In early June 2002, while many of my colleagues were halfway through teaching their summer courses, my wife and I found ourselves in the rural village of Bodo City in the oil-producing Niger Delta region of southeastern Nigeria. We were there, in part, so I could receive an honorary chieftaincy title from the village (Mene Eedee I of Bodo City) as their show of appreciation for my fundraising efforts over the past few years for the construction of two nursery and primary school classroom buildings. The chieftaincy ceremony was the capstone of a personal trajectory that took me from street level activism to academic research to launching what might be termed a “personal development initiative.” While the specifics of this particular case are unique, my experiences provide general insights into three larger questions: 1) How can we as political scientists benefit from active civic engagement?; 2) What can we as political scientists offer to clients and practitioners outside the academy?; and 3) What are the costs of such civic engagement? After providing some brief background on my own case, this essay addresses each of these questions in turn.

My own initial interest in the Niger Delta was peaked by the hanging of the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni leaders on November 10, 1995. Saro-Wiwa was ostensibly hanged for his role in the murder of four Ogoni chiefs in 1994. Most observers believe he was killed to silence his leadership of the increasingly effective non-violent Ogoni protest movement against the continued underdevelopment and environmental devastation of their homeland at the hands of successive Nigerian military dictatorships and the transnational oil companies, particularly Royal Dutch/Shell. In this sense, former British prime minister John Major succinctly described Saro-Wiwa's hanging as “judicial murder.” At the time, I was doing my Ph.D. in political science at the University of British Columbia on an unrelated topic. After hearing Saro-Wiwa's younger bro-ther Owens Wiwa speak in Vancouver, I joined an activist group called the Ogoni Solidarity Network. From the first to second anniversaries of the hangings, we held 52 consecutive weekly protests at 17 different Shell gas stations in Vancouver. The combination of my growing research on this topic for activist purposes and my desire to change gears after writing my dissertation ultimately led me to reorient my academic research agenda around the impact of resource-extractive transnational corporations on the security and human rights of their local host-communities.

With new research design in hand, I took my first trip to Nigeria in April 2000. One of my Ogoni hosts took me to his home village of Bodo City. Bodo City is the largest village by population in the Niger Delta and its people are overwhelmingly subsistence farmers and fishermen. While there, I was introduced to the director of Bebor Model Nursery/Primary School (BMN/PS) who asked for my assistance in raising funds so they could provide dedicated classroom facilities for their students, many of whose classes were presently held outside under trees. We started raising funds for the school in October 2000 and, to date, have delivered $15,500 to the school in four separate rounds of funding. This money has finished work on one five-classroom building originally started with Canadian government funding and built one six-classroom building from scratch. Construction of a third six-classroom building has recently commenced.

Andrew Stark (2002, 578) has argued that psychologists and sociologists, in contrast to political scientists, “more frequently…lend themselves to clienteles in the ‘real world' who can readily identify with, or vividly see themselves in, the academic work being produced.” The end result is that political scientists “are less closely linked to clients outside the academy than are sociologists or psychologists.” Stark does not argue that political scientists should emulate these other disciplines. He does, however, at least implicitly argue that psychologists and sociologists can potentially do more “good” in the real world than political scientists and that their disciplines are enriched by this closer engagement with the non-academic world. What follows below is not a reply to Stark. Indeed, I agree with many of his points. My experiences do, however, challenge Stark's (2002, 578) contention that “academic psychologists and sociologists–through their links to the helping professions–can directly aid those whose behavior they study, at least more than is the case for political scientists….”

At the outset, it should be noted that this essay does not address the larger methodological question of whether or not “detached,” “objective,” or “unbiased” scholarship is either possible or desirable. Scholars who believe that such work is attainable, desirable, and necessary for good political science would probably not want to engage themselves as closely with the people and places they study as I have done.

That rather large caveat aside, there are arguably a number of benefits for your own academic scholarship that can come out of such engagement. First, in my case, it was my activist concern that led to the generation of an entirely new research agenda for my professional career. Second, this kind of personal involvement can offer tremendous benefits in terms of field research access. Involvement in tangible and positive service for one community opens doors to other communities and the political entrepreneurs within.

