community in the classroom, The

An English professor describes how the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is restructuring its core curriculum to work with the community.

WHAT WAS THE DECONSTRUCTIONIST doing at the Social Development Commission, anyway? As I sat in the office of the commission's executive director, Deborah Blanks, listening to her discuss race, education, and public service, I felt both inadequate and inspired. That appointment was one of a series of meetings with community leaders that I had begun to attend off campus as part of my commitment to the Milwaukee Idea, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's new effort to build bridges between the ivory tower and the city street. Blanks, an articulate African American community activist, clearly had much to teach me, though this was hardly the kind of seminar table I had been accustomed to after twenty years as a professor. My place at this table was not at the head, and the syllabus was not of my devising. There were no students in the room, except perhaps for me.

I am probably not alone in feeling disorientation at the kind of experience I had that afternoon. As institutions of higher education increase their efforts at community engagement and civic participation, more and more faculty members find themselves going through an awkward transition. The walls dividing the campus from the world that surrounds it are falling fast, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for reasons that should alarm us. Community engagement for the purpose of enriching education is exciting; community engagement for the purpose of enriching corporations and endowment accounts is suspect. Yet the problems faced by contemporary institutions of higher education make it increasingly difficult to discern the fine line between these two purposes. My decision to get involved in my university's new initiatives stemmed largely from my conviction that faculty had better draw that line before someone else does it for them.

Economics of Engagement

Not surprisingly, economics explains much about the current rage for community engagement. The proportion of public university budgets covered by state appropriations continues to fall. This makes campuses increasingly dependent for money on alliances with other public and private organizations, including for-profit corporations that may attempt to dictate research and teaching agendas. Skeptical legislators and governors want today's university to renew and extend the commitment to economic and social improvement that underwrote the funding of land-grant campuses. Urban campuses are especially targeted with high expectations: save public schools, clean up pollution, jump-start new technologies, deliver improved health care, diversify the arts and culture, and provide the engine for economic growth-and, oh, by the way, educate students from every background, age group, and preparation level through dozens of degree programs using all media at all hours of the day and night.

Higher education has always been seen as an instrument for addressing large social problems. This expectation has, however, been balanced by the powerful notion of academic freedom and the extensive support given to pure research and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. How long we can maintain this balance in today's climate is anybody's guess.

Thus when Milwaukee's new chancellor, Nancy Zimpher, invited me to join about a hundred other faculty, staff, students, administrators, and community representatives in a yearlong brainstorming session, I was ambivalent. Here are the initial questions given to us:

How can we create better economic opportunities for people of all ages?

What will learning look like in the next decade?

What does it mean to live in a global economy and how, as an international hub, can Milwaukee and UWM broaden the community's horizons?

Our natural and social environments are under siege. What can and should the neighborhoods of the twenty-first century look like?

Clearly, the mandate lay in turning the university's attention toward addressing worldly concerns. But what, I wondered, could the place of the arts and humanities be in a redesigned "engaged university," especially one known as a "commuter school" in a hypersegregated, working-class town with a public school system known nationally for its crises? I accepted the invitation partly because I feared that the trend toward seeing universities primarily as job-training centers would only be accelerated if arts and humanities faculty gave up in advance. But the 1960s idealist in me also became excited about the possibility of really transforming the curriculum by mainstreaming much of the best progressive scholarship and pedagogy developed over the last thirty years.

Interdisciplinarity

At the start, the process did not look promising. Only one of the project's ten working groups was to discuss "culture and education," the others being more pragmatically focused on health, technology, international affairs, and the Like. But our culture and education group was large and varied; it included state legislators and community activists as well as students, faculty, and administrators. The first payoff was almost immediate: liberation from isolation in our separate universes. Large metropolitan universities are notoriously fragmented places, and in twelve years at UWM I had talked with precious few people outside my discipline or building-much less from off campus. Now I was in dialogue with occupational therapists, sociologists of race, elementary education specialists, bookstore owners, dancers, librarians, community organizers, and a whole host of others who became my friends and allies in the months to follow.