Community Action for School Reform

Chapter 14

Chapter 14 Realities and Fantasies in University-Community Partnerships The next three chapters analyze challenges in forming interinstitutional networks. We begin with university-community partnerships, move to community-school partnerships, and finish by looking at tensions between attachment and knowledge in interorganizational practice. The Southeast Education Task Force letterhead reads: “A project of the Southeast Planning Council and the University of Maryland, College Park Urban Studies and Planning Program.” The announcement for the USDE Urban Community Service Program described its purpose as “provid[ing] grants to urban academic institutions to work with private and civic organizations ” (Federal Register 1994, 15810). The U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of University Partnerships lists Maryland’s work with the Task Force among “University-Community Partnerships in America” (U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 1999). Links between universities and communities can be mutually beneficial. Universities can conduct research and practice in communities. Communities can get help improving conditions. Both can benefit financially (Benson and Harkavy 1994; Feld 1998; Maurrasse 2001; Nyden, Figert, Shibley, and Burrows 1997; U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 1995, 1996, 1999). Such accomplishments buoy a growing, but often uncritical, enthusiasm for “partnerships” as solutions for many, wide-ranging problems. Advocates may exaggerate partnerships’ potential, minimize their requirements , and ignore evidence that development often is disjointed and tenuous. They may imagine that simply creating a “partnership” magically produces “resources” that will solve problems, obviating realistic analysis of conditions or strategies for changing them. 195 The case of the University of Maryland and the Southeast Education Task Force helps understand what university-community partnerships may be and do. This partnership is near the small end of a continuum in terms of funding, the number of individual or institutional participants, and activities, in contrast with some well-funded, long-term, multiinstitutional partnerships. Even so, it resembles many partnerships, and its predicaments pertain to university -community partnerships of all sizes. PARTNERSHIPS AND FANTASIES The partnership is the first human relationship, in infantile attachment to the mother, a partner who seems to offer infinite nurturance. Soon enough, the infant becomes aware of another partnership, the mother’s relationship with the father, which, among other things, produces new life in the form of siblings . For infants, fantasy and barely distinguishable reality endow parental partners with seemingly infinite power to create and sustain life. Though these early experiences with partners recede from conscious memory, the assumptions about parents continue to influence beliefs about and involvement in partnerships throughout life. Organizational partnerships are a world away from the relations of infancy. They are institutional, formal, and often deliberately planned. Moreover , they make good sense in turbulent environments, where organizations cannot control enough to accomplish their purposes alone. If groups and organizations combine resources, not only can they draw on a larger pool, but they may cross-pollinate in ways that create new resources. Yet studies of institutional relationships, including business partnerships, joint ventures, corporate mergers, managerial teams, and interdepartmental initiatives, reveal an interplay of realism and fantasy that echoes life’s early moments. Organizations often form partnerships with exaggerated expectations of what they can accomplish, and then, if the going gets rough, they imagine that what they are doing, despite contrary appearances, will somehow succeed.1 Partnerships are especially likely to grow on and nurture fantasy when reality resists strongly held intentions. Common talk of cross-pollination offers a clue to unrealistic expectations. The language is metaphorical, yet its usage expresses a widely shared belief—or wish, reminiscent of early life fantasies: if only two bodies came together in the right way, they could give birth to abundant new resources. This is a satisfying thought, but differences between flowers and bees and universities, community organizations, and business firms signal confusion between fantasy and reality. In fact, the desire for cross-pollination resembles a fantasy that groups sometimes indulge when they conclude that rational planning cannot solve a 196 Tensions between Attachment and Knowledge problem. Bion (1961) found that frustrated groups unconsciously redefine their purpose and the means of success in order to feel effective. One stratagem is to assume that the task of the group, rather than to solve a problem instrumentally, is to allow two individuals or units to pair up and watch them, as if by immaculate conception, give birth to a leader or program of action that will miraculously bring a solution. Without effort, with...