deep intellectual engagement, thoughtful communication, and other aspects of faculty work (of course, to varying degrees depending on the endeavor). As such, PFW should be thought of alongside traditional faculty work, and not (only) as evidence that the traditional faculty work is excellent and meaningful. This also means that PFW has its own impact, and that impact should be part of the assessment of the PFW.

Why Lehigh Values PFW

The creation and dissemination of knowledge does not end at the boundaries of the academy. When faculty bring their expertise to broader audiences, whether through public commentary, translational research, open educational resources, or community engagement, they amplify the university's impact, enhance its reputation, and fulfill a responsibility that is inseparable from the scholarly mission itself. 

PFW can also strengthen the research and teaching it emerges from, deepening faculty members’ understanding of how their work connects to pressing societal needs and opening new lines of inquiry that might not emerge from disciplinary or academic conversations alone. By recognizing PFW in RPT, Lehigh affirms that excellence takes many forms and that the public relevance of faculty work is not incidental to the university's mission but central to it.

A Note on Terminology

Several other terms, similar to PFW, are in use elsewhere. For example, UNC Greensboro, University of Arizona, Campus Compact, TRUCEN, and others use terms such as community-engaged scholarship, engaged scholarship, or scholarship of engagement to refer to work that faculty members do in collaboration with community members. University of Virginia, Drexel, and Vanderbilt use translational research to refer to scholarship that is applied in practice, especially in scientific or medical fields. The PTIE organization focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship, while HELIOS Open is dedicated to open scholarship. Other universities use public-facing scholarship.

Lehigh has adopted the term public-facing work to be as broad as possible. Our definition includes work with community members, scientific or medical advances applied in practice, innovation and entrepreneurship, and open scholarship under the umbrella of PFW. Moreover, we use public-facing work rather than scholarship to emphasize that all three domains of faculty activity (research/creative work, teaching, and service) can be public-facing.

Examples of Public-Facing Work

The following is a non-exhaustive list of examples of PFW that could be included in an RPT dossier. We emphasize non-exhaustive—there are many other examples, and faculty members should not assume that, because a given activity is not listed here, it does not “count.”

Research/Creative Activities

  • Technology transfer of one’s research via patents or other forms of intellectual property, licensing, new non-profit or commercial entities, or incorporation into existing products or services

  • Open-source computer code, data sets, or other forms of open science

  • Articles, op-eds, interviews, etc. related to one’s scholarship in public-facing media outlets

  • Blog posts and social media engagement

Teaching

  • Teaching to audiences outside the traditional classroom, e.g., community organizations or companies

  • Instructional materials for use outside of higher education, such as in K-12 schools, industry, or government

  • Contributions to the scholarship of teaching in one’s field of study (e.g., articles in journals on pedagogy)

Service

  • Participation in mentorship or other support programs for students outside of higher education

  • Expert opinions, advice, or other support provided to governmental or non-profit organizations

  • Outreach in local K-12 schools

R&P Language Regarding RPT

Lehigh’s Rules and Procedures of the Faculty (R&P) Section 2.2.1.5 (“Criteria to Be Applied”) says:

Excellence in teaching, research and scholarship, and service are the criteria for reappointment, tenure and promotion. These criteria will be applied by the department, college committee, dean, provost, president, and board of trustees. During the course of a faculty member’s career, annual evaluations or triennial reviews, as required in section 2.2.4, will indicate a faculty member’s progress toward meeting these criteria. In applying these criteria, voting members of the concerned department(s), members of the college tenure and promotion committees, the dean, and the provost are required to conduct a thorough evaluation of a candidate’s professional qualifications.

Along with traditional measures, faculty can demonstrate excellence through public-facing work, which consists of research, teaching, and/or service activities designed to engage a broader audience beyond the traditional academic sphere. The types of public-facing activities will be assessed at the department and college levels consistent with department-specific guidelines and with university promotion and tenure standards.

The second paragraph was added by the Faculty Senate in spring 2026 and is scheduled to be voted on by the Board of Trustees in May, 2026.

PFW in Departmental RPT Guidelines

This webpage is intended to complement the text of R&P by providing guidance from the Provost about what PFW is and how it can be incorporated into RPT processes. This guidance is university-wide; departmental RPT guidelines can and should provide further guidance to faculty members about the extent to which PFW is encouraged and valued, and how it is assessed.

Importantly, PFW can replace, to a limited extent, traditional faculty work. As noted above, PFW is work, and should be treated as such. On the other hand, there are no simple equivalences between traditional faculty work and PFW. That is, we cannot offer formulas such as “8 blog posts equals 1 conference paper.” Although this is somewhat unsatisfying, it is similar to other aspects of RPT. For example, interdisciplinary research is recognized as an asset in RPT cases—and doing interdisciplinary work might mean the candidate has slightly fewer publications than other successful candidates because of the nature of such work—even though there are no formulaic rules about the extent to which this may be done.

Departmental RPT guidelines play an important role in articulating some of these tradeoffs. And even department guidelines will not be able to anticipate the nuances of every faculty member’s work, so individual discussions will be important in articulating the role of PFW for some faculty members.

Evaluating PFW in RPT Cases

Although the mechanisms for assessing traditional faculty work are more codified and broadly agreed upon than those for PFW, it is both possible and important to evaluate PFW as components of RPT cases. Below, we list some questions that candidates might address and evaluators might assess regarding PFW projects. This list is not exhaustive; candidates are free to make the case for the quality and impact of their PFW in ways that make the most sense to them.

  1. Scope: How substantial is the work? What form(s) does it take? What goals did the project set for itself, and were those goals attained? Is the work innovative and novel?

  2. Review: Has the work been reviewed (either through a peer-review process or in the public media), and if so, what were the reviewers’ opinions of the work? Has the work won awards? Has it led to patents, non-profit status, or startup funding?

  3. Impact: What are the impacts of the work on the community? How widespread is the dissemination or distribution of the work? Has it reached new audiences that traditional work would not have? How widely has it been shared, cited, or used? Has the work affected civil discourse or policy discussions? Has it contributed to student learning? What impacts has the work had on the faculty member’s department or college, or on Lehigh?

  4. Collaboration: Was the work done collaboratively with other scholars and/or with the public communities it is meant to benefit? 

Faculty are welcome to include their PFW in their CV and are encouraged to distinguish PFW from traditional faculty activities (e.g., by including them in a separate section) if appropriate. Faculty may integrate a discussion of their PFW into the narratives in their research, teaching, and/or service statements.

Internal and external reviewers should evaluate the PFW and its potential or realized impact as part of a holistic review of the RPT case. They should bear in mind that PFW is work, not simply evidence of impact. 

Examples at Lehigh

Possible examples to include,  after requesting permission from the relevant faculty:

Other Resources

Other universities: University of Arizona, University of North Carolina–Greensboro, Johns Hopkins, Rutgers, Michigan State, Penn State