Can Universities Build Community? A Conference Explores Possible Paths

Can universities be effective community builders? Advocates have long argued “yes.” Observers going back to the early 20th-century US philosopher John Dewey have also contended that universities play an essential role in creating a democratic citizenry.

Since most universities are nonprofit or publicly owned, by law, they must be community-serving. Given their extensive campuses, they have high sunk costs, which is why they are often called “anchor institutions.”

The Anchor Institutions Task Force (AITF) conference took place just two days after Election Day, so the event’s theme—“Local Solutions in Divided Times”—was apt. But do universities actually produce local solutions?

Well, it depends. But leaders in the AITF, including university presidents and university community engagement directors, came together in New York City for their fifteenth-anniversary gathering to consider how to do better.

More than once, speakers acknowledged the difficulty of developing effective institutional partnerships with community residents.

As one speaker, Salamishah Tillet, a professor of African American Studies at Rutgers University–Newark and director of Express Newark, said, “There is a deep power imbalance” between universities and community. Recognizing that inequality and taking steps to even the scales, she added, was essential.

What Can University Partnerships with Communities Achieve?

To be clear, it would be a gross misrepresentation to imply that universities always—or even usually—are good community partners. As Davarian Baldwin, a professor of American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, has pointed out, university economic power often has pernicious results.

“Campus expansion can raise housing costs for homeowners and renters,” he writes. “Residents who live and work in those neighborhoods also face greater surveillance at the hands of campus police.”

The value of partnerships is to “simultaneously transform the community and the institution itself into a more humane organization.”

Universities, as Baldwin has detailed, “turn their research into lucrative commercial goods and patents in a range of fields, from the pharmaceutical industries and software products to health services and military defense weaponry.” This generates economic value but often displaces residents and helps give universities well-earned reputations as agents of gentrification.

Yet a different university is possible.

At the conference, Nancy Cantor, president of Hunter College in New York City, offered a possible positive vision: “I see the work of institutions anchored in place but open to imagining a different future as fundamental to communicating the value to our democracy of intra and intergroup solidarity coexisting, as hard as it may be to maintain on the ground.”

For Ira Harkavy, who directs the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the value of partnerships is to “simultaneously transform the community and the institution itself into a more humane organization.” Another way of saying this is that advocates of the kind of partnerships that people like Cantor and Harkavy envision must become community organizers within their own institutions.

Like any complex institution, universities are made up of people—many of whom pursue what Harkavy and his colleague Rita Hodges called in NPQ, the “neoliberal university,” while others aspire to the “democratic civic university.” The point of centers like the one where Harkavy and Hodges work, in part, is to connect community groups to the university. However, they also serve as internal institutional organizing hubs for like-minded people to support the development of a more democratic and civically-oriented university.

Central to Harkavy’s vision—and that of most conference participants—is the idea that “democracy must begin at home and its home is the neighborly community.” The Netter Center, Harkavy noted, seeks to “solve problems and improve quality of life of proximate communities,” thereby benefiting the community and supporting the teaching and research missions of the university. Netter, Harkavy noted, has been operating for over 32 years, but he conceded that achievement of the broader democratic mission is “still very much a work in progress.” 

In terms of concrete projects, conference participants offered many examples. Often, these examples involved the creation of community facilities that are university financed but community-led spaces—or what Cantor called “third spaces.”

The culture and structure of a large university often clashes with the culture of the surrounding community.

More broadly, the vision, as Cantor put it, is to bring communities together to pursue local place-based action that makes communities surrounding the university more economically sustainable and culturally vital places to live.

As Harkavy said, by drawing on the expertise of people both inside and outside institutions, “significant, complex, local problems that people care deeply about” that have long been considered intractable can be more effectively addressed.

Universities, Community, and Overcoming Bureaucracy

Attaining the vision that Harkavy and Cantor articulate is not easy. One of the practical challenges in executing university–community partnerships is that the culture and structure of a large university often clashes with the culture of the surrounding community.

