In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Creating a New Kind of University: Institutionalizing Community-University Engagement
  • Hiram E. Fitzgerald (bio)
Stephen L. Percy, Nancy L. Zimpher, and Mary Jane Brukardt (Eds.). Creating a New Kind of University: Institutionalizing Community-University Engagement. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, 2006. 288 pp. Cloth: $39.95. ISBN: 1-8829-8288-6.

Universities are being challenged to connect with communities to develop solutions to many of the social and economic problems of contemporary society. Partially in response to societal challenges to higher education, education-oriented social critics and reformists have articulated a new vision for higher education. This vision emphasizes a student-oriented mission, an expanded definition of scholarship, innovative approaches to teaching and learning, reciprocal and sustained university-community partnerships, and transformational changes in how faculty view and conduct their work.

At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), the Milwaukee Idea was the response to these challenges. Creating a New Kind of University describes a bold and innovative effort to transform an urban university. Led by Chancellor Nancy Zimpher, UWM engaged in a campus-wide [End Page 203] discussion about engagement that set the tone for institution transformation (Zimpher, Percy, & Brukardt, 2002). Authors in the current volume candidly assess the progress made and delve deeply into a range of issues that either facilitated change or remain as barriers to the generation of shared meaning both within the institution and between institution and community.

The story told across the 15 chapters flows nicely. Opening chapters provide an overview of the Milwaukee Idea, noting the extent of community involvement in developing the Idea and stressing the importance of administrative leadership for achieving institutional priorities. Several chapters then provide perspectives from community partners, academic governance, and continuing education with a focus on what has been achieved to date. Although these chapters are deeply informative, more written work on the scholarship of engagement needs to be informed by community voices, not just (as in this text) vignettes offered by faculty ethnographers. Direct, honest reflections offered by community partners provide evidence of reciprocity and reflect discourse about shared meaning (intersubjectivity) that is not captured by secondary reports about community views.

Community voices are essential in the dialogue about the scholarship of engagement if we are to understand whether communities are ready to call the question about commitment to engagement with higher education. This can be accomplished only by a greater emphasis on intersubjectivity whereby campus and community co-construct the meaning of engagement and address how diverse partnerships specifically reflect that meaning.

The concluding chapter by Brukardt, Holland, Percy and Zimpher—well worth the price of the entire book—draws attention to this intersubjective aspect of shared meaning and the need for this meaning to be uniquely generated in each campus-community partnership. There are no instant formulae or models for establishing community partnerships. Building trust, co-creating meaning, and defining the parameters of sustainable partnerships require original work on both sides of the equation, and both the academy and the community must commit and recommit because neither is a constant. Jon Wergin's chapter captures these concepts well by stressing the "perspective" component of engagement, a deep sense of individual commitment to engaged teaching, engaged research, and engaged service that is not equivalent to the more superficial structural and function components of engagement. Although not explicitly stated, the implication is that this perspective is foundational for sustained engagement because, in the final analysis, individuals, not institutions, make partnerships work.

Nearly 70 years ago, Alfred North Whitehead (1936) noted, "Unapplied knowledge is shorn of its meaning. Careful shielding of a university from the activities of the world around is the best way to chill interest and to defeat progress" (qtd. p. 267). The extraordinary government investment in science and technology that followed World War II transformed America's universities from teaching institutions to research-intensive institutions and elevated research productivity to primacy among the criteria used to reward faculty performance. The scholarship of application was devalued. Basic research became the standard of practice for faculty promotion and rewards. Whitehead's warning about isolating knowledge generation from knowledge application was forgotten. But it resonates in the question raised by the authors in this volume...

pdf

Share