Reports and References - Tufts Research Summary Report

[download PDF file]

University Civic Engagement and Community Partnerships:
Varying Emphases at Five Schools and Lessons for a New Century*
Susan A. Ostrander, Professor of Sociology
Tufts University

Summary of Report Prepared by Ed Fogelman
Professor and Chair of University of Minnesota Civic Engagement Task Force
09.25.01

Susan Ostrander, Professor of Sociology at Tufts, visited five schools recognized as leaders in civic engagement -- Brown, Portland State, Bates College, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Minnesota -- in order to learn useful lessons for her own university. While her Report addresses the special situation at Tufts, it suggests a number of conclusions that are applicable to UoM. This summary provides an overview of the Report, but cannot duplicate the detailed and instructive account of activities at each school, which deserve careful attention.

DISTINCTIVE APPROACHES: Civic engagement is notably different and has a distinctive emphasis at each of the five schools:

BROWN: Civic engagement occurs largely through a campus-based learning center, the Swearer Center for Public Service. This center has its own endowment, which covers about half the budget, 13 full-time staff, over 80 part-time paid student employees, and an array of other resources. The Center was established in 1986 by President Howard Swearer (also a leader in founding Campus Compact) in the belief that
"the university holds a public trust to prepare its students for engagement in public life."

The Swearer Center is guided by an explicitly stated educational philosophy of integrating community concerns into intellectual life. The work is organized into "learning communities" arranged according to "thematic clusters" of five issue-defined community programs: adolescent development and education; art and society; children's development and education; health and development; language and literacy education.
Some 55 current community partners -- organized into these five issue-based interest groups -- include local public schools, art centers, literacy programs, health clinics, and youth development and children's programs. While more community organizations would like to work with the Center, community partners must have an agency-defined "clear agenda for change."

A specific strategy of the Swearer Center during the next three years for reinvigorating community partnerships is to "Develop initiatives that help students, community-based partners, and learners develop advocacy skills and integrate advocacy agendas into the mission and goals of all community partnerships."

PORTLAND STATE: More than elsewhere, Portland State has made community-based learning a required part of the core of academic learning for nearly all students, and has supported and engaged faculty in teaching community-based courses. Civic engagement is the responsibility of the Center for Academic Excellence, established in 1995, which reports directly to the Provost. The university provides "hard money" for five positions in this Center, replacement money for all faculty (about 30) who teach specially-designed Capstone courses, quarter-time release for the chair of the faculty course-review committee, and four faculty-in-residence.

The dual goals of the Center are student learning and faculty development, which are achieved through a wide variety of on-going activities: faculty workshops, retreats, and study groups; campus speakers and other events; course-development grants; opportunities to meet with staff who are knowledgeable about community-based learning and learning assessment; and other activities. Of particular interest are the senior Capstone courses created around community-university partnerships and community-based learning: some 140 such courses are offered over the four quarter of the academic year, each with 15-20 students. About a third of these courses are taught by regular faculty, a third by part-time adjunct faculty, and a third by community partners who may be designated as adjuncts. For Portland State, civic engagement has meant above all a far-reaching transformation of the curriculum.

BATES COLLEGE: Civic engagement at Bates reflects a community-oriented dimension, carried out through a Center for Service Learning which was established in 1995 to enhance connections to the community and integrate service into the intellectual life of the college. About half the students participate in service-learning, and a third of the faculty include service-learning in their courses. Priority is given to community-defined priorities. The Center plans to organize its activities around six major issue-areas established by local residents in a two-day city-assembly: educational aspirations; economic vitalization; the family; community leadership development; arts, culture, and diversity; environmental quality of life. The university funds the Center Director plus another one and a half staff positions in the Center, who serve as the crucial link between campus and community. Last year, students and faculty worked with 139 agencies and institutions, of which some 60 were ongoing community partners.

The partnership between Bates and adjacent cities is institutionalized through LA Excels (L for Lewiston, A for Auburn), an independent nonprofit association established in 1998 by the Bates College president, which exists in part to leverage outside funds for work with local communities. The university funds the Executive Director.

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA: Penn works nearly equally in various dimensions of civic engagement in a multiple-emphasis approach. Leaders of this work have developed a clear well-articulated intellectual rationale and theory of change, based on an analysis of the place of the public school in the larger society and in relation to democracy, and the potential for public schools to become a force and locus for change in their local communities. Programs and activities focus on production and transmission of knowledge; research and learning take place around community-defined priorities and partnerships. More recently the guiding intellectual rationale and theory of change have been expanded to include "the strategic problem of our time...most likely to advance the university's primary mission of producing and transmitting knowledge to advance human welfare: the creation of 'democratic, neighborly communities' around the world."

Penn's multiple-emphasis approach is structured into three main organizational components -- one campus-based, one community-based, and a third that combines the two. The campus-based Center for Community Partnerships has 16 staff members, about a third on hard money and the rest on grant monies of about $5-6 million. The off-campus West Philadelphia Improvement Corps (WEPIC) mediates Penn's civic engagement work in the community. It involves over 5,000 children, their parents, and other community members in educational and cultural programs, job training, community service activities, and so on. The West Philadelphia Partnership, which combines university and community, is critical in creating an on-going working relationship and building trust between the university and community. The WPP Board includes the university as one of some 30 local institutions, corporations, and grassroots organizations.

