This volume of New Directions for Teaching and Learning offers insights into how and why public scholarship has grown and is beginning to sustain itself at Penn State University and beyond. The research and writing contained here was generated by faculty and graduate students active in Penn State's Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy.

The chapters in this issue attempt to:

• Examine the constitutional roots of public scholarship
• Distinguish between public scholarship and service
• Propose a framework for researching individual, organizational, and epistemological factors that shape faculty engagement in public scholarship
• Review developmental studies of youth and public scholarship
• Provide a narrative of student and faculty work in the American Indian Housing Initiative
• Make baseline explications for assessing public scholarship outcomes
• Provide a postmodern critique of expertise in the context of public scholarship 

In the final chapter, Judith Ramaley looks at the promise of public scholarship, from beyond the institutional site of Penn State, for higher education and democracy.

This is the 105th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Teaching and Learning.