Third, recurring personal involvement of this sort brings development problems home to you in an incredibly poignant way. To give one example, on our last trip to Nigeria, the school director was worried about whether or not he would be able to find the money to pay the tuition fees for the numerous “scholarship” students whose parents cannot afford these fees. Thinking we might be able to help, I asked him to compile a list of all of the scholarship students and the cost of their tuition fees. The next day he gave me a handwritten list of 29 scholarship students. All of their tuition fees combined totaled about $246, or approximately $8.48 per pupil for the entire school year. The next day we were walking through the village around the time that the school let out. I noticed many of the children carrying small plastic chairs and asked about this. As the school cannot afford to buy its own chairs (and the government does not provide them), they have asked the pupils who can do so to bring a chair from home every day. Stanford University economist Edward Lazear has noted how tangible examples derived from field investigations remained with his readers long after they had forgotten his statistics (The Economist 2002, 60). Seeing that handwritten list of school fees and watching those kids carrying their plastic chairs will remain in my mind well after academic journal articles on development challenges in the Third World are long forgotten. Active civic engagement is one of the best ways to encounter striking examples which can enliven our teaching and writing.

There are at least three reasons why political scientists might actually have a comparative advantage in doing projects like this. First, good political science training inculcates a set of research skills helpful to activists and practitioners. The need to consult a wide variety of sources, sensitivity to the limits of what kinds of conclusions can be drawn from available evidence, and identification of further research agendas are skills that political scientists can help diffuse into the activist community. Second, knowledge of the literature in a variety of topics ranging from welfare reform to poverty reduction gives political scientists the ability to bring a diffuse knowledge base to bear on pressing challenges faced by “real people” in the “real world.” My choice of the Bodo City project was made, in part, because of my knowledge of the academic criticism of traditional development projects, mainly that they often focus on grandiose “white elephant” projects concentrated in capital cities which succeed only in delivering services to the elite. In contrast, the Bodo City project concentrates its efforts on a small, grassroots scale, by focusing on a rural village comprised overwhelmingly of subsistence farmers and fishermen, and by providing primary as opposed to tertiary education. As another example, BMN/PS has a mother's committee designed to ensure that women have substantive input into the school's governance. This mother's committee recently convinced the school's board of directors to build the nursery school building in a different location than the one they had originally favored because of their perceptions as mothers of what the special needs of the youngest children were and how they could be better served by relocating the building. One reason this committee exists is that Dr. Kenna Owoh, a social scientist who, at the time, worked for the Canadian government, impressed upon the school's leadership the importance of giving women an institutionalized voice in its governance. Our knowledge helps qualify us for involvement in community service projects in areas related to our research interests. It can and should be put to productive use outside the classroom.

Third, beyond our own qualifications, political scientists are also able to draw on the extended resource base of their own institutions for such service activities. During the fall 2002 semester, for example, two students in a technical writing course at IUPUI worked on upgrading BMN/PS's Internet web site (www.bebor.org) and devising fundraising brochures for the school. Rather than give her students hypothetical problems to solve, my colleague, Marjorie Rush Hovde, puts them to work every semester benefiting non-profit organizations. Even seemingly small things like free university web server space for faculty members is an opportunity that we as professors can take advantage of which many other individuals cannot.

There are, however, a number of costs incurred with such involvement. First, the benefits of such engagement are purchased at the fundamental price of time. I sometimes refer to my involvement with BMN/PS as my “third or fourth course” because this work takes up about as much time each semester as it does to teach a course. Faculty under intense pressure to publish in order to secure promotions and raises might thus view this essay more as a cautionary tale of what not to do than as an example worthy of emulation.

Related to this, the work to reward ratio for faculty is not good here, and perhaps understandably so. While many universities like IUPUI evaluate promotion and tenure dossiers on the basis of contributions to research, teaching, and service, service is not usually construed to include public service or civic engagement. In return for the benefits of tenure, faculty incur service obligations to their institutions and to the profession as a whole, not to an outside public (however worthy it may be) of their own choosing. Putting a lot of effort into something your employer does not value highly will probably not appeal to most professors. Measured against this, however, is the immense personal satisfaction that comes from doing such work.

Perhaps most importantly, such engagement also taxes your own scholarship. In the same way that this engagement has opened research doors with activists, non-governmental organizations, and village communities, it has probably closed them with oil companies and Nigerian government officials. While some of the best political science scholarship stems from passionate concern, the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of direct action are not the same thing. Extended civic engagement of the sort described here risks blurring the line between scholarship and activism. The danger of losing one's perspective can be managed, but that does not make it any less of a danger.

Good political scientists make a difference in the lives of their students every day. Our training, knowledge, institutional support, and commitment also enable us to make a big difference in the lives of people far beyond the academy. While other political scientists may not follow my own trajectory from street protestor to academic researcher to development project initiator to village chief, the costs and benefits of engaged scholarship should be explored.