Academe: The community as a classroom

From coping with an overflowing sewer to selling vegetables in an elementary school, college students and teachers are developing community-based projects that have a real-life impact.

WHEN TAMARA DUBOWITZ'S PARENTS immigrated to Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in 1978, their goal was to raise their children far away from the racial and social divisions of their native South Africa. In Pottsville, however, they did not find exactly what they were seeking. In the 1920s, the city had been a thriving business center serving the coalmining industry in southeastern Pennsylvania. But by the 1970s, the downtown jewelry shops, movie theaters, and clothing stores had all closed. Dubowitz's family, supported by her father's income as a doctor, lived comfortably. But many of her friends qualified for free lunches at school and lived in subsidized housing. Watching the families of her friends struggle just to get by and listening to her parents' tales of life in apartheid South Africa helped instill in Dubowitz a deep concern for social justice.

Soon after she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, Dubowitz, an anthropology major, set out to find a way to combine her education with her desire to address issues of social disparity. The Turner Nutritional Awareness Program gave her the perfect opportunity. Through the program, started by Penn anthropology professor Francis Johnston, Dubowitz and her fellow students visited Turner Middle School in West Philadelphia to collect data on the health of its students, many of whom suffer from nutrition problems affected by a lack of access to markets that sell fresh produce.

The Penn undergraduates used the data to study the relationship between food, health, and nutrition in urban America. The program also required them to work with the middle school teachers and students to set up a curriculum in which the Turner students could learn the basics of health and nutrition and share their knowledge with others in the community. "The idea that the university could engage in substantive research while promoting social change in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood really excited me," says Dubowitz. "It seemed the best of both worlds."

Education with a Purpose

Efforts like the Turner Nutritional Awareness Program are part of a larger movement in U.S. higher education that started to gather steam in the 1990s. The movement began as one study after another documented social disaffection among students. The studies showed a sharp downturn in student voting and political participation and reported growing lack of interest among students in the lives of their communities.

Beginning in the early 1990s, concerned faculty and administrators started to argue for inclusion of civic activism in the core curriculum of the university. They said that encouraging student volunteerism was not enough. "Penn does not see civic involvement as a sideshow," stresses Ira Harkavy, director and vice president of the Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania, which now has more than a hundred courses in which students combine academic study and community activism.

The faculty members Academe interviewed for this article agree that courses involving civic engagement must have solid academic benefits for students while also supporting change in the community. Not surprisingly, faculty in community-based research have had their share of run-ins with local groups that have opposed their projects. In addition, they must deal with issues of race and class as a result of sending middle-class students into low-income, minority communities. And tenure is a constant concern for these faculty members, because tenure and promotion committees often fail to recognize communitybased inquiry as "real" research.

Roots

Ira Harkavy, who is a historian, sees a precedent for the current push for civic education in the early days of research universities, when service was viewed as an important part of the institutional mission, especially at urban and land-grant universities. Institutions moved away from service in later years, Harkavy explains, especially during the Cold War, when they focused resources on distant, not local, problems. Now that the Cold War is over, he says, universities can no longer afford to ignore long-neglected issues affecting localities. "Over fortyfive years of looking outward had its costs as unresolved domestic problems developed into unresolved, highly visible crises," Harkavy notes.

Moreover, the government and private foundations now want research institutions to use their resources to help solve social problems, and they are providing funds for that purpose. "Universities are starting to see that altruism pays," he remarks, although he cautions that the amount of support given is often inadequate to address the problems at hand. For institutions like Penn that are situated in distressed urban areas, altruism pays in more than one way: it improves the environment surrounding the colleges and universities, presumably making them more attractive to prospective students.