Facts at a Glance
Outreach from the School of Human Ecology (SoHE)
- Last year, our faculty directed over 2.7 million dollars in grants to support our outreach projects. This is more than $50,000 per faculty member.
- About one-quarter of SoHE faculty (11 professors) have partial appointments with the University of Wisconsin-Extension, which allows them to do parts of their teaching off-campus, around the state.
- Last year, these Extension faculty of SoHE had over 8,900 teaching contacts with Wisconsin citizens from nearly every Wisconsin county. This averages about 35 teaching contacts per work day. We also provided consulting to 228 Wisconsin businesses or agencies.
- Last year, 61,400 Wisconsin citizens received our fact sheets or instructional newsletters, and information on our web sites were accessed 56,000 times.
- Every year, approximately 300 businesses and community organizations in Wisconsin benefit from the unpaid energy and intelligence of our undergraduates, who are each required to perform a semester-long internship before graduating.
- Approximately 12% of SoHE courses include a Service Learning component, in which students conduct research or work within an off-campus business or agency that is linked to the course content. This makes for better education, and also is one of the ways we serve the broader community around us.
- The two Rothermel-Bascom Endowed Professorships awarded by the School of Human Ecology include, among their criteria, the impacts of the professor’s outreach. An endowed professorship is usually the highest academic honor in a distinguished career, and to have them based upon outreach excellence (at least in part) is a rare and unambiguous statement of the centrality of outreach to our vision of scholarly excellence.
- The mission statement of our School explicitly directs us to use our scholarship to make a difference in this world, “…to enhance the quality of people's lives and their environments through interdisciplinary research, creative innovation, teaching, learning and outreach.”
“…in no other state in the union has any university done the same work for the community that has been done in Wisconsin by the University of Wisconsin.”
--Theodore Roosevelt--
