Being Anchored: The Challenge of Cultural Change

The term “eds and meds” began circulating in the 1990s to recognize universities and hospitals as leading employers, purchasers of goods and services, and real estate developers, particularly in urban areas. This concept has since evolved into the idea of “anchor institutions,” a phrase widely used by hospital and university leaders that has expanded to include other large rooted entities such as libraries, performing arts centers, cultural organizations, municipal enterprises, and faith-based institutions.

A lot of hope has been placed on the role that universities can play to support and help improve the wellbeing of their surrounding communities. But while certainly large and important economic players, universities in general have often been guided more by corporate, neoliberal values than community wellbeing. (This separation from community, of course, is part of what has made universities so vulnerable to political attacks today.)

It is not enough, in short, to be a large institution. A true anchor mission and vision means that the activity of the entire institution, including both its intellectual and institutional resources, works intentionally with its surrounding community for mutual transformation.

The Anchor Institutions Task Force (AITF) was founded in 2009 for this reason, as an action-oriented learning community for universities and other anchor institutions. AITF emphasizes the importance of democratic anchor engagement, guided by equity and social justice, democracy and democratic practice, place and community, and collaboration and partnership values.

It all sounds good in theory, but can it work in practice? Achieving this shift requires changing the culture of universities to be truly engaged anchor institutions, where community voice and a commitment to co-creation must be fully embedded.

To study these issues, I examined the Newark campus of the Rutgers University system in New Jersey. Led by Nancy Cantor—a leading national advocate of this “anchor” approach, who served as university chancellor at Rutgers between 2014 and 2024—the Newark campus provides a window into both what is possible and the challenges that remain.

What Is Rutgers University–Newark?

Rutgers University–Newark (RU–N) is a diverse, urban, public research university in New Jersey’s largest city. Roughly four in five of its nearly 11,000 students are students of color, and over a third are first-generation students.

RU–N has had a clearly articulated vision statement, mission statement, and strategic plan since 2014 that center an anchor-institution agenda with five priorities: 1) building strong educational pathways for youth for increased postsecondary attainment; 2) creating strong, healthy, and safe neighborhoods; 3) promoting and leveraging the arts and culture; 4) promoting science in urban environments; and 5) facilitating equitable growth through entrepreneurship and economic development.

A true anchor mission and vision means that the activity of the entire institution…works intentionally with its surrounding community for mutual transformation.

Several key animating features have supported Cantor and her team to begin making transformational changes within the university and across the city, in a relatively short period of time. One was a clear and compelling vision. Another was an “outside-in” framework: the visioning and transformational process was guided by what the community or broader public needed from the university.

A third key feature was the diverse and inclusive coalitions that Cantor built internally and externally to push their anchor agenda forward. This included embracing a shared equity leadership model, which focused on collaboration and designing for people on the margins, so that everyone can benefit. It also included encouraging, in Cantor’s words, a “‘community of experts’ with and without pedigree” that allows for coproduction of knowledge. RU–N’s anchor strategy further shows how their external work—building and nurturing trusted partnerships with community organizations and other institutions, and helping them fortify their anchor-institution mission—has encouraged transformation within the university itself.

Cantor’s approach, in short, was to build a robust and diverse cabinet, representing all the major functions of the university that could coalesce around a shared vision and collectively infuse values-based anchor work throughout the institution. RU–N’s story highlights how the singular role of an experienced visionary leader, when reinforced by a strong team, can embed anchor work into institutional mission and strategy.

Principles at Work

Strategic planning, principles, and leadership team structure are important, but how does an “anchor mission” show up in practice? Here are a few examples:

• Public Safety

The Newark Public Safety Collaborative (NPSC) co-created knowledge through an evolved process that required both training faculty and building trust with the community. Established in 2018 as a broad public safety partnership and convened by the School of Criminal Justice faculty, NPSC’s Data-Informed Community Engagement approach to public safety aims to democratize data.

RU–N serves as the “neutral convener” that brings together leading criminologists, local government, police, more than 40 community-based organizations, and other stakeholders around “trusted tables” to analyze crime patterns, prioritize responses, and take collective action. Among the practical outcomes is a lighting replacement project in the highest-risk areas of the city, which helped significantly reduce nighttime violent crime incidents in those areas.

Building and nurturing trusted partnerships with community organizations…has encouraged transformation within the university itself.

• Redefining Merit

The Honors Living-Learning Community (HLLC) is an honors program that emphasizes recruiting local students. With an in-depth admissions process, the initiative holistically assesses talent and potential by using a set of criteria that includes critical thinking, leadership skills, social and emotional intelligence, and academic and artistic potential. About half of HLLC’s 200-plus scholars are Newark residents attending the university with scholarship support. By defining community members as experts, the HLLC’s curriculum emphasizes building upon students’ “knowledge and lived experiences.”

In a similar vein, the Lives in Translation project centers the expertise of RU–N students’ 40-plus home languages to provide translation and interpreting services, particularly in legal clinics and nonprofits supporting Newark’s immigrant communities.

