IN HIS POEM "MENDING WALL," Robert Frost declares, "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out."
For too long, America's urban colleges and universities built higher fences around the campus, with the idea of keeping poverty, crime, and downtown blight at bay. Yet this status quo strategy failed to consider the larger socioeconomic and geopolitical implications of Frost's statement.
To be sure, urban college and university leaders and their internal constituencies may have felt safer on campus. Sadly, they fenced their lofty academic ideas and community service commitment within the campus walls. For some, however, times have changed, and a new generation of civically engaged colleges and universities has really figured it out.
Consider Clark University in Worcester, Mass., the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. These exemplary urban institutions have led the way in tearing down walls, welcoming the community on campus, and leveraging the academic enterprise to work for the betterment of their host communities.
Long-term town/gown relationships depend on 'a shared vision, mutual respect, and a shared will to succeed.' -John Bassett, Clark University
The results of their noble efforts are palpable: engaged students, committed faculty, stronger communities, better prepared applicants, and safer local streets. Whatever you call it-an urban renaissance, town/gown collaboration, or self-preservation-it comes down to committed institutions stepping up to address the failure of private, governmental, and nonprofit sectors to establish two-way bridges between campuses and community.
With nearly 800 four-year colleges and universities situated in urban settings in the United States, according to The College Board, the lessons learned from these town/gown experiments are important for the future of American higher education and for the future of our cities.
CLARK: HELPING HOUSING, MAKING K?12 CONNECTIONS
Clark University provides a remarkable model of a community-based strategic partnership with its surrounding neighborhood in Worcester, known as Main South. Clark has helped to renovate housing, and it co-founded and helps to operate an award winning high school. In collaboration with the Main South Community Development Corporation, Clark has helped renovate hundreds of housing units, sold homes to first-time homeowners, and leveraged millions in grants and housing tax credits. These investments by Clark and public and private entities represent a nearly $100 million effort. The new Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise at Clark promises to help disseminate this type of strategic town-gown partnership model across the landscape of urban America.
What is truly amazing about Clark's collaboration with Worcester Public Schools for the University Park Campus School is that all of the school's graduates have gone on to college, despite being first generation college attenders. Not surprisingly, 73 percent of the students receive free or reduced-price lunches, and 67 percent speak English as a second language. Clark faculty and students teach and learn at the school and serve as mentors and models for neighborhood children and families.
Clark's president, John Bassett, has said he now can envision the creation of a Worcester learning corridor built on the success of the University Park Campus School. That would be a proud legacy for this venerable urban institution at which Robert Goddard conceived the early beginnings of rocket science and Sigmund Freud gave his first and only American higher education lecture series.
That said, Bassett is candid in sharing that undertaking this kind of genuine community partnership is by no means easy. "It cannot be a top-down, one-shot charitable endeavor. It has to be a real partnership with the community built on mutual and admiration," he says. "With a shared vision, mutual respect, and a shared will to succeed, communities and universities can build long-term relationships in which the lives of everyone involved are improved."
TRINITY: SUSTAINING DEMOCRACY
Evan Dobelle, former president of Trinity College and a long-time proponent of civic engagement by urban colleges, puts it this way: "If you don't do something significant to improve the neighborhood, the college is sending the wrong message-that it is okay to have that kind of America. ... These efforts are all about sustaining democracy in urban America."