Faculty at Penn emphasize the importance of getting faculty involved in civic engagement through their research. Faculty are also involved through seminars and study groups on themes emerging from community-defined priorities that connect faculty across disciplines, such as Poverty and Society, Arts and Society, and Education and Society.

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: Minnesota's Center for Democracy and Citizenship has been involved for some time in a number of aspects of civic engagement guided by knowledge production and the on-going development of a conceptual knowledge base. Their work is described as "civic experiments and theory building", and they have developed a number of broad concepts to explain what they do and why they do it. Reflecting two other dimensions of civic engagement, a significant segment of priorities for their work are community defined by local immigrant populations at the Jane Addams School for Democracy; also, the work at Jane Addams is learning centered and not focused only on U. of M. students

Minnesota has recently embarked on a University wide effort toward civic engagement. The two co-directors of CDC have been leaders. What Minnesota sees as the critical components of civic engagement can be seen from the topics that guided the six working committees of the Task Force on Civic Engagement: Civic Mission; Public Scholarship; Institutional Priorities: Community Partnership; Civic Learning; and Institutional Connections. Task Force leaders are clear that civic engagement cannot be just an add-on to the work faculty already do. It is also essential for faculty supports and incentives to be in place. One example of this is the selection of five or six faculty each year who have been doing exemplary work in this area and then providing extra compensation in their salary base.

Related activities reflect other dimensions of civic engagement. Curriculum based civic learning (previously called service learning) has been on-going for some time at the Career and Community Learning Center, which recruits individual faculty to teach Civic Learning courses, provides them with the knowledge and support they need to do it, works with students, and creates and maintains community partnerships where the learning takes place. Community defined applied research has been for four decades the work of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), which operates as a broker between organizations who want research done and U. of M. students and faculty willing and able to do it. They conduct some 180 projects a year, mostly small scale. Though projects are community defined staff at CURA work with the organizations to help shape research questions and then find campus researchers to do the work.

Civic engagement benefits from the U. of Minnesota's history as a land grant institution, including the work of long established Extension Service programs funded by the state legislature providing funds for faculty to do community based research. The Regional Sustainable Development Project provides over one million dollars a year to the University which local citizen boards decide how to spend. Minnesota is a huge and exciting place.

FOUR DIMENSIONS OF CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: Based on the diverse experiences of the five schools, Ostrander identifies four dimensions of civic engagement:

-Student Learning-Centered: integrates community-based student learning into students' intellectual life; enhances students' academic interests with personal, social, and ethical development; not necessarily course-based;

-Curriculum Transformation (core goals for student learning and faculty development): achieves core educational goals for all students through community-based learning integrated into academic courses; emphasizes faculty development necessary for course development; creates an exciting intellectual community and faculty incentives;

-Community-Defined Priorities: uses university resources to work in partnership with local communities to address community-defined issues or problems; supports community and community-university structures and processes for defining priorities;

-Knowledge Production: organized around faculty, students, and community members creating and disseminating "public scholarship" that contributes to practical and theoretical knowledge, especially knowledge about how to build and sustain democracy, and how to build and maintain public spaces, public conversations, and public action.

LESSONS FOR CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: From her visits, Ostrander derives four main lessons in setting directions for civic engagement:

-Intellectual and Educational Rationale: Institutional initiatives for civic engagement must explicitly state their own intellectual and educational rationale and use it to guide their work. Civic work --like the other work of a university -- must be driven by intellectual as well as practical problems and questions. This point is key to the successful integration of civic engagement into the larger educational and intellectual mission and culture of the university.

-Distinctive Emphasis: Each school should determine its own current emphasis in relation to the four main dimensions of civic engagement, recognizing that a fully-developed approach will require an integration of all four. Emphasis should be decided in the context of each school's own history and culture, and the current circumstances of both the university and the communities with whom partnerships are developed.

-Connections to Other Initiatives: Civic engagement should be developed in relation to an understanding of existing knowledge and practice about civic engagement -- to what might be called civic engagement literacy. This suggests that it would be useful to establish some institutionalized context to facilitate mutual sharing of knowledge and experience.

-Bold and Innovative Changes: Civically engaged universities must be bold and innovative while still building on the work of others. Institutional and societal changes are difficult, and even a relatively small but clear and visible change matters. This kind of change requires a sharply defined focus.

Ostrander concludes that CIVIC ENGAGEMENT WILL REDEFINE AND REINVIGORATE THE UNIVERSITY AND ITS PLACE IN SOCIETY AND HISTORY FOR THE NEW CENTURY.

ADDENDUM: Ostrander's Report has a number of implications for civic engagement at University of Minnesota. It seems clear that effective civic engagement:
-must have a coherent intellectual focus;
-must reflect the intellectual and practical interests of motivated leaders on campus;
-must have a distinct institutional identity through some Center(s);
-must be institutionalized with strong budgetary support within the university;
-must have well-defined practical objectives;
-must have broad and active faculty support;
-must be connected to civic engagement initiatives elsewhere.
In light of these criteria, I believe we are on the right track, but we still have a way to go.

* Full report is available from Sue Engelmann, Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost 612.626.9186