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Campus-Community Partnerships: Perspectives on Engaged Research
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
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5 Campus-Community Partnerships: Perspectives on Engaged Research Hiram E. Fitzgerald, Angela Allen, and Peggy Roberts Partnerships do not simply deal with our responsibilities to the community or with new challenges of making knowledge relevant. They make us confront questions about the nature of expertise, about disciplinary allegiances, about reward systems, about local applications versus national prominence, and about the uneasy relationship that urban universities maintain with their surrounding communities.—Linda Silka Higher education is under increasing pressure to develop solutions to major social and economic problems affecting society. Critics contend that higher education has drifted too far from its core mission and moved too far from its historical commitment to help meet the broad and diverse needs of society (Boyer, 1996; Coye, 1997). Research universities, in particular, are cited as devaluing applied research and overemphasizing basic or pure research as the gold standard for faculty promotion and reward. Both critics (Boyer, 1994; Glassick, Huber, & Maeroff, 1997; Kezar, Chambers, & Burkhardt, 2005) and commissions (Kellogg Commission, 1999) have offered alternate visions for higher education, visions that broaden the definitions of scholarship-based teaching, research, and service and encourage university-community partnerships designed to resolve a wide range of societal problems. In 1990, Ernest Boyer published his challenge to higher education to recast its mission to reflect what he termed the scholarship of discovery, teaching, integration, and application. Boyer (1994) later challenged higher education to become immersed in solution-focused engagement in order to help solve societal problems that threaten the stability and viability of democratic society, including infant mortality, child poverty, homelessness, substandard housing, failing schools, youth crime and violence, and adolescent pregnancy. Today, Boyer likely would add a host of economic and regional development issues to this problem list. H I R A M E . F I T Z G E R A L D , A N G E L A A L L E N , A N D P E G G Y R O B E R T S 6 Boyer’s challenge is as apt today as it was two decades ago (Driscoll & Lynton, 1999). Children and youth in particular, seem to be involved in the risks and lowered life choices associated with America’s societal problems. For example, estimating annual statistics from the Children’s Defense Fund’s (CDF, 2008) one day in the life of American children and youth indicates that 2,920 children and youth are killed by firearms, 904,835 are abused or neglected (1,460 of whom are killed), 2,190 commit suicide, 1,648,800 are arrested (of whom 73,365 are arrested for a violence crime), 223,200 are corporally punished in school, 426,060 drop out, and 3,328,740 are suspended. These are not the kinds of statistics that support efforts to build a new creative, knowledge economy or efforts to renew America’s commitment to a civic and democratic society. In this chapter, we focus on efforts to transform the life-course pathways for many children and families through campus-community partnerships. Although statistics such as those compiled by the Children’s Defense Fund are inclusive across ethnicity, gender, and place of residence, we focus primarily on efforts to impact outcomes for individuals residing in metropolitan regions. We review principles and practices that support both the development and maintenance of urban regional university-community partnerships. As a part of this review, we provide examples of community change models of regional transformational change framed within a scholarship-focused engagement context (Franklin, 2008; Goodman & Wandersman, 2004). University-Community Interface During the past century, transitions from rural to urban life have accelerated at such an unprecedented rate worldwide that 83 percent of all humans now reside in urban areas. Further, 85 percent of all jobs created today are created in urban areas. Yet, the quality of individual and family life in the inner core of most urban areas increases in direct relation to the distance one lives away from the urban core. Urbanization has led to increased specialization , exacerbated division of labor, and increased size, density, and heterogeneity of the population. It contributes directly to weakening relationships among individuals through social isolation and to decreasing the social networks that traditionally provided neighborhood and community support systems to families. For individuals remaining in urban core residential areas, neighborhoods all too often are characterized by concentrated poverty, racial separation and isolation, low levels of academic achievement among children , low levels of quality-of-life indicators, a poor economic base for industry, weak...