Power, privilege, and the public: The dynamics of community-university collaboration

✍ Scribed by Byron P. White

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2010
• Weight: 49 KB
• Volume: 2010
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0271-0560
• DOI: 10.1002/he.414

✦ Synopsis

Scholars, practitioners, and proponents of community-university engagement insist that reciprocity, mutual benefit, and peer relationships are essential to creating truly democratic partnerships between campus and community leaders (Bringle and Hatcher, 2002;Peters, 2005;Weerts and Sandmann, 2008). These same principles are seen as important to creating environments where university students learn democratic knowledge, skills, and values through civic engagement (Boyte and Kari, 2002;Creighton, 2009;Hartley and Hollander, 2005). Frequently, the effort to carry out these principles focuses on the quality of interpersonal relations. It is aimed at the way individualsstudents, faculty, and administrators-interact with community representatives, particularly where cultural, economic, and educational differences are apparent.

Achieving democratic partnerships must also take into account discrepancies in power and privilege between the conditions of the university as an institution and the conditions of the community as a whole. Unfortunately, this macro-level relationship is seldom discussed in the literature on community-university engagement. It is as though campus participants believe-or hope-that positive personal relationships between university and citizen actors can somehow surmount the overriding social disparities between campus and community.

My research and experience suggest that although constructive interpersonal relationships may mitigate and even postpone inevitable conflicts between institution and community, they cannot eliminate them. No matter how personally well-liked a university representative may be to the community or how prominent the rhetoric of community-university parity exists in 67 8 NEW DIRECTIONS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION, no. 152