The concept of community engagement as a primary function of higher education and the roots of this movement can be traced back to the 1980s with the founding of the Campus Compact in 1985 (Glass & Fitzgerald, 2010). The concept has been endorsed by several higher education organizations, including the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU), and the Coalition of Urban Metropolitan Universities (CUMU). Despite widespread consensus regarding the value of community engagement, progress toward aligning faculty reward structures to support community-community-engaged scholarship has been slow, even among institutions that have attained the Carnegie voluntary community engagement classification (Giles, Sandmann, & Saltmarsh, 2010, pp. 161-176). This special issue of "Metropolitan Universities" aims to examine institutional approaches to the recognition of community-engaged scholarship in faculty retention, promotion and tenure (RPT) policies and processes. The call for papers requested papers that would describe evidence-based approaches to defining and evaluating the quality of engaged scholarship, as well as analyses of the processes and outcomes associated with adoption and implementation of engaged scholarship in RPT policies. Several recurring themes appeared in the stories of successful institutional change as well as individual faculty cases: (1) alignment of community-engaged scholarship with the institutional mission and strategic goals; (2) a top-down and bottom-up collaborative approach to institutional change; (3) space and time for conversation about the difficult issues related to evaluation and recognition of community engaged scholarship; and (4) leadership and support from deans, provosts and presidents, both for institutional change and for individual faculty using engaged scholarship to make their case for promotion and tenure. Challenges remain, however, in each of the institutions described in this volume, as well as in the field of higher education as a whole.