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119 Engaged Scholarship and the Urban University Matthew Hartley and Ira Harkavy As other chapters in this volume have underscored, the civic aims of American colleges and universities extend back to their origins. This is certainly true for urban universities. With the addition of a medical school in 1765, the University of Pennsylvania became America’s first university. Penn was, of course, founded by Benjamin Franklin as the Academy of Philadelphia in 1740 in the largest and arguably the most important city in the American colonies. In 1749, Franklin published a pamphlet entitled “Proposals Relating to the Education ofYouth in Pensilvania [sic],” and in it he articulated a vision of an institution predicated not on classical education for the elites but on serving all students of ability in the interest of fostering an “Inclination join’d with an Ability to serve mankind, one’s country, Friends and Family” [emphasis in the original]. A similar civic-minded sentiment was echoed over a century later by the founders of many land-grant colleges. In the founding documents of Ohio State University, located in the capital Columbus, the trustees stated that they intended not only to prepare graduates to be successful “farmers or mechanics, but as men, fitted by education and attainments for the greater usefulness and higher duties of citizenship” (Boyte & Kari, 2000, p. 47). It was the late nineteenth century that saw the dawn of the modern research university. The fortunes of many of these institutions were tied to their urban contexts. In 1876, Daniel Coit Gilman, first president of Johns Hopkins University, asserted in his inaugural address that the mission of urban universities was to “make for less misery among the poor, less ignorance in the schools, less bigotry in the temple, less suffering in the hospitals, less fraud in business, less folly in politics.” In like manner in 1902, William Rainey Harper, the University of Chicago’s first president, gave a speech at Nicholas Murray Butler’s inauguration as president of Columbia University. Harper envisioned the emergence of the urban “Great M A T T H E W H A R T L E Y A N D I R A H A R K A V Y 120 University” (his term) “which will adapt itself to urban influence, which will undertake to serve as an expression of urban civilization, and which is compelled to meet the demands of an urban environment . . . will ultimately form a new type of university” (Harper, 1905, p. 158). Harper meant far more than being attentive to local surroundings or being a responsible institutional neighbor. He believed that only by using their intellectual resources to solve the pressing problems of the day would universities fulfill their promise. “Just as the great cities of the country represent the national life in its fullness and variety, so the urban universities are in the truest sense . . . national universities” (Harper, 1905, p. 160). This was no mere idealistic flight of fancy. Harper was convinced that such an emphasis would secure the support of wealthy Chicago elites, especially those committed to improving the city’s public schools. Such enlightened self-interest was highly compatible with and powerfully reinforced by his theoretical conviction that collaborative, action-oriented, real-world problem solving was by far the best strategy to advance knowledge and learning and the interests of Chicago (both the city and the university) (Benson, Harkavy & Puckett, 2007). That said, the civic vision embraced by the leaders of these urban universities was very much a contested one (Hartley & Hollander, 2005). There were competing notions about the purposes of the university. As historian Julie Reuben has documented, by the end of the nineteenth century the emphasis on moral instruction was replaced by a commitment to advancing knowledge and an adherence to emerging scientific standards (Reuben, 1996). Scholarship was increasingly defined (and its legitimacy derived) from its commitment to scientific objectivity and value-neutrality. Indeed, in 1889, G. Stanley Hall, the first president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, argued that faculty members should “live only for pure science and high scholarship.” Such attitudes exemplified an important aspect of the German university model—learning for learning’s sake and the establishment of a hierarchy of knowledge in which pure science was elevated above its application. The rise of the academic disciplines transformed the work of the professoriate at research universities . Greater specialization and expertise (as defined by the various disciplines) formed the basis for the increased legitimacy and authority of faculty members at these...

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