Viewpoint: The Challenge of Creating Engaged Public Research Universities.
2010; Society for College and University Planning; Volume: 38; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0736-0983
Autores Tópico(s)Higher Education Research Studies
ResumoHow to harness the vast intellectual assets of universities as a lever for social good? Several years ago, Michael Burawoy (former president of the American Sociological Association and a University of California, Berkeley professor), in a response to a New York Times op-ed by Stanley Fish, declared: Academics are living in a fool's paradise if they think they can hold on to their ivory tower (Burawoy 2004, p. B24). He continued, chickens are coming home to roost as the public is no longer interested in our truth, no longer prepared to subsidize our academic pursuits. ...Fish would have us draw the curtains, close our eyes, and either accede to privatization or hope that the passion for the market will evaporate. It won't. We have to demonstrate our public worth (Burawoy 2004, p. B24). Burawoy's challenge to engage in public life has never been more urgent. Witness recent protests on college campuses across the country - clearly, there is a crisis in higher education. With skyrocketing tuition, shrinking access to and budgets for public universities, and increasingly complex social problems, it is time to ask: What are public research institutions doing - and what should they do - to fulfill their compact with the citizens of their states? One approach is found in the example of The University of Texas at Austin's (UT-Austin) intellectual entrepreneurship (IE) initiative. Part of the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement headed by vice president Gregory Vincent, a presidential portfolio created by president William Powers Jr. to foster dynamic community-university partnerships designed to transform lives, IE seeks to educate citizen-scholars - students supplying more than narrow disciplinary knowledge (The University of Texas at Austin 2008, ¶ 1). Whether participating in cross-disciplinary multi-institutional teams to find solutions to overcrowded emergency rooms (synergy groups), working with mentors on- and off-campus to address the problem of child abuse (pre-grad internships), developing an arts-based community newspaper and implementing arts educational programs that place at-risk urban youth on the path to college (arts entrepreneurship incubator), or using the scholarly methodology of oral history to implement programs for increasing diversity and promoting culturally-sensitive communication in local schools (project in interpreting the Texas past), these IE students and projects concretely exemplify academic engagement. They take to heart the ethical obligation to discover and put to work knowledge that makes a difference - engaging in with, rather than to, society. Moreover, IE students reveal how local, national, and global problems are complex and cannot be solved by any one academic discipline or sector of society. Answers demand intellectual entrepreneurship - an approach to that fosters collaboration among educational institutions, nonprofit agencies, businesses, and government. This is far different from the customary unilateral, elitist sense of the term service in which universities contribute to society in a top-down manner. To be clear, these student examples are powerful illustrations of the potential of academic engagement. Yet serious challenges remain. Several UT-Austin faculty (a poet, economist, philosopher, neurobiologist, theatre historian, and geologist), along with distinguished community members (including the U.S. secretary of commerce, CEO of a major health care network, chancellor of the University of Texas System, and president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), contributed to an IE newspaper series exploring how to engender greater connections between the university and community (The University of Texas at Austin 2003-2004). What emerged was the conclusion that the quest to create engaged public research universities - to fully realize the ethical imperative to make a difference - requires academe to confront a stark reality: inflexible administrative structures, historically embedded practices, status-quo thinking, and inertia. …
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