• College Access

As a lead partner in the Newark City of Learning Collaborative, RU–N was instrumental in reaching the city’s goal, set in 2012, that one in four Newark residents would obtain a college degree by 2025. This was “an increase in the college-attainment rate of between 6.7 and 12 percentage points, representing as many as 20,000 people,” according to CivicStory. To meet its goal, RU–N specifically strengthened its pathways and financial aid scholarship program to better support newly admitted undergraduates from Newark, transfer students, and previously incarcerated students. As of 2023, that goal had largely been met.

• Democratic Spaces

RU–N also built new physical structures and spaces that bring faculty, students, and community residents together in what are commonly called “third spaces.” These intentional spaces attempt to break down “established and often unequal relationships of power and expertise” by bringing student, faculty, and community members together to co-create. Express Newark, an arts center and collaboratory, beautifully exemplifies this type of physical third space.

• Multi-Institutional Partnerships

Through the Newark Anchor Collaborative, RU–N extended the anchor mission work across the city. Building this coalition was highly significant not only for building collective goals and accountability—such as increased local purchasing and hiring—but also in creating momentum for further institutional change, inside and outside the university, that cannot be undone by any one leadership transition.

The Culture Challenge

Culture change gets talked about a lot in organizational theory. As management theorist Peter Drucker once famously said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” So, how can a university—an institution famous for being insular—change its culture to show up as an effective community partner?

Larry Cuban’s 1988 study of educational reform provides a useful framework for exploring the institutionalization of the anchor concept. Cuban distinguishes between “first-order” changes, which improve efficiency and effectiveness without challenging existing structures or goals, and “second-order changes [that] seek to alter fundamental ways in which organizations are put together… [by introducing] new goals, structures, and roles that transform familiar ways of doing things into new ways of solving persistent problems.”

Cuban’s second-order change is closely aligned with what Peter Eckel, Barbara Hill, and Madeleine Green described in their 1988 paper as “transformational change” within higher education. At RU–N, its anchor mission helped not only to provide more cohesion to existing social justice and community engagement initiatives—requiring first-order change—, but it also defined how the institution in its entirety would embody a set of values and transcend business as usual—requiring second-order change.

How can a university—an institution famous for being insular—change its culture to show up as an effective community partner?

RU–N, nonetheless, faced common obstacles found within complex research institutions, as well as additional barriers of being part of a larger public university system. Among these barriers was the premature ending of Nancy Cantor’s tenure, announced—to great surprise and consternation from the community and the field—by the Rutgers University president in August 2023. (Cantor is now president at Hunter College.)

Although my research was conducted before this transition, so far it appears that the collaborative, inclusive leadership, and many webs of relationships RU–N spun across campus and out into the greater Newark community have resulted in continued strength and stickiness to its anchor identity. Only time will tell if it will withstand the leadership’s transition.

Preliminary Findings

Here are some steps that institutional leaders might wish to take to advance an anchor vision as part of their core mission and identity, based on RU-N’s experience:

• Develop an inclusive strategic planning and visioning process that builds on your institution’s strengths, values, and existing connections. Take an “outside-in” approach by asking what the community needs from your institution. Enlist trusted institutional leaders to champion and socialize these efforts. Engage stakeholders to contribute to the new plan in large and small settings, such as townhalls or community planning meetings, on and off campus. Provide enough specificity to offer clear direction but also allow it serve as a living document that continues to evolve.
• Don’t carry out the agenda alone. Build a diverse senior cabinet that represents all major functions at your institution; a cabinet that believes in and helps carry out the vision based on a shared-equity leadership model. Ensure that there are consistent feedback loops among stakeholders at various levels of the institution and the broader community.
• Invest strategic resources such as seed funds, new research centers, and physical spaces that can be shared by campus and community members and support and incentivize community-engaged scholarship.
• Advance strategic policies that fundamentally change core culture and institutional operations. As a research university, the promotion and tenure of policies that recognize and reward community-engaged scholarship are essential to shifting academic norms. Procurement policies that encourage investment in local businesses, preferably owned by people of color and women, can also be connected to community-engaged research. An example of this is the innovative work at the Center for Local Supply Chain Resiliency at the Rutgers Business School.
• Identify other institutions in your region that might be ready to share the anchor mission. Build a values-based, action-oriented, cross-sector collaborative that can advance collective goals, learn from each other, and share accountability to develop a more equitable and inclusive community.
• Continually communicate the value and evolving vision of your work internally and externally. This includes involving board members, faculty, staff, students, and community partners, as well as activating broader networks or associations of higher education and other anchor institutions.

Moving Forward and Movement Building

Anchor work that is co-created with community partners takes long-term vision and commitment. Given the important role of leadership, and the fact that the average tenure of college presidents continues to shrink, it’s important to design for cultural changes that are sustained across multiple university leaders.

Mutual transformation is a critical value, process, and goal for the anchor-mission ideal. For a research university, this means a very deep focus on its academic and institutional culture and operations. Community-engaged or publicly engaged scholarship that involves working democratically with community partners is therefore an essential component to embedding this work.

Given the entrenched systems and traditions that actively work against these efforts, moving the needle requires building community-engaged scholarship into the rewards and recognition structures, as well as hiring faculty who want to do this work.

More broadly, realizing an anchor mission implies a cultural shift of the sector across institutions that places greater value on the generation of knowledge for public good. With universities threatened as never before, the future of the university itself may depend on making this full-hearted commitment.