ABSTRACT
Increasingly, the rhetoric associated with university engagement calls upon higher education leaders and their institutions to deliberately connect with pressing social issues in the hope of activating sweeping or transformative changes that bring widespread benefits to society. The logic holds that universities’ raw materials of knowledge, expertise, and innovative discoveries and their abilities to bring people together from diverse fields and/or to produce skilled people in high-need domains can serve to stimulate the sorts of changes necessary to overcome long-standing collective problems. Transformation is what emerges after overcoming a state of perpetual dispute and contestation, morphing into an altogether different reality that evokes new meanings, strategies, and tools for action, power distributions, and collective ambitions for what the community holds in mutual high regard.