As Tillet of Express Newark explained of her organization, “We are off campus” and are “a de facto nonprofit in a university system.” It is hard to be “nimble,” she noted, within a highly bureaucratic university.

She added that clashes can occur in “something as basic as having no one having to show their ID.” For Express Newark, not checking for identification “is an expression of accessibility and openness,” but her center constantly has to reiterate and explain to other university officials why the “No ID Required” policy is important to keep in place.

Another example—this one involving the government rather than the university per se—illustrates how different partners, even when aligned, may have very different expectations. Jerry Johnson, interim director of the Rural Education Institute at East Carolina University, got a two-year American Rescue Plan grant to promote and practice community-based democracy.

The thesis of the project, Johnson shared, was if “we can engage families in community in the organization and operation in the school, we can promote student engagement, which will support wellbeing and academic growth among the students.” A key activity was holding monthly potlucks to build trust among community members. Programs would come later.

As Johnson elaborated, the only real expense the first year was for food on family dinner nights. In the second year, spending climbed to pay for field trips and other activities. The project requested a no-cost extension to have more time to spend the money allocated.

However, officials at the government agency were concerned about why spending was delayed, assuming the lack of spending in the first year signaled that something was wrong.

This was true even though, as Johnson notes, the idea from the beginning was to give “voice and agency [to residents] to decide what they need. Now, we are doing the giving. We spent a year listening to people. What do you want from your schools? What do you want for your kids? What are your aspirations for this partnership?” Funds were only spent after community priorities were established.

The Power of Local Solutions

Many of the community projects discussed at the conference were inspiring, including a developing arts hub at Georgia Tech in Atlanta and a partnership in Milwaukee to support community development in the Near West Side neighborhood.

Of course, it is hard to ignore the fact that much of the deep organizing work that some of the people at the conference engaged in goes against the grain of our current society. As Marshall Ganz writes in his recently published book People, Power, Change, “Many [Americans] are out of practice at coming together, committing to one another in pursuit of a shared purpose, deliberating together, deciding together, and acting together—the essential practices of democracy in its most everyday form.”

This is a real problem that affects community partnership work. It can be challenging for an institution, even if motivated by the best intentions, to partner with a fragmented community—which many communities in the United States are.

Paul Pribbenow, president of Augsburg University in Minneapolis, noted at the conference that sometimes the first step of community partnership work is to invest in building communities’ deliberative democratic capacity to address fragmentation.

The neighborhood surrounding the university, Pribbenow shared, is now home to many Ethiopian and Somalian immigrants. To begin building partnerships, the university convened 15 to 20 immigrant-led nonprofits. For the first two years, Pribbenow explained, “the whole focus was on skill building,” with topics like: “How do I deal with philanthropic communities? How do I do media relations? How do I navigate the political system at City Hall? We brought in experts to help them to gain those skills.”

Now, he noted, the nonprofits set the agenda for each other and have built trust for themselves: “We see the difference in safety, overall wellbeing.”

A New University

Another effort highlighted at the conference was College Unbound, one of a growing number of institutions that serve adult learners. Adam Bush, the college’s president, explained that the school was founded in 2009 in Providence, RI, to help students who had dropped out of college earn degrees through a curriculum that includes peer support (Lab), virtual learning, and internships (Learning in Public).

The students who graduate earn a bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership and change, and close to two in five graduates go on to enroll in graduate school. The college currently serves about 500 adult learners, more than 70 percent of whom are students of color. In addition to Providence, College Unbound students are now enrolled in Chicago, IL; Camden, NJ; Greenville, SC; Philadelphia, PA; Wilmington, DE; and Washington state.

Wendell Pritchett, a University of Pennsylvania professor who also chairs the board of College Unbound, noted at the conference that nationwide, over 40 million Americans started college and didn’t finish. “We in higher ed should be embarrassed and we are not,” Pritchett said. He added, “We talk about students failing college; we don’t talk about colleges failing students.”