Their Communities

The urban university has emerged as a distinct representative of American higher education (Waetjen and Muffo: 1983). The founding or transformation of universities to serve their immediate urban environments has re-emerged to focus new attention on the role for place in traditional teaching, research, and service components of the university. The notion that universities should seek and maintain relationships between their main mission, teaching and research, and area communities, and that they have a responsibility to do so, is still hotly debated and far from settled (Shalala:1991; Stukel:1994; Greiner:1997). Lee Benson and Ira Harkavy note that the idea of not just a role but a responsibility for universities to connect with their communities is a question that “...is particularly hard to answer at present because, among numerous other reasons, academics have ignored it so studiously. ” (1997 Barry Checkoway, in a review of efforts to “reinvent ” the research university to incorporate community partnerships, notes that universities with some of th